… and what I heard was we cancelled it.

That might have been true. There were actually two phone teams at Intel working with the same hardware. WinPhone and Android. Our budget came from the Android budget, as they had already been funded and working on the Android version for 6 months already. It came time to demo the phones and our WinPhone could make calls, get internet, and connect to wifi. The android phone could only boot. So the Android team took back what remained of the budget, because it was felt that more Android phones would sell. The WinPhone was put on pause. Then, the android team ran out of budget and the whole thing was scuttled, including WinPhone. I bet MSFT was doing Intel a solid by not trashing Intel because it’s Android team dropped the ball. Props to MSFT for that.

Anyway, yep, I am fully linux and fully team red now.

Same. And I’m never looking back.

Yeah man, have code in Win8, WinPhone, and Win10. Bet you didn’t know Intel had a WinPhone device. Of course, Intel cancelled it. I definitely avoid mega corporations now. Won’t even take their interviews. The small company I work for now, they said, “Can you make this integration in 8 months”, I said yes. Two months later, all done and deployed to production. Everything is much easier when you can actually talk to other teams and submit PR’s you need.

I’m with you. I’ll never work for another big corporation. The have no interests in making good products. All Intel did was use their money to artificially keep AMD from selling chips. Which is crazy, Intel pretty much did everything first. Now they do nothing.

haha, I was a Windows Kernel dev for Intel. What a shit show. Both companies would fuck each other over. So many times. We would start project, get Microsoft to buy in. Microsoft would pull in a bunch of engineers to support it, 3 months later, we cancel on Microsoft. Or Microsoft does the same thing to us, I get pulled on to a team to support Microsoft, 3 months later, Microsoft cancels. No wonder those two companies are imploding. Good riddence.

Bazzite is great. I tried it out for gee whiz. I don’t use it because I use my PC for dev work. Bazzite is purpose built for gaming. If that’s what you use that machine for, then I’d say it’s a good move. But really, you’ll be just fine for gaming if you stick with a standard distro too. I’m on Ubuntu now, but plan to move the second Pop!_OS hits beta.

Same. If I’m fixing something, it’s because I did something I knew I shouldn’t; which I rarely do. For instance, forced the upgrade of Ubuntu to 24.04 even though Canonical said that wasn’t ready and had it disabled, but 24.04 was fine for new installs. I went out of my way to enabled the upgrade, let it break, and then I spent 5 minutes fixing the upgrade. Everything was fine after that. That was never my experience when I had to use Windows. It’s like trying to start your carborated engine in the 80s. It’s just a roll of the dice that things don’t work with Windows.

Just use a live boot thumbdrive. Let her get her feet wet. When she sees she has almost no issues or zero issues compared to Windows. She’ll just use Linux by default.

Try using Linux off a live boot thumbdrive. Then you can figure out what you need to figure out before committing. You can even test out different distros. Just get as fast of a thumb drive as you can or Linux will feel pretty slow.

zed ctrl+{ fold ctrl+} unfold

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it offers no GUI to easily create and manage user groups

Correct, a very common task for little grandmas and other average users.

Yep, they aren’t trying to figure out what games, one manually adds to the Steam library.

git stash git stash pop

Because the driver is the glue code between the device, and the operating system. What happens when the kernel changes, or needs to change? Then the driver on your devices don’t match up with the kernel anymore. A lot of Windows folks think Windows has some sort of stable interface and that’s why Windows is backwards compatible. But it’s untrue, Windows has inbox drivers, just like Linux has driver’s that build with the Kernel. Any driver that reaches inbox status get brought into the Windows source. As the Windows kernel changes, Microsoft engineers update all the inbox drivers to match the new kernel changes. When companies don’t get their driver inbox’d, they are responsible for keeping up with the kernel changes. Some devices eventually get left behind.

git

I believe you. I know I’m stretching it here. Only because it’s just not like Microsoft to allow their OEMs off the leash. It’s not unlike Microsoft to bring the full force and weight of the legal system down on their partners. And we definitely know Microsoft wouldn’t hesitate to tie another company up in court just the for the sake of draining them of their operating cash. I’m just thinking, maybe there is a way that these handhelds fit into the free Microsoft licensing. I mean, knowing Microsoft is just going to crack the whip, why even spend the engineering dollars supporting Linux hardware in the first place. Maybe to give them leverage against Microsoft I guess.

Looks like /u/Luma got you sorted. Awesome feature right? It’s been there for a long as I can remember. This is the best part about Linux. People who use Linux created features that helped them solve problems or made their daily work easier. And you can do the same if you are feeling motivated one day.

That’s what the tty is for, or at worst a bootable thumbdrive, CD, or Floppy. If I can’t switch to a tty, I boot a bootable drive, mount my harddrive, and chroot my install. No second machine required. It’s rare that I fuck something up though. Rest assured it was some bullshit I was trying, zero to do with Linux itself. But I do remember Windows would just bork itself randomly for no reason at all. I’m sure Microsoft has all that resolved now, but man back in the day it was painfully often.

You are. You are supposed pretend, everything you know on Windows should immediately transfer to Linux. Try to do techie things on Linux the Windows way; borking your system. Finally claim Linux isn’t ready for the average user, despite not using Linux like an average user would.

I had figured that would be the case this time as well. There is no way Microsoft will let their OEMs off their leash if they can help it. At first I thought there was no way any Windows OEM would be allowed, SteamOS on their handheld officially supported, or even sold that way. But I learned recently, at BUILD 2014, Microsoft made Windows free for devices with screens 8" or less, mostly IoT. I think that would count for these handhelds as well. So I think this time will be different.

The way I understand the contracts you are mentioning, the deal is, they have to sell a Windows license with every PC they sell. When a company like Dell or Lenovo sell machines with Linux, it’s usually in the 10,000 range, (at least that I can tell) which is something Dell or Lenovo can eat the cost of. Plus, most of the machines go to companies that already have Volume Licensing deals already, so basically the Windows Tax is paid for in some way already.

But I think this time will be different because there will be a ramp up of devices and competition in the handheld space where there is no Windows Tax required. Valve will surely release a Steam Console and that will probably become the new PS2/DVD player that everybody buys. When people are buying consoles instead of PCs, OEMs are already spending engineering dollars on Linux for the handheld market, and 3rd party software and devices are suddenly competing in the Linux space. It’s a stretch, but I really think SteamOS is breaking the grip of Microsoft’s vendor lock’in strategy and we are just seeing the very beginning stages with Windows OEMs officially supporting SteamOS.

I think setting expectations appropriately is a reasonable expectation of new users. Microsoft expects it of Windows users. Apple expects it of MacOS users. For Linux, nope, we must have a different standard. If we don’t, Linux isn’t ready for the average user. Got news for you, average users don’t install Windows, they don’t install MacOS, and they don’t install Linux or any other OS. They buy pre-built machines where everything is taken care of. Average users buying pre-built machines do not experience the woes of a tech nerd.