No Arch nor KDE plasma have nothing to do with it specifically. It's that there is now a 'default' UI/UX that general consensus can be built around. That's what important. Valve could have chosen debian+gnome for SteamOS I would have felt the same way. Ubuntu tried to be noob friendly, but it's been offered with several different DEs. And Linux Mint which is meant to be the most like Windows, has existed for years with the cinnamon DE that is different from what Ubunutu would ship with and/or recommend over the years. Windows doesn't have the best UX/UI, but people freaked out when Windows 8 removed the start menu because it was different, not that it was necessarily worse. You need UI/UX consensus for a desktop OS to grow in the mainstream. Hell Windows still has the legacy control panel with redundant settings because it's difficult to not only redesign but to replicate the UI/UX w/ the new settings panel even though the new settings menu debuted in Windows 8 almost 10 years ago!

Lol what a reply! "You're wrong, you don't understand anything I'm done debating you." How convincing.

I mean DIY in a way that building and setting up your own Windows PC is DIY. Linux is far from that right now but if you are truly able to hide the CLI in 99% of cases that won't be the case that's my point.

And the distro doesn't matter, it's that Valve chose a specific distro and DE to go with. They could have build SteamOS on Debian and gnome and I would have been just as excited and thought SteamOS had just as much promise. The point is when someone goes to google how to do something or troubleshoot or w/e, they are given clear instructions how to do it through the UI, not through the CLI. There needs to be consensus with the UI/UX, does't matter what that consensus is, just that there's consensus.

It doesn't matter which distro or DE Valve chose, just that a distro and DE were chosen period. I said better or for worse for a reason. Having a consistent design language and UX is what is needed for the Linux Desktop. Normal people don't want to mess around with the CLI and any FAQ/guide isn't going to show you how to do something in every popular DE available. People lost their minds when Windows removed the start menu from Windows 8. Didn't matter if it was better or worse, it was different.

No it never was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0506yDSgU7M

That's what linux needs to overcome.

But that's the point of my post. The reason linux can get so complicated is because there is no 'default' distro or DE to build a consistent knowledge base around. In linux even if the distro under the hood is the same, the DEs aka the GUIs vary even among the same distro. There is Matte, Gnome, Cinnamon, KDE etc. are all popular so there is no way to know for sure that GUI has x settings panel, or the settings are in different places etc. But now focus is on Arch and KDE Plasma specifically. If a setting isn't available in the GUI, now someone can build it in themselves and they know it will just work on Arch and KDE Plasma, w/o having to worry about Ubuntu or Mint or Manjaro or any of the DEs I already listed. And that target audience will be PC gamers who are the pro-sumers that are savey enough for some DIY, but not to the extent that they want live or rely on the CLI, they will demand more elegant solutions. And this is the very crowd you need to win over cause they're the people that are going to tell their friends to build install SteamOS not Windows etc. They aren't the biggest market but it's the biggest pro-sumer demo in the PC space by far, and they act as the gatekeepers to wider acceptance among general audiences.

I think you'll see going forward that Steam Deck support will be a day 1 priority for most, if not all new PC releases. Even it's just to avoid the bad PR.

Honestly the thing that has me most excited about Steam Deck isn't the hardware, but SteamOS itself. Valve, for better or for worse, have crowned Arch Linux and KDE Plasma as their distribution and desktop environment of choice respectively. Just as the Deck's success has resulted in a soft hardware floor for PC games, their software choices have created an unofficial 'default' distro+DE for the Linux desktop, which IMO has been one of the biggest limiting factors for its growth and adoption over the years. The value of having mainstream consensus around an OS and design language cannot be understated and it's what the Linux Desktop has needed to get away from its CLI crutches. This is the first time I've realistically been able to see a potential replacement for Windows in the desktop space and not just for gamers. I hope I'm not wrong.

> and we were all like "Bro...iPod nano.

Lol I would have been like "Bro....that Nano won't even fit 1/5 of my library" on there. You're also forgetting video. Remember iPods played movies and tv shows sold through the iTunes store. Those took up lots of space and were very popular. And in 2008, the iPod Touch was the new hotness for iPods, not the iPod Nano. You're off by about 3 years. 2005/6 is when the Nano had it's moment in the sun. Also the Classic wasn't discontinued until 2014.

> I remember people having iPhones and iPods. The issue was because of the first iPhone's super garbage battery life. If you listened to music on your iPhone all day, it'd be dead before you got home. Having a dedicated device to listen to music for hours at a time is way more functional than having a dedicated device to check Twitter once in a while, especially when the Twitter app did the exact same thing the dedicated device would do.

This isn't the reason people hung on to dedicated devices. The iPod Classic had a 160GB HDD at the time vs the 8GB of flash storage on the iPhone. It was litteraly 20x the space. Streaming wasn't a thing yet, people were still syncing their music with their computers and they had built up dozens of GBs worth of music & videos.