Orange Pi Neo Coming as a Ryzen 7 and Linux Powered Handheld Device
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
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's mostly emulation, though (see https://www.reddit.com/r/SBCGaming/)
They both run Windows natively, though; that should place them in an slightly different market.
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.
- no word on pricing or availability, which are the most important pieces of information
- resolution is in a weird spot where it's too high to drive most games at native res and potentially too low to look good at 2x integer scaling
- screen is 120Hz and has "500nits Brightness", but is not OLED
- having trackpads make this usable in more contexts than gaming (from my experience with the deck), but they could end up being trash
- I haven't had the chance to use either hall effect triggers or sticks, but I am curious on how they pan out
- advertising "no exposed screws" is mad suspicious to me, and casts doubt on reparability
- dual usc-b ports (top and bottom) is always great to see
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.
It's just a waste of everyones time.
Since Arch stable is indeed stable these days, the Manjaro approach to package delaying does not make sense, I agree with that.
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?
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.
... 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?)
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.
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.
You can view the build recipes at https://gitlab.archlinux.org.
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).
Another article: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/handheld-gaming/ora...
> AMD Ryzen
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
(I'm still a little miffed that RPi didn't come up with a different name for the raspberry pi pico.)
Am I being naïve to think building a hand held gaming device should be similar to building a smartphone?
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.
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.
7-inch FHD+ (1920 x 1200, WUXGA) 16:10, 500nits Brightness, 120Hz Refresh Rate
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.
I also don't understand the phone comparison, this is a gaming handheld, very specific purpose compared to an all-rounder device. Please elaborate
> 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.
Minisforum is also exclusively(?) marketing Manjaro for their MiniPCs (besides Windows of course).
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.
When i say "the platform", i meant it offer the optimal setup for the use-case
- better UX
- better performance
- better battery life
Besides, the one that sells the most is the Steam Deck, wich run a Linux OS
A Handheld gaming device is not a novel concept, countless of devices running both android / linux in the market
Example:
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.
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.
It’s in the name!
Anything larger than Switch Lite shouldn't call themselves "handled".
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 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.
So can a 15" laptop. That doesn't make 15" laptops handhelds.
It seems strange to say something needs to be pocketable in order to be considered "handheld".