I've been on alpha since alpha 7. It's great! There have been consistent updates throughout, and any of the minor issues I experienced early in the release have already been fixed.
I switched to Niagara a few years ago when Nova was sold. True game changer once you get used to it (which doesn't take too long). It works great on phone or tablet. And there is still something SO satisfying about watching the alphabet and apps move with your thumb. It's so smooth and the haptic feedback is perfect (running on Pixel 7, GrapheneOS, and a cheap old Samsung tablet A8).
Random video showing the UI within the first minute:
I have been using the Alpha for almost 6 months. Overall it has been a very positive experience. Even in Alpha, it worked better out of the box on my laptop than Fedora and Bazzite. Especially the printer support and multi-monitor support.
This is amazing, thank you for putting it together. I recommend that you remove all the ones that don't have a citation (or add citations if possible). There are so many(!) and most of them have cites. The cited ones alone are already plenty impactful. I think having uncited allegations detracts from the legitimacy, especially when the very first one is an uncited quote.
I am very familiar/comfortable with Windows and very confused by MacOS. Yet I much prefer Gnome over Plasma.
Not to say you are wrong or anything, maybe I'm just an outlier.
That said, I've been using Cosmic DE for about the past month and it's pretty great. I think I might stick with it. Gotta love all the options we have!
Thanks for these, especially the "we're not going anywhere" link. I was hesitant to switch because I was worried about future support on my Pixel 7. Here's the full quote for anyone that didn't check the above link:
Many companies and individuals are trying to mislead people about the future of GrapheneOS to promote their insecure products and services. GrapheneOS is not going anywhere. We've made it clear we're shipping Android 16 soon and that the supported devices will remain supported.
I've been exclusively gaming on my Steam Deck since launch and have a slightly different experience. For me, if the game is certified "Playable" or "Verified" on the Steam page, I just download and play it. I have never once tweaked any settings or tried a different version of Proton. I'm sure there are tweaks that can achieve better performance on certain games, but I have never personally felt the need to research that on any game.
For reference, below are my recently played games. All but Trials worked great for me. Trials is marked "Unplayable" on Steam, though I did get it to work for a few hours before it broke.
I have used FF based browsers for a long time and still do. I recently saw this from the GrapheneOS developers, which kinda freaks me out and has me considering switching to a Chromium based browser:
Chromium-based browsers like Vanadium provide the strongest sandbox implementation, leagues ahead of the alternatives. It is much harder to escape from the sandbox and it provides much more than acting as a barrier to compromising the rest of the OS. Site isolation enforces security boundaries around each site using the sandbox by placing each site into an isolated sandbox... Browsers without site isolation are very vulnerable to attacks like Spectre...
Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
EDIT: I really hope Ladybird turns out to be amazing.
I was considering a switch but due to recent policy changes at Google, I'm now concerned about long-term (or even short-term) support for GrapheneOS and other custom ROMs:
I have a launch LCD Steam Deck and yesterday was planning to upgrade to the OLED version. Unfortunately:
Steam Deck OLED 512GB and 1TB models are temporarily out-of-stock in the US and Canada as we adapt to recent supply chain constraints. We anticipate being back in stock by end of summer, and currently expect prices will remain the same. We'll update here as soon as we have more clarity on what the timeline ultimately looks like.
I don't know, sorry. I use Pop on my laptop for general computer use and I only game on a Steam Deck.