Definitely agree. Had a couple of them and loved some of the ideas (touchpad sticks, gyro to mouse aim, all of the Steam Input flexibility) but they never really eclipsed my rechargeable Dualshocks in terms of feeling right. Taking some of the Deck’s refinements and giving it another spin is welcome.

In a weird way this makes Linux a microkernel. They’re “macro” but isolated and cooperative. Coolest patch set I’ve read about in a while.

You are getting this from Xwayland, so you’re running a rootless X server in the background. It’s nice that it works seamlessly, but it’s not really Wayland doing anything but managing the X window.

I don’t have experience with MSI recently, but I’d be really surprised if you couldn’t flash a new BIOS off the system partition or FAT32 USB. You may not be able to update from Linux directly, but almost all motherboards I’ve seen support doing it from the BIOS interface.

Intel has been struggling overall, and lately has been letting some of its Linux engineers go. Nothing absolutely fundamental has been affected yet (AFAICT) but I guess Clear Linux didn’t make the cut.

It would allow SSH if the desktop is locked, they’re separate. If you can get in via SSH then you can poke around logs like dmesg and see what’s up. There will probably be some messages to give you something more specific to search with.

I agree. I have become more amenable to things like Flatpak or Podman/Docker to keep the base system from being cluttered up with weird dependencies, but for the most part it doesn’t seem like there’s a huge upside to going full atomic if you’re already comfortable.