Is that a practical question looking for a real solution right now or is more of a philosophical question?

If the latter:

Tech should be approachable by teaching users and add safeguards, not by dumbing things down to a degree users stay dumb. Options should be easy to find, preview what they do, and always offer to restore defaults. A desktop for extreme beginners may even adopt an idea from gaming and have them do a tutorial section first. It may even double as a wizard of which accessibility features to enable for elderly users.

MOST people use smartphones before they use PCs and none of them have drive letters. All use a unix-style structure internally and just hide this fact through abstraction layers. Not one chose to show drive letters.

I love my Steam Deck but it is unwieldy when used as a tablet. Also, software support is spotty for a tablet-like experience.

Didn’t happen with MP3.

Someone re-parented a variation to prevent it being public domain until 2040.

So the variation cannot be used. That’s irrelevant for a file format. Some company could, for example, patent a more efficient encoding technique but the resulting file format is still public domain. So at worst an open source encoder would need to be slightly inefficient because it uses the traditional technique.

Someone will most likely patent hack it in order to reclaim it, then try to patent troll about it… Because corporate people are jerks.

How? If the tech is older than 25 years, it’s prior art no matter what. MP3 is fully free for the same reasons.

Nothing screams “Workstation” louder than Reddit Mobile.

https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube

Even a potato can run Linux so regardless of a distro it should be all fine.

A potato with a GPU only compatible with deprecated Nvidia drivers would still be just that and a hard pass for Linux.

Luckily this notebook is AMD-based, so should be fine. Maybe the WiFi card could cause trouble.

there’s more to an operating system that a program needs other than the kernel(?)

Yes, and the other parts have other names, like the toolkit GTK or the C standard library glibc and all those things make up a Linux distribution, like Fedora.

android just uses the kernel

Yes and the kernel’s name is “Linux”. No other software is named “Linux”. Ask Linus Torvalds if you don’t believe me.

not doubtful, a lot of compositors, kwin included can run nested.

It’s not a question if some of Plasma Mobile could run in that VM. It’s a question if anything usable is possible. I highly doubt Google will make it possible to call phone numbers etc. in that VM.

With diffs sometimes around 5m lines of code (in case of qcom)

Nobody’s denying that. Many embedded distributions targeted special hardware are like that.

Phones don’t really have that

But Android tablets to.

Can it run x86_64 programs

The article sound like it will work for x86 devices running Android as well. I don’t think this is about emulation.

Plasma Mobile for Android? 🤔

Doubtful. A VM doesn’t have access to the underlying hardware (unless explicitly passed through).

I’ll just run Linux shit on…Linux

Android is a variant of Linux, just not GNU/Linux because of not using glibc.

Is gtk not backward compatible with older version?

New main versions of software usually is not compatible with old versions. That’s one of the points of new main versions. You cannot load Qt 3 themes into Qt 6 either.

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.