• 6 Posts
  • 102 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • it makes sense, now, why Valve would choose KDE for the Steam Deck (which has a touchscreen).

    I like my Steam Deck but I must be honest here: Desktop Mode, which is Plasma 5 and not the latest 6.x release, is trash on that touch screen. It just a shrunken regular desktop. You can use some environment variables to affect a few QtQuick applications but the results are mixed. There are KDE applications what are designed for mobile but don’t even consider the possibility of anything but portrait screen orientation. SteamOS doesn’t ship with a proper Maliit keyboard, it’s just Steam’s built-in one which never pops up automatically outside of Steam and Steam games.

    Plasma 5 on that tiny screen isn’t enjoyable at all. It kinda, sorta works but I’m happy the touch pads exist.




  • Is that a practical question looking for a real solution right now or is more of a philosophical question?

    If the latter:

    Tech should be approachable by teaching users and add safeguards, not by dumbing things down to a degree users stay dumb. Options should be easy to find, preview what they do, and always offer to restore defaults. A desktop for extreme beginners may even adopt an idea from gaming and have them do a tutorial section first. It may even double as a wizard of which accessibility features to enable for elderly users.





  • Someone re-parented a variation to prevent it being public domain until 2040.

    So the variation cannot be used. That’s irrelevant for a file format. Some company could, for example, patent a more efficient encoding technique but the resulting file format is still public domain. So at worst an open source encoder would need to be slightly inefficient because it uses the traditional technique.