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Considering this is browser stats I doubt the steam deck has much to do with it, the steam deck is all about never opening anything other than steam.

AFAIK no, and we probably never will

They just might, open source financing is good PR. 100 is a fair bit more than i thought, thanks for the source.

Fedora is pretty much vanilla GNOME.

They have minimize and maximize buttons ootb iirc. And probably a bunch of other stuff I can’t cite off the top of my head. Arch is the one that has vanilla gnome.

And yes, pretty much all users install third party apps.

I think you have a biased view of an average user. Anyways we’re getting off topic. The original argument being that tray icons are not relevant for most users. You have yet to cite a good example where the tray icon is necessary for the app to properly function.

Okay but the comparison was about GNOME vs KDE, not "GNOME modified with 5 extensions and tweaks

Yeah each distribution has their own patch set. If you really want to compare you need to start with the most popular, ubuntu and fedora.

Also, most users will want to install third party applications. Your average gamer will likely install Discord and Steam, both of them use a tray icon.

The two examples you gave are definitely not most users. I’d be surprised if it were even 20%. And the tray icon isn’t necessary for either of them to work correctly. Most people use the computer to open the browser.

I think you’re discounting just how much they’ve invested and continue to invest in Proton/WINE

I’m not really sure I am… Do we have some actual numbers into how much money they’ve sunk in linux?
Gaming on linux is a huge community effort, whether it’s wine, dxvk, vkd3d, mesa, linux itself… and plenty of smaller projects like lutris, bottles, UMU… And all this spans literal decades, far before valve ever got involved.

Beginners using vanilla GNOME

Beginners will never really be in a position where they’ll be using vanilla gnome, so that argument is kinda moot. And even if they did, those features are literally one extension away…

will quickly miss features like a minimize button and certainly tray icons.

Tray icons don’t exist in gnome’s ecosystem, it only becomes problematic once you get third party applications. The real problems are the minimize/maximize, desktop icons, and panel on top when coming from windows. Although these days with the ever increasing phone use people might just be more at ease with gnome’s workflow anyways.

It annoys me too that Valve is getting most of the credit for Proton while most of the work is actually done in winehq, dxvk… I’m sure Valve pays for some development here and there, and greases some developer wheels, but the main thing they do is being a front end for consumers.

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Yes.

My point being that while valve itself has only 350 employees, it subcontracts far more than that.

These stats don’t include subcontractors and as such they’re very misleading. For example, who do you think produces the GPUs inside the steam deck? Hint: it’s not Valve.

The whole thing never made much sense anyways, machines would be without scrupules and cut off any redundancies like extra limbs, they’d probably just keep your brain in a jar.

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If you’re addicted to a game, your phone battery is the least of your problems.

Well yeah, but the problem is typically the people who you don’t want you calling you in the middle of night are also the ones willing to call you a few times till you pick up.

Linux only just hit 2% market share

That’s steam players, linux on desktop is estimated at 4%, and 6% if you count chromeos.

Most phones these days allow you to set a DND schedule which you can customize to allow specific numbers for emergencies and people that don’t abuse it.

It’s not that you can’t do it, but rather that it’s very much a windows concept, applications on linux don’t need to hog your attention and dig through your data by starting with the OS. On linux you start an application when you need it. Setting up startup applications is usually a bit hard to find simply because it’s not a feature that people care much for so you typically have to dig a bit to do it.

There’s the new UMU launcher that allows running proton outside of steam. Winehq also works fine by itself, at the end of the day proton is just a fork of wine with a few patches and relies on plenty of shared components like dxvk and vkd3d.

Blizzard games have always had good linux compatibility. Might change now that they’ve bought by microsoft though.
As for ubisoft games they probably run too, launchers are a pita but they do run, you’ll need something like lutris, bottles or heroic launcher to get you started running shit outside of steam, they’re not necessary but they make things simpler.