Hacker News Reader

Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

Valve is a relatively small company. They have absolutely fantastic in-house talent (gamescope, for example, is a Valve development and an important innovation of modern SteamOS), but they also have quite a few contractors and projects/teams they support.

(Disclaimer: I worked at a contractor on the Steam Deck for a while, working on the desktop mode.)

View on HN

Thank you for making it dope! I love my deck.

Out of curiosity, why didn't desktop mode include things like language support or CUPS printing support?

Not sure! My particular team was working on features upstream in the KDE Plasma desktop. The packaging / Arch-based distro was done elsewhere. I also left the contracting company before the shipping year, though (while still involved with KDE otherwise today); it's possible there was more intra-team comm later on.

All I can offer you is speculation: Maybe just something no one's gotten around to yet? Also, I think desktop mode and its use cases are probably a lot more popular than anyone expected.

I wouldn't put CUPS on Steam deck because too many people have HP printers. People trying their HP printer or scanner and not having it working would put Deck in bad light really.

Since when is CUPS not able to handle HP printers? HPs have been basically plug-and-play for me.

I had an experience of trying to install InkJet and some old DeskJet AIO just 3 weeks ago and it wasn't great. Brother, Brother is plug and play.

That explains it, then; I use laser printers exclusively these days, so that probably cuts down a fair bit on any consumer-facing shenanigans.

It's a desktop and was advertised as "a PC", but it has no printer support at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com