I’m from the US as well, and I can verify that very few average people use those types of messengers primarily. It is almost exclusively iMessage and SMS/MMS/RCS texts as the main form of messaging. I will admit that quite a few people will use the messaging features that are built into social media apps (like messaging in Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, etc). At least to me, it seems like those are moreso used for sending memes or messaging people you don’t interact with regularly and are still secondary to the other forms of messaging.

I had an issue where a client reported a crash on login. The exception and stack trace reported were very generic and lent no clues to the cause. I tried debugging but could not reproduce. I eventually figured out that the crash only happened for release (non-debug) builds that were obfuscated. I couldn’t find the troublesome code, so I figured out which release introduced the issue, then which commit, then went change by change until I was able to find the cause. It turned out to be a log message in a location that was completely unrelated to login. That exact log message was fine a few lines up. Other code worked fine in that location. For some unknown reason, having that log message in that specific location caused a crash in a completely different area of code.

I would say it’s a bit more nuanced than that. I have installed quite a few games on my Deck that have had serious issues that require their own unique fixes in order to work. I had a few games that had shader issues with flashing neon textures that required specific Proton versions to work, a few games that could never get past the main menu due to infinite loading that required reinstalls and using specific Proton versions, and one that required adding some additional commands on the startup in order to avoid crashes. I’ve also run into a few games where the Deck has quirks, such as one I played where the keyboard would cover the game’s text input and the keyboard would appear immediately after closing, which meant you could hardly read what you were entering text for. They do work eventually, so you are technically correct, but they require effort to fix that some people will not feel comfortable doing.

When I first got my Deck, I was playing a lot on it. I then kinda transitioned back into PC gaming for a while and that continued into the beginning of 2023. However, I started gaming a lot more on the Deck in the past few months. I’ve mostly been working through some of the indie or older games that are in my backlog. Right now, I only really play on PC when I am playing my primary multiplayer games that don’t run (or run poorly) on the Deck.