Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThis is mind-boggling. And makes me all kinds of confused. I skimmed the Ars article at the time and figured it could only be good.

Is the Steam program for ChromeOS just some kind of weirdly packaged webapp pretending not to be a webapp? Can it not run normal binaries? What about CrossOver? On the one hand, so long as web environment integrity is not a thing, that's great for compatibility for all OSes. Rising tides and all that.

But why would you purposely GIMP your OS like that?? It's one thing to be web-first, but web-only is something else...

(with apologies to the current GIMP maintainers)

Quoting: CatKillerThe thing that ChromeOS can do that desktop Linux can't (but which Windows can) is run Android applications. But people generally don't think of Android (or Windows) as a desktop Linux OS.

I remember there being something that could do that on Linux. Waydroid?

Quoting: CatKillerChromeOS has been able to run Linux applications in a container for around five years.

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Quoting: mad_mesaMy hypothesis is that statcounter is seeing Steam Deck, and/or that the new ChromeOS Flex may have a slightly different user agent string that is making it miss their special case exception that would otherwise prevent it from getting grouped in with the other Linux distributions.

In either case we should probably expect that they will further break Linux apart in their stats by shifting Deck to the tablet section (or making a new handheld category), or adding more special case exceptions for ChromeOS or other distributions.

Who's habitually browsing websites on their Steam Deck?

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI've never owned a Chromebook—surely there are native programs on there not accessible from the web?

Nope. Until last year ChromeOS the UI and ChromeOS the browser were exactly the same binary. The change last year to separate them was to make ChromeOS more Linux-like.

They dabbled with having web-apps-but-packaged-differently for a while but dropped that (as Google tends to do) a few years ago in favour of just-web-apps.

The thing that ChromeOS can do that desktop Linux can't (but which Windows can) is run Android applications. But people generally don't think of Android (or Windows) as a desktop Linux OS.

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI'm willing to accept this if programs built for ChromeOS work on Linux distributions like Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE. Is that the case?

That way round is trivial: ChromeOS uses web apps. The other way round is harder, but ChromeOS has been able to run Linux applications in a container for around five years. Work is ongoing to make Steam and Steam games on ChromeOS a thing.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyAt any rate, in an odd way a good sign. I mean, I'm happy the Deck exists and believe it has led increased Linux adoption for gaming. But, if overall Linux is up despite Steam OS within that being down, that means overall Linux is clearly growing. That's a happy thing for me, since I want to see continued growth of desktop Linux in general, along with growth in use of the Steam Deck in particular; it wouldn't be so great if the Steam Deck became huge but the rest of desktop Linux shrank and became an irrelevant appendage.

Of course, caveats as usual given the bounciness of polls and the unknown nature of Steam sampling--none of this data is necessarily that real. But taken at face value, it's nice.

Agreed. My preferred scenario is that the Deck never grows to more than half of the Linux market and they both grow in tandem. Proton and the Steam Linux Runtime are very useful abstractions for developers to target all of Linux without worrying about specific details, but I wouldn't want my desktop machine to be forced under the limits of the Deck because that's the only Linux they're considering.

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Quoting: ageresWhat is "Freedesktop SDK 23.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit" and why has it risen from 0 to 5%? Was it some SteamOS update that changed something and affected the Steam Deck statistics?

It's Flatpak Steam. It has a new version number, which is why that entry is new and the previous entry has dropped off the list. Exactly the same as the versioned Ubuntu entries, but unlike the unversioned Arch entry.

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Quoting: Highball

Quoting: ArehandoroSteam OS Holo has -2.46%, is that a typo or are people removing Steam OS to to install other distros?

It just means less Steam Deck machines were apart of this recent survey.

That statement is too strong. Proportionally fewer Steam Decks were sampled, yes, but they could very well have sampled more Steam Decks than last month as well as even more non-Deck machines.

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Quoting: gradyvuckovicStuff like this is why Steam's still ahead of the pack by a mile on PC.
I can imagine that being very useful for stuff like making sure you and all your friends have the same mods when you play an online game together.

Also "mods on desktop" and "mods on Deck."

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Make the film script just the last pizza delivery mission. Sorted.

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Quoting: kshade"If we only had a few more programmers" he said while drying his tears of sorrow with the stack of microtransaction dollars he made that same minute.

Don't forget that it's less than three months since he got rid of over 800 staff members.

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