When I met a close friend’s husband at an event, somehow PCs and Linux came up. He asked if I’m a Linux user (which I like to think you can’t immediately tell); I assume he wanted to build some nerd cred. I said “yeah, I technically have Linux with me right now”. He asked what I meant, so I pulled out the Steam Deck. He was unfamiliar, so I briefly explained.
When he heard it’s (obviously) a commercial product, he actually pretended to faint. And then kept acting as if I had personally insulted him, not in a joking way. I had clearly failed the purity test in that moment.
It was a strange experience. Not even in hackerspaces I’d ever had a conversation like that. So these people are rare but they do exist.
Steam Deck is one of them best things ever created. It is a great way to market Linux to masses, this is the same way Windows gained its market cap. Windows made its dominance by being the default operating system for most PCs, normal users don’t know how to install operating systems, and probably don’t even know Linux exists.
honestly if I heard someone say “I technically have linux with me right now” I would expect them to pull out an Android phone and say that Android is based on the Linux kernel (it is, its just not what anyone means when they say ‘linux’, its a pretty good example of how ‘linux’ refers to the OS and not the kernel)
Yeah fair. I expected we’d talk about how Linux could displace Windows on Desktop, to which SteamOS and Proton running on an x86 laptop chip is a lot more relevant than an Android phone.
Absolutely wild. Pretending to faint because a company sells hardware running on Linux? I feel like most of us want to be able to buy more computers that don’t just automatically come with Windows… That person sucks.
When I met a close friend’s husband at an event, somehow PCs and Linux came up. He asked if I’m a Linux user (which I like to think you can’t immediately tell); I assume he wanted to build some nerd cred. I said “yeah, I technically have Linux with me right now”. He asked what I meant, so I pulled out the Steam Deck. He was unfamiliar, so I briefly explained.
When he heard it’s (obviously) a commercial product, he actually pretended to faint. And then kept acting as if I had personally insulted him, not in a joking way. I had clearly failed the purity test in that moment.
It was a strange experience. Not even in hackerspaces I’d ever had a conversation like that. So these people are rare but they do exist.
Steam Deck is one of them best things ever created. It is a great way to market Linux to masses, this is the same way Windows gained its market cap. Windows made its dominance by being the default operating system for most PCs, normal users don’t know how to install operating systems, and probably don’t even know Linux exists.
honestly if I heard someone say “I technically have linux with me right now” I would expect them to pull out an Android phone and say that Android is based on the Linux kernel (it is, its just not what anyone means when they say ‘linux’, its a pretty good example of how ‘linux’ refers to the OS and not the kernel)
Yeah fair. I expected we’d talk about how Linux could displace Windows on Desktop, to which SteamOS and Proton running on an x86 laptop chip is a lot more relevant than an Android phone.
Absolutely wild. Pretending to faint because a company sells hardware running on Linux? I feel like most of us want to be able to buy more computers that don’t just automatically come with Windows… That person sucks.