soulsource

That's a very good point. I hadn't considered potential lack of domain knowledge at all. In that case Rust might even help, because it's easier to write interfaces that can't be used wrong - so that even someone without the needed domain knowledge might be able to fix compile issues without breakage.

Behind all the negative tone there is a valid concern though.

If you don't know Rust, and you want to change internal interfaces on the C side, then you have a problem. If you only change the C code, the Rust code will no longer build.

This now brings an interesting challenge to maintainers: How should they handle such merge requests? Should they accept breakage of the Rust code? If yes, who is then responsible for fixing it?

I personally would just decline such merge requests, but I can see how this might be perceived as a barrier - quite a big barrier if you add the learning cliff of Rust.

I know it's a cross-post, but since this is not on the cheap, but rather on the libre side: Have you checked out the MNT Pocket Reform?

I only use my Steam Deck while I am away from my gaming (Linux-)PC. The reasons for this are that for me a big screen wins compared to the small (and relatively low-res) display of the Steam Deck, and also the games I usually play play way better with mouse and keyboard than with gamepad input... Also, the Steam Deck is relatively heavy, so gaming in bed or stuff like that also isn't that enjoyable...

That said, the Steam Deck absolutely shines in situations where I cannot access my gaming PC. I usually take it with me when I go for a longer train ride, and also brought it along for vacation.

Compatibility wise I am in the situation that all the games I ever tried are working on the Steam Deck, but that's mostly because I have been using Linux exclusively for decades, and have made it a habit to check if a game is going to work before buying it. Though, in recent years that habit slightly changed, thanks to the work Valve has put into WINE development. While back when I switched to Linux most Windows games would not run via WINE, nowadays one can expect that almost all games do. It is still a good idea to check protondb first, of course. Also, there are still a few games that need tinkering to get them to run, and protondb usually has some info on how to do that.

One negative point I have to mention is battery runtime. It strongly depends on what one is playing, but very demanding 3D games can drain the battery in 1.5 hours. However, I am talking about the old LCD model here, the newer OLED models run longer with one charge (though I don't know how long actually).

Another negative is the display resolution. Most games don't mind running on 1280x800, but some do. This can lead to illegible text, broken UI, or, as is the case with Stellaris, a different UI that is less convenient to use.

And last, but not least, performance. The Steam Deck GPU is just enough for the built-in display's resolution, and also only under the assumption that games are reasonably optimized. I have not yet been in the situation that I would have gotten unplayable FPS, but I have heard a lot about games only running with 20 FPS, and needing upscaling... So, basically don't expect it to run Crysis (yes, I know that joke is old, and that the Steam Deck can run Crysis just fine).

I haven't looked at the schematics, so I am not certain which connection exactly would be needed. I only know that the Reform Mainboard and the Reform CM4 adapter don't expose any way of writing to the eMMC other than booting the system first. The problem here is that the Banana Pi CM4 boot process first looks for a bootloader in eMMC, and only if it cannot find one there, tries the SD card. So, if one flashes a bootloader that gets recognized by the firmware, but that later fails to boot, one is stuck...

The I/O board on the other hand allows to connect to the CM4 via USB, and there is a weird, but supposedly working, procedure to erase the data in eMMC.

In any case, I now have a spare CM4 I/O board lying around, and if I ever choose to upgrade my Reform to the Rockchip SoM (or something even faster), I can then still use the CM4 as a small standalone PC.

At least in my case, the default OS came on an SD Card, and both, the M.2 SSD (which I had ordered together with the laptop) and the eMMC were empty. The manual contains a section about moving the OS to eMMC, so I guess that's their default setup.

(In my case there's an additional thing though: For the Banana Pi CM4 SoM the installation of u-boot into eMMC is officially not supported, as one would need a CM4 I/O board to erase it again, if anything goes wrong. I installed it there anyhow, and it's working for me, but I did buy the I/O board beforehand as a precaution.)

I am curious how much work it will be to modify that Ubuntu image to fully work on the Reform. The audio chip and some other peripherals are on the mainboard, and need to be included in the device tree for the kernel to pick them up, so I would expect that at least some modifications of the image are needed.

It might already be enough to grab the device tree from the MNT gitlab, compile it, and put it in the boot partition for stuff to work. (You will likely also want to install the reform-tools - either from their gitlab or from their repository. They include a kernel module that is needed to get battery readout and to power off the laptop on shutdown.)

What helped me a lot while setting up the system was that I kept the SD card with the official (Debian Unstable) image around - every time something didn't work, I could boot it up and check how the official image does it.

I own one, and am really happy with it. There is some jank to expect though:

• The official system image is based on Debian Unstable. This means that you frequently get broken updates (for instance, currently waybar is broken, and just a few days ago, boot got broken by a buggy initramfs).
  • At least for some SoMs there are also Debian Stable images available, which are, well, stable.
  • I am running Gentoo on my Reform, and once one gets past the initial setup (kernel config is a challenge) it works pretty well. I have written a blog post about installing Gentoo on the Reform.
• DPMS off might not work reliably (depending on SoM). I got it working well on my BananaPi CM4 SoM by changing sway config though.
• Suspend-to-disk (hibernate) does currently not work. Last time I tried it, the system continued just fine, but froze a few seconds later.
  • No clue if standby works. I don't use standby.
• Some other issues exist with the Banana Pi CM4, but there are workarounds: https://community.mnt.re/t/tracking-known-issues-and-solutions-with-the-bpi-a311d-upgrade
• There are probably more issues that I cannot remember right now.

That said: Now that I have Gentoo running on it, and found workarounds for the most annoying issues (except for the suspend-to-disk issue), I am loving the laptop and would not trade it for anything else.

In addition to LibreOffice I often use standalone tools.

If I want a high quality document, I use LaTeX. Same for presentation slides. However, writing stuff in LaTeX is only worth the effort if the quality is needed. For non-important stuff I just use LibreOffice.

For calculations it depends on what I want to have in the end. If I just want to play with the data a bit, then LibreOffice Calc it is. However, if it is for something serious, I tend to write script files, or even full programs, that do the processing. That way computation and data is in separate files, and the used formulas are clearly visible and easy to debug.

I have been a user since the 90s. Back then it was still called StarOffice.

Its feature set differs from that of MS Office, and its performance could be (a lot!) better, but I strongly prefer the LibreOffice user interface, and the features that matter to me (like CSV import) are way better in LibreOffice. However, LibreOffice does not have all the features of MS Office, and some are notably worse (for instance auto-fill in spreadsheets, where Excel is way better at guessing the next value).

Sadly it's not only a matter of preference, because file exchange between different office suites is not flawless. MS Office and LibreOffice don't agree 100% on how to load each other's files...

No. Or rather, not yet. Valve has not released SteamOS 3 for anything other than the Steam Deck, but is planning to do so at some point in the future.

I honestly wouldn't recommend SteamOS for anything other than a dedicated gaming device though. It excels at its use case of launching games via Steam, but for everything else it is quite cumbersome... I would much rather install a general purpose Linux distribution and run Steam on it.

I would rather trust GamingOnLinux here:

While it is not in any way officially supported by Valve, they have now released Windows drivers for the newer Steam Deck OLED model.

(emphasis mine)