I received my Steam Deck two weeks ago after a wait of roughly half a year. Thus, I wanted to write a blog entry to jot down my first impressions of the device. If you don’t know anything about it yet: the Steam Deck is a PC running a fork of Arch Linux with a read-only file system in the form factor of a handheld console. It’s tightly integrated with the Steam platform and offers a gaming mode in which you can seamlessly buy, install, manage and play games from your library. Furthermore, the Deck offers to possibility to enter desktop mode which boots up a regular KDE Plasma desktop which you can then use as you would a regular PC. Since the file system is read-only, package management works via Flatpaks. You can circumvent this but have to do so at your own peril. ...

A while ago I bought an eBook reader. I figured it’s a smart investment because the shelves at my place are almost full. Also, this would let me carry my whole library with me at all times so I have to carry less. Buying new books should also be easier because I don’t have to order them and wait but can just download them instantly. What’s not to like? Sure, there’s something to be said for holding an actual paperback in your hands but I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, at least for me. ...

I recently decided to get a new phone. The old one (a ShiftPhone 6m) wasn’t that old yet, I only bought it 2.5 years ago but it was already running on Android 8.1 which is no longer supported. I could have waited for the manufacturer to maybe provide more support in the future but it seemed doubtful to me this would actually happen. As I understand it, the biggest roadblock for this was the CPU, a Mediathek one, for which the manufacturer apparently doesn’t provide support or something of the sort. From what I hear Snapdragon processors don’t have this issue but what can you do? ...

I’ve changed jobs recently so I no longer had access to my trusty ThinkPad T490 running Ubuntu anymore. Instead, I was provided with a brand new MacBook Air. I’ve got to admit, I’ve always liked the look and feel of these machine (from the outside that is) but I’ve never used one myself, barring messing around with it in the local electronics shop. With that said, I had some concerns with being able to work with this thing efficiently because I was so used to my Linux setup. So in preparation I spent hours and hours with watching YouTube tutorials and reading up on how to use the systems. I set up custom folders and shortcuts in finder, I installed homebrew because I couldn’t stomach the idea of not having a decent package manager. I used this to install various things like alacritty, zsh and a few other terminal tools. ...

One fine day in May I switched on my desktop PC only to discover that my keyboard would not process any key presses. The LED signaling that the num block is active did not light up (which it usually does) and I figured that the time had finally come to lay this fine keyboard to rest. Well, it wasn’t all that fine, in fact it was very cheap and came in an all-inclusive desktop PC package from Aldi in 2009. I think almost 13 years is a decent track record for such a thing. ...