I'll keep saying it, because it keeps coming up. If you're working in the FreeDesktop, Linux, or Flatpak spaces, you need to understand this, even if you don't personally care about gaming or Steam Deck.
@cassidy Personally I've heard about immutable distributions for some time but never tried any. Now that I own a Steam Deck I realized how viable they are with flatpak!
@cassidy Took me a bit to figure it out too. I think part of the confusion is it's kind of backwards. The Trojan horse is seen as a negative (after all, the troops came in and slaughtered everyone -- even women and children...) It was so bad that it was basically the precursor to the downfall of the gods.
But we should be happy to use #SteamDeck as a way to get the cool stuff we're working on into the hands of millions of new folks. And we should be happy to use it as an example when talking to app developers we want to support #Linux.
@cassidy Steam Deck(and knowing Valve was backing Linux gaming) was literally what finally gave me the push to switch 100% to Linux. It'll be two years officially this November.
@cassidy Hahaha thanks. The war between Flatpak, Snap and traditional package managers is so religious, I actually wasn't sure if calling Flatpak evil was exactly your point. I'm not even sure what my position is... but hell yeah did the Steam Deck bring Linux forward, no matter which way.
@himmelssohn yeah that's fair. In this (admittedly stretched) metaphor, I guess people working on FOSS are the Greeks, and rather than killing the Trojans, we just... want to share our cool stuff with them??
@cassidy I believe, I got the metaphor. In a way, it correctly describes the entering of FOSS into the proprietary gaming industry. But I'm not sure, whether it would be appropriately wise to notion it as a trojan horse.
FreeDesktop: the collective specs and tech that make "Linux" desktops work together and be targetable more like a single platform for developers
Flatpak: the app format Steam Desk uses, that most Linux desktops also use
Flathub: a central repository of Flatpaks with a goal of making it easy for developers to distribute their apps to any Linux desktop; included as the source of apps in Desktop Mode on Steam Deck
@Fangh my point is that there are now millions of people out there using Steam Decks as gaming devices, and they're also able to easily use all the stuff us Linux folks have been working on. We should embrace it! For example, if a popular app developer wanted to bring their app to Steam Deck, they'd use FreeDesktop specs, Flatpak, and probably Flathub.
That's awesome because it also means their app will trivially work on nearly any Linux desktop, too, automatically!
@cassidy there is such thing as a good trick as this demonstrates,and is a win for KDE, I wish I understood more why people prefer them (despite preferring to also use it whenever I think it's easier)
@cassidy so basically, you think flatpak, flathub and freedesktop are bad things, along with the steam deck? if not, I'm sorry, trojan horses usually are a bad sign.
@cassidy Frankly, I've been a Linux user for over two decades now, and the Steam Deck is literally my FIRST contact with Flatpaks.
It was annoying not being able to find stuff in my $HOME, but after a while I figured out where both Lutris and Dolphin flatpaks drop their files.
I'm not a terribly big fan of the "package everything the distro provides again" as it requires updating each flatpak individually if a dep updates, but I see the need for an easy deployment method.
@phiofx yep, exactly. SteamOS became a major distro player practically overnight, and may be the largest consumer deployment of Flathub and Flatpak.
Instead of ignoring that or pretending it doesn't matter because "well it's a console, it is different," we should be leaning into it. Especially when it comes to convincing app developers to invest in the platform!
@cassidy@AmyIsCoolz what if the horse inverted. Like open specs, and software on the outside, but hidden megacorp interests and clueless consumers inside.
We should try to have
communities should seek to own the spaces(virtual or not) they inhabit.
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