Maybe younger people won’t appreciate this as much, having grown up when this weren’t so rare, but nothing quite illustrates to me how far Linux has come than browsing Amazon and seeing “Linux” listed as a first-class citizen on product images. Not buried in the details, not answered in a FAQ, but right there on the product image at the top of the listing. Many of you will remember having to dig through wikis and forums to uncover whether a product was compatible with Linux; and sometimes you still do.
This is only a USB device; it’d be more surprising if it weren’t Linux compatible… but that’s not the point; the point is that “Linux” is advertised at the top right there after Windows and before Mac OS or Android. That’s what still grabs me. Metrics and guestimates are great; in a capitalist world, it’s often what advertisements say that indicate a truer story.
Thanks to the insurmountable effort by the dev community and GabeN who has singlehandedly taken that into the public spotlight with the deck and now the machine and frame.
What a time to be alive as a Linux nerd, while the world is roasting Linux is in the best spot ever. Kinda the only good thing going on rn.
I’m just stoked to see Tux on Amazon. Not as Linux-enthusiast swag, but on another product. It’s so wild.
The Steam Deck has done a lot to bring Linux to mainstream consumers, no doubt. And Steam on Linux has radically altered the gaming scene, although it steals credit from a lot of heavy lifting by Proton. Still, I’ve been playing BL4 on my little Ryzen 5800H mini, under Arch, with my old PS4 controller, and am always a little shocked when I do.
We live in Interesting Times, my friend, for better and for worse. Silver linings, and all.
Gaben stands on the shoulders of giants.
Back in the day, we all wanted Google to fill that role…