Maybe yes but the ulterior motive behind these "solutions" is pretty obvious. Rip anonymity from the internet, one step forward towards Telescreens.

If you include all the low level works needed to make them work well which is a lot, then maybe.

So Valve won't need to convince developers to do anything expensive and old games will also work. Most games on Steam Deck aren't tested by the original developer at all.

Windows on ARM games are extremely rare. Linux native means dealing with Linux desktop APIs and poor support in commercial engines.

Even in Minecraft it looks bad. Some CJK characters are Serif for some reason.

The problem is still the desktop itself. Basically none of the existing Linux desktop components are mature, either design or technical wise and more often than not, both.

Deck works because most games are self contained, allowing them to have a default game mode that bypasses the desktop entirely.

> Basically none of the existing Linux desktop components are mature, either design or technical wise and more often than not, both.

What do you have in mind specifically? GNOME 3 is very mature, and has a consistent, polished design that far surpasses Windows 11. In fact, in view of recent macOS redesigns, I am tempted to say that it surpassed it too.

I mean, yeah, sort of. But a lot of the design is still really bad. I am saying a lot, because I found one I like, Zorin. It is a properly pretty Linux distro. They are the first Linux distro that I feel actually have understood the value of spacing between icons and other places. Every single other Linux distro I have tried feels cluttered and messy. It is so simple, just a little more room for things, balance margins and padding just a little bit better. Gah. (And yes, I feel liquid glass on mac is a huge setback in terms of UI beauty)

They can ship the same destop/window manager combo they ship on the Steam Deck, where you can switch between the "full screen mode" (don't remember what it's called) and a proper desktop. I'm sure most people stay in the full-screen mode, it has all the settings and everything, even works with an cursor if I'm not mistaken, but can fallback when you need a terminal or whatever.

As I understood GP's comment, the crux is "a very wide range of users."

Right now Steam Deck works because of a focus on a very specific use and users. A general purpose desktop requires a lot more, and right now even the most mature linux desktop (GNOME, Plasma etc) have their rough edges and learning curve.

Steam deck is currently my primary computer. You just try to not use sudo at all. So I use nix to install all my software. From firefox to htop. It can get annoying because one of my scripts was trying to detect Mesa the other day and didn't work with nix installed mesa, otherwise it's perfect.

Linux had mature stable desktop stacks in the past, but they kinda sucked.

Churn (and consequent ongoing immaturity) seems to be the price we've paid in the last 10-15yrs of "progress" making them suck less. I hope it settles down a bit soon and we get to enjoy more longer term polish on these improvements though.

10 years ago Linus pointed out that most distros willingly break application compatibility all the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc

I'm not really following desktop Linux, is Linus' assessment still accurate?

There are better ways to do this.

Enforce 18+ age rating and mandate platform parental controls. If the parents decide to let their child pay for adult content freely that's unfortunate and on them.

Going stricter isn't effective, ID check will become tools for whatever ulterior motives they have.

CS:GO is already rated 18+, and Steam already has parental controls. That has done essentially nothing to prevent it as children sometimes lie about how old they are and don't have their parents set up parental accounts to oversee themselves.

Compatibility and tightly coupled legacy components tech debt catching up, ads to get revenue from free users, half baked new UIs made out of slow web tech and more.

No serious effort went into consumer desktop Windows in the past 10 years, most of the upgrades are for Windows Server, Azure and Xbox OS. Windows 8 was their last real attempt and they gave up immediately.

Notification centre has been there since 3.x era.

Though it's accessed by clicking the clock so perhaps it's not very intuitive.

Potentially longer gaps between major updates, since they can no longer follow upstream closely.

However, Google might have planned to slowly make Android proprietary, which means death to 3rd party forks.

Most of those forks twiddle a lot of low-level knobs, and if Google does not want to support those then the forks will have a hard time anyway.

The big problem is that aaaaaalll these forks are still just a tiny tiny tiny drop in the bug mobile phone OS bucket.

If the forks want to be sustainable they need to cater to the market a bit. (Of course that's much harder said than done, but we see - for example with Nothing Tech - that there are new successful upstarts from time to time.)

The World needs more Snow Leopards.