This is phrased like a feature, but it's absolutely not. Why would anyone want this when the Steam Deck is super easy to repair and has a lot of spare part options?
It is usually ok for the first repair but having replaced 3 times the screen of my significant other (!) the plastic casing tabs do not like repeated access.
Even worse if the stuff is not documented correctly you can break those plastic tabs by mistake. I did so when I converted my vintage polaroid camera to battery-less I-type films.
Asus and Lenovo both make a handheld gaming device that competes with the Steamdeck now. Though the Orange Pi Neo looks like an interesting entrant. Manjaro is pretty similar to the Steamdeck OS, which Valve has failed to release for other hardware (they said they were going to). In fact, Manjaro is what Valve recommends to developers looking to test their games ona "steamdeck like" OS if they don't have a Steamdeck.
I recently went down this rabbit hole. I bought a controller and mount for playing emulated games on my phone and then started seeing references to various handheld emulation devices. The amount of options from $50-200 is insane and I think my kids will love one of the switch-like devices that can play a ton of retro games.
I've also recently fallen into (reading/watching about) it, and from what I've seen, some of them have really impressive levels of community software support
Nothing kills my interest faster than seeing Manjaro. What a bad choice of distro, for users, and/or as a partner. To me, it shows they don't get it. SBCs can be such a nightmare.
What is it about Manjaro anyway that makes these corporations adopt it? I don't get it. I remember at least one Linux phone burned a ton of community good will by adopting Manjaro.
Yes, I had them in mind. I have to check my own biases because I think [my distro] is of course better suited and more mature, but I really don't get it.
I personally think the community management, and XDA-forum-esque development ecosystem really ties into the conditions leading to the "crisis" that affected a certain first gen SBC/phone device.
I'm absolutely convinced that the first SBC manufacture that embraces tow-boot/nixos is going to find themselves with a dedicated, loud fanbase. NixOS or Guix on these stupid SBCs is end-game. Whether it's vendor BSP or upstream, it's trivial to share work and share output images. And, it makes it trivial to side-by-side vendor+mainline configurations, thereby further putting pressure on the SBC manufacturers to actually upstream their work or contract Collabora to do so (see: rock5b).
In general it's better to just stick with a distribution with a large userbase and developer community. Something stable that has proven itself over the years.
With Manjaro you are basically using ArchLinux with its many developers and contributors, except that a few extra developers are messing with the packages and delay the updates. Whenever you encounter a bug in Manjaro, you don't know if it's from the source, introduced by Manjaro or an issue with ArchLinux. You can't rely on the ArchLinux wiki and the ArchLinux forums or irc will refuse to help you. And the Manjaro developers have outright said in their forums that they are not responsible for users having a broken system after an upgrade.
To be fair, Manjaro filled a gap for users looking for a beginner friendly Arch. I understood Arch only recently got a decent UI-based installer and Endeavouros was non-existent back then. I am pretty sure Manjaro has quite a large userbase.
Since Arch stable is indeed stable these days, the Manjaro approach to package delaying does not make sense, I agree with that.
Manjaro is a decent-ish "beginner-friendly Arch". I mean the fact that they have their own separate repo and hold packages does confuse users who think they're running Arch, and I recall having an issue with AUR builds sometimes failing because the kernel name contained MANJARO where the build script expected ARCH, and their SSL issues are amateurish, but it's overall an alright "beginner-friendly Arch" which works out of the box.
But hopefully these projects aren't beginners; hopefully they have people who would have no problem putting together a sane Arch system that's as usable as the one Manjaro provides. So even if you want to use Arch Linux on these sorts of embedded Linux systems, why wouldn't you just put together your own Arch system? What benefit does Manjaro provide there?
> Arch only recently got a decent UI-based installer
There's still no UI installer. There's now an official install script.
But install scripts have been around for as long as Arch has. Including UI ones.
EndeavourOS isn't just installing Arch, it also unnecessarily installs a firewall and uses things like Dracut.
> Since Arch stable is indeed stable these days
What do you mean "Arch stable"? Arch has testing repositories but those are just for testing. Besides Arch has always been as stable as a rolling release distribution can be.
> it also unnecessarily installs a firewall and uses things like Dracut
... having a fw by default seems like a good idea to me. (also Dracut, it just works, no? IMHO better than a ton of legacy shell scripts. what's the problem with it?)
> having a fw by default seems like a good idea to me.
One of the few principles of Arch is to not have any.
> also Dracut, it just works, no?
But it's not the Arch default. It's something new to keep in consideration whenever you're viewing Arch specific instructions like on the Wiki. Arch has is own tool for creating ramdisks, mkinitcpio. That's not a legacy she'll script.
The official Arch repositories are enormous. And all packages are unaltered from upstream, with default configuration and few backported patches.
And for many people I think rolling release is just preferred. Your software will always be at the newest version. This is especially relevant for people who play games or software developers.
Arch has the biggest rolling release repositories with fast updates and good tooling.
Arch also has the AUR which holds package build recipes creates by regular users. You can manually build/install nearly any software from the AUR. Though as a Manjaro users there's no guarantee AUR packages work.
The way Arch maintaines that many packages, is that most packages are maintained by Package Maintainers (formerly Trusted Users). They are responsible for keeping their dedicated packages up-to-date and working.
I guess that "Pi" branding has come to mean ... small computing of any kind now? Or maybe I'm just out of the branding loop and "Orange" is more meaningful than Pi and thus they should have just omitted the "Pi" part
It's pretty common for a company to adopt their first product's name as their brand name as they branch out into other products. Just like how Raspberry Pi sells accessories, microcontrollers, cases, etc. under the brand name Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi (which originally made a product called the Orange Pi, which was definitely meant to invoke the small computing idea, totally not a trademark violation wink wink), now makes other products under that brand name.
