Three side remarks about China, which can be a peculiar example to compare to for Russia, maybe even any other country:

• They actually banned consoles for a quite significant 15 years (2000–2015), which strongly tilted their market towards PC.
• Their companies actively make PC-type gaming handhelds, and many of them are even well-established in the business ahead the current “Steam Deck” wave/bandwagon: GPD (once called GamePad Digital, first release in 2016), OneXPlayer (2020), Ayaneo (2021).
• Chinese gaming companies are quite at the whim of the censorship, and occasional “crackdowns” out of the blue, and many have therefore reoriented themselves for an international audience to de-risk their business.

Just for reference, a few years back, (ex-Microsoft) David Plummer had this historical dive into the (MIPS) origin of the blue color, and how Windows is not blue anymore: https://youtu.be/KgqJJECQQH0?t=780

Likely due to being a prototype. Production laptops from Tuxedo tend to have the “TUX” penguin in a circle logo on the Super key by default. They also have been offering custom engraved keyboard (even with the entire keyboard engraved from scratch to the customer’s specifications) as added service, so probably there will be suppliers or production facility to change the Super key.

By the way, there was one YouTube channel that ended up ordering a laptop with Windings engraving from them: https://youtu.be/nidnvlt6lzw?t=186

GIMP is a special case. GIMP is being getting outdeveloped by Krita these days. E.g.:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/9284

Or compare with:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Krita-2024-GPUs-AI

GIMP had its share of self inflicted wounds starting with a toxic mailing list that drove away people from professional VFX and surrounding FilmGimp/CinePaint. When the GIMP people subsequently took over the GEGL development from Rhythm & Hues, it took literally 15 years until it barely worked.

Now we are past the era of simple GPU processing into diffusion models/“generative AI” and GIMP is barely keeping up with simple GPU processing (like resizing, see above).

In the beginning, only privileged ones will be allowed to run in pass-through mode. But goal/roadmap calls for all FUSE filesystems eventually to have this near-native performance.

Well, if you have a constructive suggestion which site to link instead regarding kernel developments, I am all ears:

• Not sure that raw commits are readable or have sufficient context for non kernel development readers here
• LWN, particularly timely/kernel development news there, has gone mostly paywall, and there will be (legitimate) complaint if I link articles needing a LWN subscription

Not sure what called for this blatant personal attack. My post history speaks for itself, quite in comparison to yours. And Phoronix is well-known Linux website, and its test suite is in fact even referenced in various regression tests/patches in LKML (also not sure what/if any kind of kernel development you have done).

Retention, or the lack thereof, when cold-stored.

In term of SD or standard NAND, not even Nintendo does that. Nintendo builds Macronix XtraROM in their Game Card, which is some proprietary Flash memory with claimed 20 year cold storage retention. And they introduced the 64 GB version only after a lengthy delay, in 2020. So it seems that the (lack of) cold storage performance of standard NAND Flash is viewed by some in the industry as not ready for prime time. Macronix discussed it many years back in a DigiTimes article: https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120713PR201.html.

And Sony and Microsoft are both still building Blu-ray-based consoles.

Yes. If you mean “CLI” as for e.g. pacman install, it is a GUI (Electron) application, so I expect will install straight from e.g. KDE Discover and then run without you touching the shell.

Installing podman-compose with the immutable filesystem is fairly straight forward, since it is just a single Python file (https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/blob/devel/podman_compose.py), which you can basically install anywhere in your path. You can also first bootstrap pip (python3 get-pip.py --user with get-pip.py from https://github.com/pypa/get-pip) and then do pip3 install --user podman-compose.

There might be several misunderstandings:

• Docker Desktop ≠ Docker Engine, and I think what you (and several in this thread) are thinking is actually Docker Engine. Docker Desktop ultimately includes a Docker Engine inside, but it does not appear you need that virtual machine (e.g. running non-Linux code). See: https://docs.docker.com/desktop/faqs/linuxfaqs/#what-is-the-difference-between-docker-desktop-for-linux-and-docker-engine
• Docker Desktop is based on KVM, which already works with Flatpak. So this is not something new. For example, GNOME Boxes is available as Flatpak and provides a way to run KVM guests in SteamOS.
• Starting with version 3.5 (the current stable) SteamOS already includes Podman with the default installation. And running the daemon-y Docker Engine “bare metal” is not going to be any easier with the immutable filesystem. While Docker Desktop solves this by using KVM, it adds another layer with performance loss, vs. just running Podman containers.

So what you want is already available, and no Docker Desktop is actually needed.

Actually that I doubt it (in the sense you can enter the NCART and move around, like maybe GTA 4).

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform

English has been the total outlier among (originally) European language with no body of authority over its spelling. Even the “reform” by Noah Webster never really caught on outside North America, nearly 100 years later. And even more curious, the somewhat authoritative Oxford English Dictionary disagrees in their spelling with everybody (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling).

Nearly every single word in English that starts with a g followed by a soft ih/eh vowel is pronounced as a soft g, just a few:

That is patently not true and blatant cherry picking, e.g. already contradicted by the lexically matching word “gift” (and there are “giggle”, “gild”, “girl”, “git”, “give”, “gizmo”, etc.). See Wikipedia, which referenced linguists studying this:

An analysis of 269 words by linguist Michael Dow found near-tied results on whether a hard or soft g was more appropriate based on other English words; the results varied somewhat depending on what parameters were used.[11] Of the 105 words that contained gi somewhere in the word, 68 used the soft g while only 37 employed its counterpart. However, the hard g words were found to be significantly more common in everyday English; […]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_GIF#Cause

Michael Dow is an associate professor in linguistics with specialization in phonology, by the way.

and if you’re confused why others pronounce it with a soft G, they would seem to be simply more familiar with the English language 🤷‍♂️

Well, clearly you are already not as “familiar with the English language” as you might think.

Just see https://time.com/5791028/how-to-pronounce-gif/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_GIF#Analysis_of_the_dispute

• People who had math in high school and have seen blackboard bold/double struck characters

GCC, back in the days DJGPP in particular. As a child in the 1990s I could not afford the big name compilers like Watcom. And compared to DJGPP, all the “prized” Borland/Turbo stuff that my middle school pushed (with segmented real mode), were practically Fisher-Price and Mattel compilers.