Three side remarks about China, which can be a peculiar example to compare to for Russia, maybe even any other country:

• They actually banned consoles for a quite significant 15 years (2000–2015), which strongly tilted their market towards PC.
• Their companies actively make PC-type gaming handhelds, and many of them are even well-established in the business ahead the current “Steam Deck” wave/bandwagon: GPD (once called GamePad Digital, first release in 2016), OneXPlayer (2020), Ayaneo (2021).
• Chinese gaming companies are quite at the whim of the censorship, and occasional “crackdowns” out of the blue, and many have therefore reoriented themselves for an international audience to de-risk their business.

Unless Valve can either find or pay a company that does a custom packaging of a Nvidia GPU with x86 (like the Intel Kaby Lake-G SoC with an in-package Radeon), very unlikely. The handheld size makes an “out of package” discrete GPU very difficult.

And making Nvidia themselves warm up to x86 is just unrealistic at this point. Even if e.g. Nintendo demanded, the entire gaming market — see AMD’s anemic recent 2024Q1 result from gaming vs. data center and AI — is unlikely to be compelling enough for Nvidia to be interested in x86 development, vs. continuing with their ARM-based Grace “superchip.”

Probably from the FAQ pane on the Kickstarter page:

What about Steamdeck support?
Will be 100% supported
Last updated: Tue, April 23 2024 10:55 AM PDT

Have people actually checked the versions there before making the suggestion?

F-Droid: Version 3.5.4 (13050408) suggested Added on Feb 23, 2023
Google Play: Updated on Aug 27, 2023

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.videolan.vlc/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.videolan.vlc

The problem seems to be squarely with VLC themselves.

See https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/u-mad, in particular the “Due to the agitating nature of the phrase, it is often considered a form of trolling.”

The “you mad bro” is found among internal Valve communication (Valve COO Scott Lynch to Erik Johnson and Newell, i.e. in the sense Johnson/Newell being “mad”, not Sweeney). It was particularly not sent out as a response to Sweeney. Another outlet already got tripped over this and had to make a correction: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/03/valve-coo-on-epics-tim-sweeney-you-mad-bro-when-launching-the-epic-store/

This is not quite as sensational as some people are framing it.

The was a GNOME FAQ that describes “guh-NOME” or IPA /ɡˈnəʊm/ as the official pronunciation, due to the emphasis of G as GNU. It does acknowledge that many pronounce it “NOME” or /nəʊm/: https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/astaff/project/aui/html/pronunciation.html

Undervolting provides the chip with additional power and thermal headroom, and can improved situations where otherwise throttling sets in.

Yes. But one should also note that only a limited range of Intel GPU support SR-IOV.

From https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/10/tony-hawks-pro-skater-1-2-adds-offline-support-for-steam-deck/ :

You may be able to get it to work on desktop Linux too in offline mode by using SteamDeck=1 %command% as a Steam launch option for the game, which likely won’t work for Windows since the Steam Deck is just a Linux machine.

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 runs decently on the Steam Deck, and has semi-(?)/de-facto-(?) official support (the developer purposefully switched to a Linux/Wine-compatible EAC earlier this year, and referenced the Steam Deck support in the corresponding patch note).

This summary (and sadly, also the GoL title) has somewhat buried the lede here: The firmware update that comes with 3.5.1 Preview adds undervolting controls — with the obvious implications of improving the battery life.

The release notes describe changes in multi-threading, and there appears also to be changes in the graphics stack.

Note that Lawrence Yang said in March “a true next-gen Deck with a significant bump in horsepower wouldn’t be for a few years.” (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-community-continues-to-blow-our-minds-valve-talk-the-steam-deck-one-year-on)

You know, there are several built-in functions in phones, that are already viable methods to communicate remotely?

There are unboxing videos out there showing that the carrying case is included: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcW-p5ZbSuc