I tried Alpha 1 and it was completely unusable

You mean like an alpha version?

There’s more hardware in a notebook than just the CPU. It’s pointless without network and GPU drivers, for example. Also the ARM DeviceTree stuff is BS.

Internet surfing

Forget web browsing with 4GB RAM. You can completely disregard the comments recommending a “lite DE” when merely opening a modern web site will put the whole PC into crawling. The 150 MB more or less for different desktops are completely irrelevant then.

The best “newbie friendly” distribution is just plain Fedora Workstation but with only 4GB RAM it will be a pain to use no matter what.

Edit: If you’re a KDE user yourself, you’re best equipped to answer KDE-related questions.

Any way to break down that “Other” and see what it contains?

No, not without lobbying Valve.

there might be some more Ubuntu versions hiding in there.

Certainly because non-LTS versions are not in the main table as well but neither are Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, NixOS, etc.

I looked at the August 2024 results and SteamOS was not mentioned anywhere in the OS version section.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=linux

Probably because everybody with a Steam Desk shows up as Arch in the survey.

Had you looked up the current stats, you would have known that this is completely false. SteamOS is in massive lead and I used the phrase “general purpose distribution” for a reason.

Latest non-LTS Ubuntu could be high up the Steam Survey list but isn’t. The strongest general purpose distribution is Arch Linux.

Interesting how the numbers between “computer pros” and hobbyists (Steam Survey) diverge. Unsurprisingly for Steam gamers the Windows numbers are way higher but for Linux specifically Ubuntu is crashing hard since a few years from absolute domination to all Ubuntu versions + derivatives (Mint + pop_OS) combined barely making up 20% of the Linux user base whereas at Stack Overflow there’s a clear lead of Ubuntu over the rest.

Edit:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=linux

Have Facebook not heard of the Internet? Anyone can right click save as.

They have, old politicians haven’t

Except it’s not deferderated by everyone.

My favorite (not): The instances who find it more crucial to defederate from Threads than pedo and neonazi instances…

Regular Mint (not LMDE) adds to the Ubuntu market share. Also remixing a 3rd party distribution by adding custom repositories on top can cause incompatibilities. That is the reason why regular Mint uses only Ubuntu LTS as base.

• KDE Plasma has currently better upstream development (a side effect of Steam Deck) but the integration of KDE into Fedora is done by volunteers.
• Gnome is integrated into Fedora by Red Hat employees but upstream development lags a bit behind in adopting some newer technologies Red Hat isn’t that interested for RHEL.

I used Fedora in the past and found the KDE Spin a little less polished. I don’t know the current situation but there was a time Fedora KDE shipped out of the box with three web browsers because the volunteers couldn’t agree on one, whereas the RH employees just decided that they want Firefox and not Gnome Web for RHEL, so in Fedora they just did the same. Updates were rolled out in a timely manner (and I heard nothing that indicated anything changed in that regard), so the volunteer squad didn’t do a worse job there than the paid Gnome people.

Edit: It’s actually opt-in.

… in certain areas:

Yeah, because your instance and almost all instances have decided to straight-up defederate

No, it didn’t defederate from Threads.

cuz Meta will access the federated info

Meta will access Threads accounts via federation? Um, sure… I mean it’s on their platform already…

I just edited my comment to add a link to the guide for opting in.

“Be outside Europe” is hardly a guide to opt in. 🙄 I’m in Europe and my Threads profile just isn’t available on ActivityPub. Period.

If Brazilian fediverse is anything like English fediverse, its community was probably tied up in discussions who to deferderate from next and vegan cat food instead of promoting Mastodon.

Threads uses opt-out ActivityPub.

That’s not true. I can neither opt my test account in nor out of ActivityPub. It’s simply not available to Mastodon.

You’re clearly someone who never contributed to open source.

Do regular Mastodon instances and clients play nicely with Threads?

You can’t connect to Threads using a Mastodon client but you can follow select Threads accounts from the Mastodon instance your client is connected to. Threads is still in what is basically a public beta. That’s why there are currently no ads there either (but they were announced recently).

Yeah, as if the authors had no idea what terms the license has…