lunar_rover

For single player gaming, probably. Actual desktops still suffer from significant technical and design issues.

Wayland spent a decade to be mostly usable with rough edges, Flatpak sandbox is really rough and most things are designed by amateurs.

Still Windows destroying itself made the gap closer than ever, right now is a great chance to gain market share and funding and professionals.

I don't see this happening in the foreseeable future.

Making competitive phones is even harder than making a desktop, and they aren't investing in Linux desktop itself either, just the components they need. SteamOS works by not running a desktop in its default mode.

Maybe yes but the ulterior motive behind these "solutions" is pretty obvious. Rip anonymity from the internet, one step forward towards Telescreens.

If you include all the low level works needed to make them work well which is a lot, then maybe.

So Valve won't need to convince developers to do anything expensive and old games will also work. Most games on Steam Deck aren't tested by the original developer at all.

Windows on ARM games are extremely rare. Linux native means dealing with Linux desktop APIs and poor support in commercial engines.

Even in Minecraft it looks bad. Some CJK characters are Serif for some reason.

The problem is still the desktop itself. Basically none of the existing Linux desktop components are mature, either design or technical wise and more often than not, both.

Deck works because most games are self contained, allowing them to have a default game mode that bypasses the desktop entirely.

There are better ways to do this.

Enforce 18+ age rating and mandate platform parental controls. If the parents decide to let their child pay for adult content freely that's unfortunate and on them.

Going stricter isn't effective, ID check will become tools for whatever ulterior motives they have.

Compatibility and tightly coupled legacy components tech debt catching up, ads to get revenue from free users, half baked new UIs made out of slow web tech and more.

No serious effort went into consumer desktop Windows in the past 10 years, most of the upgrades are for Windows Server, Azure and Xbox OS. Windows 8 was their last real attempt and they gave up immediately.

Notification centre has been there since 3.x era.

Though it's accessed by clicking the clock so perhaps it's not very intuitive.

Potentially longer gaps between major updates, since they can no longer follow upstream closely.

However, Google might have planned to slowly make Android proprietary, which means death to 3rd party forks.

The World needs more Snow Leopards.

Neither is even close to how smooth Gnome's overview is.

And macOS still renders only a single desktop for some reason.