And that arrogant “I understand it, why don’t you?!”-attitude is exactly what’s so often the main issue in the design process of open source software.

I’d recommend watching this recent talk by Tantacrul, the design lead for MuseScore and Audacity. In it, he shows some videos of first-time user tests he conducted for Inkscape recently. It’s really fascinating to see, how users fail to do what they want because of confusing UX choices. And often it isn’t even that hard to fix. But open source image editors are just full of these little annoyances by now, which really smell like the result of inadequate user testing. And no professional would prefer to work all day with software full of little annoyances when there are alternatives.

I mean, just try adding text in Krita, for example. There’s a giant pop-up where you have to format your text without actually seeing it on your image. That’s just klunky and far more time consuming than a WYSIWYG approach would be.

This isn’t Adobe.

And as much as I want to like Krita, GIMP and such, their workflows just can’t compare with proprietary software in many cases. Also, especially for photo editing, their feature sets can’t compare with Adobe’s or Affinity’s either.

I use Krita, GIMP and Affinity Photo pretty regularly, and while there have been great improvements to the open source alternatives recently, I just get stuff done with Affinity, while still having to constantly search the web for things Krita and GIMP hide somewhere deep within their menus.

All open source image editors I’ve used are in dire need of a complete UX rework (like Blender and Musescore successfully did) before being more than niche alternatives to proprietary software.

So, as of yet, I can definitely understand the wish for a feature-rich and easily usable image editing suite on Linux.

I think Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais explained their plans for a Steam Deck 2 pretty well in this interview (starting at 8:36).

Paraphrasing: They are happy to work with other companies, but the people at Valve also have their own ideas and goals for hardware. And they want to be able to set the bar for these ideas themselves. That‘s why they‘re working on a Steam Deck 2.

And when you look at how well that setting the bar worked with the Deck, I‘m really glad that they want to follow up on that.

I own a GPD Win 2, a handheld PC from a few years before the Deck was a thing. That device couldn‘t be charged while using it, it had its speakers wired the wrong way, it constantly overheated and was a pain to use because of that. Ever since the Deck came out, the whole handheld PC market, including GPD, improved their device quality by a country mile.

And that‘s one of the best things about the Deck, in my opinion, and will hopefully also be one of the best things about the Deck 2.

Yup. It‘s from the Cave Johnson Announcer Pack reveal video. Which is definitely worth a watch, even if you‘re not into Dota 2.

I think I‘ve stumbled across this at some point, but I think it has been updated since.

Thanks for finding it, I‘ll keep it in mind when I get around to trying VR on Linux again in the future.

I’m doing all of my PC gaming on Linux for years now. Except for VR. It’s unfortunately not running well at all for me. I’m running an Nvidia GPU with a Valve Index and whenever I was able to even get a picture on the HMD in the first place, the latency from movement to screen was about a second or so. Which is an incredibly efficient way to feel incredibly sick.

I’m not sure about your setup, maybe it’s better supported in some way, but, from my experience, I’d unfortunately recommend keeping a Windows partition for VR and saving yourself the (quite literal) headache.

Although I’d love to see that happen more frequently, this is simply not realistically doable for most commercial games.

Almost all of them use licensed third-party libraries which are integrated deeply into the game’s code base, but which can’t legally be distributed as part of an open source project. So in order to be able to open source a modern commercial game, you’d have to put in quite a lot of work finding all of your code integrating with commercial libraries and either replacing or removing it. And if that’s not enough, you’d probably have to have your (expensive) legal team check the entire code base for any infringements just to be on the safe side.

All that work for no monetary gain just isn’t a very good business case. So, unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect a lot of modern games to be open sourced any time soon.

I‘d be really surprised if Apple tried that.

They have to know that it violates the DMA. And the penalty for violating it can be up to 10% of their yearly worldwide revenue (not earnings!) for the first violation and up to 20% for repeated violations. I don‘t think they‘d risk that, especially as the EU really isn’t known for its leniency when someone intentionally breaks their rules.