Can it work with Linux? That's all I care about.
So with proprietary blobs that give you more trouble that they're worth?
Are you refusing to use the Nvidia binary drivers and/or a setup like DKMS that ensures kernel modules are rebuilt as necessary? While I respect the principle, it's a problem you're creating for yourself.
> upgrade my Kernel whenever I want to without getting a black screen with a blinking cursor on the next boot.
Really? I had very much the opposite experience.
But once we're talking about laptops, hybrid graphics etc. it quickly shows that this is not a platform Nvidia cares about.
Just anecdotal, but I never had these issues with the desktop AMD APU I had before it or Intel on board graphics on numerous laptops.
But I would say that as an Ubuntu and Debian user for decades I have no incentive to use anything else on it and I'm just pleased to have a Linux on Aarch64 machine that is well supported for a change.
tbh, I was rather unimpressed with the out-of-box experience for an "ai" computer, you couldn't even run a model locally with the common tools people use (no llama-cpp, ollama, vllm, etc). No huggingface CLI eiher, like come on!
I did put together my eventual setup in a repo https://github.com/verdverm/sparky
I need to update that because I have a nice vllm setup on there now with 4 models running, but should be able to get anyone else going without having to muddle about as I did.
No one seriously cares about this running Windows. We want Steam and CUDA/Ollama, and Windows just gets in the way. nVidia are simply not that oblivious, but I have to admit in their position I'd have considered the Microsoft involvement more trouble than it's worth, which is among the many reasons I'm not a billionaire.
Maybe they think the RAM market is so terrible it will kill the whole initiative regardless.
Has Steam finally started to push for native Linux games instead of translating Windows ones?
The failure of business, only reinforces Windows as the platform most studios reach for.
Buy Windows, buy Visual Studio, pay game engines licenses, let Valve do the work.
This ignoring that current Valve's management doesn't live forever, so who knows what happens afterwards.
Windows' monopoly on game dev isn't just market share either, since game dev isn't just code. You still need Photoshop, Maya, etc. and in smaller studies there's typically a crossover where some devs are doing art as well. Visual Studio's C++ debugger is still one of the best, and the tooling elsewhere hasn't caught up yet (compared to DX + PIX).
Then you also have to solve distribution and handling the fragmented display & audio stack. It's gotten a lot better, but its still a factor.
I'm fine with most of the work going into Wine/Proton. A stable ABI for Linux is a boon, if it happens to be Win32 then so be it.
Valve isn't going to be around forever porting Windows games into Proton, which is actually hardly any different if they would start selling Nintendo games with Dolphin, if we ignore the legal implications for a moment.
Microsoft have spent the whole Nadella era in "oooo cloud" inspired wonder and actively screwed up everything else.
Note how game developers rather spend their working hours in Windows with all its issues, even if they happen to have Linux servers for running their MMOs.
My Steam library is full of old win32 games that run better on Linux than they do on Windows 11. There are some native games appearing because of the Steam Deck, but the fact is they aren't necessary.
Valve aren't simply better at running a platform business, they've thoroughly subverted Microsoft's old one and have done a better job at running that than Microsoft themselves.
Look at the absolute state of the XBox business: all native games, tens of billions spent on something, and yet it's just a trainwreck from top to bottom.
Tens of thousands of Windows games would remain playable with ubiquitous Vulkan-capable hardware and a 500mb Proton runtime?
In truth if AMD or nVidia put their mind to having decent profiling tooling on Linux, and the AI wave suggests they will have no option, then this could readily become a thing.
You’d think in an era where “code is free” there would be an easier story around running local ai than compiling llama.cpp by hand and then spending hours researching flags - only for it to crash from an oom error every ten prompts or so.