Nothing screams “Workstation” louder than Reddit Mobile.

https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube

Even a potato can run Linux so regardless of a distro it should be all fine.

A potato with a GPU only compatible with deprecated Nvidia drivers would still be just that and a hard pass for Linux.

Luckily this notebook is AMD-based, so should be fine. Maybe the WiFi card could cause trouble.

Always porting not-yet-upstreamed patches to new release kernels is additional work to the upstreaming work towards the latest development tree. The Valve engineers interviewed around the very first Steam Deck announcement said their goal with moving from Debian to Arch was to minimize the patchset maintenance burden. Their approach surely has that goal in mind. There are only two variants of Steam Deck with minor differences between them. If backporting patches from newer kernels is less work than forward porting their patches, they just stay with that version for a while. Updates to drivers for hardware they don’t use and filesystems they don’t use aren’t relevant to them anyway.

there’s more to an operating system that a program needs other than the kernel(?)

Yes, and the other parts have other names, like the toolkit GTK or the C standard library glibc and all those things make up a Linux distribution, like Fedora.

android just uses the kernel

Yes and the kernel’s name is “Linux”. No other software is named “Linux”. Ask Linus Torvalds if you don’t believe me.

not doubtful, a lot of compositors, kwin included can run nested.

It’s not a question if some of Plasma Mobile could run in that VM. It’s a question if anything usable is possible. I highly doubt Google will make it possible to call phone numbers etc. in that VM.

With diffs sometimes around 5m lines of code (in case of qcom)

Nobody’s denying that. Many embedded distributions targeted special hardware are like that.

Phones don’t really have that

But Android tablets to.

Can it run x86_64 programs

The article sound like it will work for x86 devices running Android as well. I don’t think this is about emulation.

Plasma Mobile for Android? 🤔

Doubtful. A VM doesn’t have access to the underlying hardware (unless explicitly passed through).

I’ll just run Linux shit on…Linux

Android is a variant of Linux, just not GNU/Linux because of not using glibc.

When a normal person talks about a topic, they don’t have to continuously clarify that they still talk about the same topic, it’s assumed.

It’s a new statement in a new paragraph.

Oh, now we interpret according to the intent of the author?

Accept that you misunderstood and move on.

The guy said he bought games, and those don’t work as well natively.

No, he didn’t say “those”. He made a statement about commercial Linux games in general (edit: in a separate paragraph).

if he didn’t buy them it won’t change his experience.

Shouldn’t make a generalized statement like that then.

Yeah, fuck those Linux users! Only sell those games to Windows users!

No idea how you get to that from my statement that’s advocating to make unmaintained games free. 🤷

https://dearrow.ajay.app/

Proton is the gateway drug to us getting more Linux native games.

It’s not when Win32 apologists keep making insane claims how stable Proton is… “Proton is great, it just runs all the Windows games” is the mess that got us to the place where games we buy just start crashing suddenly because nobody of those developers realizes that each major release of Proton must be treated like its own OS with proper QA targeting that. Proton works great for old games because these old games no longer change. For modern games that still get updates Proton is a gamble because a reverse engineered version of the Windows API just isn’t stable.

Linux is a total pain in the behind to write applications for, because of API and ABI instability.

Flatpak

Not a single commercial game runs as well natively as it does through Proton.

It’s funny when people like you make such statements because someone needs to literally name just a one commercial game and you’re already being proven a liar. OK, I start: Selaco.

But the sad reality is that it costs money to maintain software.

So what? They should stop taking money for unmaintained games then.

Win32 has somehow become the most stable Linux API.

Windows is a moving target. Wine/Proton is a reverse engineering chase of a moving target. WINDOWS GAMES ON PROTON BREAK ALL THE TIME! Stop making stuff. It’s great that Proton exists but it’s not like Java. What does not break? Flatpak Runtimes and Steam Linux Runtime.

I know that I can (I did with another one) but that’s not what being a paying customer is about.