(I'm still a little miffed that RPi didn't come up with a different name for the raspberry pi pico.)
I'm interested to know why it seems easy to build a Linux gaming device, but their attempts at getting a smartphone to market has been laden with problems, delays and never really getting anything decent to market.
Am I being naïve to think building a hand held gaming device should be similar to building a smartphone?
It's just a Linux running Steam UI. A phone needs so much more these days to be seen as competition. Ubuntu phone was beautiful and worked nicely, but without any ecosystem it felt boring and like a downgrade.
Gaming devices are easy because games are mostly just self contained executable that may rely on some OS library that can be freely pulled in (thank you WINE/Proton).
Smartphones use "Apps" which are tightly bound to APIs provided by the host OS and for the most part, would need to be fully emulated. Most apps also have in-app purchasing, which relies on secure hardware APIs that are specifically designed to detect emulation and fail out.
You would need a linux phone app ecosystem, and developers building popular apps for it, for linux phones to take off.
>> You would need a linux phone app ecosystem, and developers building popular apps for it, for linux phones to take off.
I believe this is the same thing that sank the Windows Mobile platform and their phones. They had everything BUT the ecosystem which made a lot of users hesitant to switch because a lot of their apps weren't available in the MS app store.
Thanks for the clarification, it helped iron out a lot of my questions.
Topically, I used to own a Windows phone and absolutely loved the OS. I had to carry a second Android phone with me though, because nearly every app I needed or wanted to use wasn’t available for the Windows phone.
No mention on repairability and that resolution is too high for the screen size and processing power I'm afraid. I wonder what the price will be therefore
7840U, 1920x1200 on 50Wh battery, guess what, that's almost exactly the same as a ThinkPad T14 gen 4 (and many other devices)
The screen resolution is high compared to steam deck for sure, but about the same as 7" ROG Ally (1200p vs 1080p), and dpi is slightly lower than Legion Go. Remember that your 6.3 inch phone, also a handheld device, probably has a higher DPI than this.
The "too high resolution" point is in terms of gaming performance. A phone has a much higher DPI screen, but it also isn't expected to run PC games which haven't been optimized for the limitations of handheld devices.
You're not normally expected to run low powered gaming devices at native 3D resolution these days. Be it via some fancier form of upscaling (e.g. FSR) or just a plain lower rendering resolution. Many big games even separate their UI resolution from the rendered resolution these days. The screen resolution is usually there for clarity when not in a demanding game (desktop or 2d/light game).
we've seen already how the rog ally with a similar (very similar) chip performs and here they bundle it with a higher resolution display @120Hz. What is the point of it if you can't drive this ? Just for winning on the specs ? maybe but then is nothing more than marketing and we don't even have the price yet
I also don't understand the phone comparison, this is a gaming handheld, very specific purpose compared to an all-rounder device. Please elaborate
I don't get the 'too high resolution' argument in 2024. The additional power consumption is negligible as has been pointed out by others. My 2013 Nexus 5 had a 1080p display.
> if you can't drive this
I assume your use case is playing Triple AAA games. But there are others such as Indie games and emulation which both benefit from higher resolutions. Especially in emulation a higher resolution will allow you to do integer scaling for a greater number of systems etc.
I think they have build up a large userbase over the years. It is pretty beginner friendly imho. The upside of it being arch based is that your favourite package is not years old. For a desktop os a rolling release where every imaginable package can be found in either the official repo or in aur is a huge plus.
Endeavouros came later, when Manjaro was already large and established. It has a more sane approach than Manjaro wrt package mgmt. But by not including a *graphical* package manager they are not an option for beginners. This is possibly meant to prevent success at any cost, I dunno.
This would be great if native GNU/Linux games would be promoted, instead I suspect it will be used for emulators (consoles, retrogaming, and Windows) instead, like every Linux based handheld since Pandora.
all 12 of them? I would give up on hopes of there being any serious market interest for Linux native games any time soon, if ever. Proton/WINE is good enough and the industry does. not. care. about targeting a platform with a rounding error number of users. The best thing to happen to Linux gaming in the last 10 years was the Steam Deck, and that alone is more or less driving adoption.
There are several orders of magnitude more people playing on Unix/BSD derivatives than there are playing on Linux unless you count Android.
Eh, in my opinion we are in a time where Proton is allowing people use linux as a full time gaming platform, and if linux adoption around gaming grows because of this, eventually native linux games will follow become emphasized.
I understand his is completely different. For starters the interface being able to completely avoid the standard desktop is awesome, which Windows doesn't seem to be able to.
Secondly I get better performance with Linux and Proton on the same hardware.
Right, the principal advantage and differentiator of a console is the practically immutable hardware configuration. If you take that away, what defines it then?
I'll have to give it a try... I imagine Nintendo will be releaseing a new console soon for their new games... I may opt out of it. I have over 1000 games for my steamdeck and growing now.
If it is handled, it is in your hands, not your pocket.
I guess everyone has its own definition. Mine is it is a handled console if you can comfortably play with it in your hands during 1h without arm/hand/joints fatigue.
It can be held in hands and used. So handheld. Fitting in a pocket doesn't have anything to do with being handheld.
It would be called "pocketable" or something like that otherwise. I use my Steam Deck and Switch exclusively by holding them in my hands and never dock.
My immersion blender is handheld and doesn't fit in my pocket. My hair dryer is handheld and doesn't fit in my pocket. A tennis racquet is handheld and doesn't fit in my pocket. A baseball bat is handheld and doesn't fit in my pocket.
It seems strange to say something needs to be pocketable in order to be considered "handheld".
This is phrased like a feature, but it's absolutely not. Why would anyone want this when the Steam Deck is super easy to repair and has a lot of spare part options?