+1 on lower tier Intel CPU mini PC. I have a slew of different boxes by Beelink, Intel, and Asus. The N95 box I bought from Beelink (basically an N100) has been one of the most impressive for being so low power, and yet handling the wealth of services I’ve been running on it (with a lot of overhead yet).

The two are not even remotely in the same category of CPU. This is a comparison of apples to orchards.

It has for sure been there for at least a decade now. I think most people autopilot through OS installs.

It says so on the installer page where you are asked to enter a root password.

FWIW: I’m not arguing for or against Debian as a beginner friendly distribution. Just mentioning that you don’t have to set up sudo manually.

Nonfree is usually something people are going to want to enable (Nvidia, Steam, Media codecs, etc)

You can install a nonfree image, but a person could argue that needing to know which image is needed is already more advanced than other distributions.

FYI: If you leave out root password on install, it instead sets your user up with sudo privileges.

No, I mean it was debian based. When Steam Deck released, they moved to being an immutable arch based distribution instead.

It also isn’t currently made available for install outside of the Steam Deck yet.

SteamOS prior to steamdeck is an entirely different distribution FYI

You son of a bitch, I’m in.

I’ve become a big fan of mini PC’s for home server use these days (with NAS systems for storage duties). Low power, low heat, low noise, and very affordable.

Beelink on Amazon makes a good selection of them. Always watch for sales. I have several of their machines and have been pleasantly surprised by all of them. The latest addition was one of their N95 systems with 8GB of memory. It hosts Jellyfin, Deluge, Wireguard (client and server), dns, forgejo, etc.

Reasons are usually just newest kernel/mesa/etc. Most of the time the difference is very small, and often inconsequential. However, every now and again there is a major development that might make it worth it (IE: The graphics pipeline that all but made dxvk-async obsolete)

The plugins would almost certainly work in a VM, but I imagine that latency would become a big headache. For my purposes, I picked up a Beelink mini pc and called it a day.

So in terms of DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), Linux already has Bitwig, Reaper, Arour, LMMS, and possibly others. Personally, I find the bigger issue comes from plugin developers (the DAW is your main program, and you add your sounds/effects through plugins). Most companies are not delivering anything Linux native. Many of these plugins can be bridged with compatibility software, and will work fine that way. However, most of these plugins now are also using their own install/activation software center, and they are often a nightmare in Linux.

Music production is the one thing I currently keep a windows mini PC around for these days. It’s not impossible to make the transition to Linux, but the last thing I want when pursuing a creative endeavor is technical software challenges holding me up.

It seems they already know how the community feels 🤣

Here is a link to this survey announcement on Steam, for those (like me) who wanted some evidence of it actually being official.

Maui has zero Linux support. I don’t believe there are any plans for it, either.

However, Avalonia is fully supported, and is almost a drop in replacement for WPF.

We are all tired on this day.

Right, that’s what I meant when I said “third party app”. Samsung can write an app to do this, but your average app installed from the play store likely cannot.

I’m not super well versed in the world of app development, but I would assume due to the way apps are sandboxed, this isn’t something that could be done with a third party app.

I really appreciate Open Source Alternative To for this (although their theme seems a little broken atm).