Yes, almost certainly.

I really wish GOG was a stronger supporter of Linux. I would move my business over to GOG where possible if so. Right now I heavily value the work that Valve has put into not only making Linux gaming a reality, but the Linux desktop in general as a side-effect.

"Escape hatch" specifically refers to the speculation that Valve is positioning themselves in a way that they can't be forced into paying fees for existing on the Windows platform, and that if push comes to shove they can say they only support Linux now. This hasn't happened yet, but it's a strategic stance which will likely prevent it from even beginning to happen. This doesn't have to do with the Steam Deck specifically; it was also part of their intentions with the Steam Machine and etc.

Maybe it needs to be more obvious that there are many ways to do things in Linux, and give new users a short "learning to learn" primer on how things operate differently in Linux-land, and where/how to look online for help. There are always first-boot popups but I imagine most people are conditioned to click out of them without even reading; forcing people to confirm a couple times that they want to skip "very helpful reading" may cut down on people that play the search engine lottery on what information they use for their first steps.

Also semi-related, I hope that mainstream Linux eventually "un-stupids" computers for regular people again. I get the distinct feeling that Microsoft and Apple have, at least somewhat intentionally, imposed 'learned helplessness' onto average computer users. "Oh computers are magic no one knows how they work. We are the only wizards that could possibly understand them and we will sell you the solution." Windows/OSX/iOS/etc are so locked down that people have rightfully learned over time that if they run into a problem, there really is no solution. I suspect that's permeating into the new user experience on Linux where people will encounter one problem and throw their hands up and say "fucking computers" instead of using basic problem solving to try another approach.

Their rough new user experience is concerning though. From what they described I suspect many of their "problems" are not actually "real", but it doesn't really matter because they still ended up in a scenario where they thought there were problems. How did they end up thinking that everything must be done with terminal while using Ubuntu? I know in the last ~10 years there's been a big focus on the new user experience, so what more can be done to prevent this? My gut says there are too many online resources that are confusing new users when they try to onboard themselves - especially resources that are old, written for other distros, or written for people who just want to find the command they can copy-paste to do something.

Gaming has been the only pathway to mainstream desktop since forever. I've been around for a hot minute and I remember that consistently, the "real Linux users" for years repeated "we don't need gaming this is an adult OS go back to Windows and play with your toys" and then turned around and whined that no one wanted to use desktop Linux. Valve stepped in and casually created the year of the Linux desktop as a side-effect of just wanting an escape hatch for their business model. Now the casuals and elitists alike will have a better experience via the magic of Marketshare, and all it really took is not listening to people that don't know what's good for them.

There's an unnerving lack of substance over on reddit. Recently I decided to look at reddit for the first time since last June, and every post's comments had 1k people saying absolutely nothing worth reading. It feels like I'm reading AI-written posts that are in the uncanny valley of almost making sense and almost being on-topic. News articles have people that literally only talk about the exact words that were in the headline. Every single post's top comments must be lame "jokes" or one-liners, and those must have several replies that riff off the joke in decreasingly-funny ways.

I've picked up a strong habit of immediately looking in comment sections for good discussion and TL;DR's on Lemmy posts and it took me a while to realize that I wasn't actually reading anything in reddit comment sections. The words pass through my brain and nothing of value is absorbed, over and over. It feels like low-hanging fruit to say "reddit is all bots now" but there's something seriously wrong about how it feels over there. You only really need ~10-20 top-level replies on a post to get a broad spectrum of answers, and Lemmy comment sections feel solid for the content that's here. I wish there were more communities here (especially niche ones), but I'm grateful for what we have.

This is a contender for one of the worst things I've ever read. I'm sure this happens more often than we realize but that is just brutal. Someone's making money off this and it makes me sick. RIP Dragoneer. I've not visited FA much but it's always felt like "Old Internet" to me and I appreciate that.

On a related note, I've found Dockge to be powerful enough for my usecases. Worth a try if you don't like the adversarial relationship of Portainer.

This video (series) is so cathartic. Love when people reach that moment of frustration with a company and break it off completely, instead of just eternally bending.

In the UK, 66% of those surveyed stated their support for same-sex relationships

Isn't this a really terrible statistic? 34% of people don't show the bare minimum level of support for letting other people live their lives? I would have expected this to be a lot higher.

For normal desktop users, yeah Debian Stable + Flatpaks is a winning combo for picking the software that you want to be cutting-edge and leaving the rest to rock-solid stability. Normally Linux distros keep a full ecosystem of packages that interop and depend on each other, but solutions like Flatpak have their own little microcosm of dependencies that can be used independently of the host distro. There are also Debian Backports for when you want native Debian packages that are more cutting-edge but still compiled to work with your older base system. Backports are not available for most packages but sometimes the important ones are available, like the Linux kernel itself. You can also try to compile your own backports, but you'll be responsible for updating it.