MudMan

Everybody in a PC community is going to go to “build your own” by default, but it really isn’t the only option.

It is true you won’t match the price-to-performance on the Deck, but if you’re willing to go a bit higher you can try a few things. For one, you can try to buy used. I would like to see a PC in person before I do that, but there may be options, depending on where you live. The good news is that upgrading from a Steam Deck anything with a dedicated GPU should be a nice boost in performance, so you can go for entry level or older desktop parts. If you don’t mind a bit of bulk or have a convenient place to stash it you can also skip the whole mini-PC space, which is typically sold at a premium, and just buy a big old tower.

And then there’s laptops. Used laptops devaluate a lot, which means you can find decent entry-level laptops with 30 series GPUs that will still outperform the Deck by a lot for a few hunderd bucks. Again, I’d like to look at one of those before I buy, but if you don’t care about the screen quality or the cosmetics there are some affordable used options out there. Just… check the noise when gaming, because some of those sound like a hair dryer on high power mode.

As others have said, it depends on your budget and specific use case, but if you’re using a handheld as a console attached to a screen you should be able to cobble something more functional together. Just maybe not as hassle-free or reliable.

Well, camel case does help readability on file names. But I guess that’s the point of case insensitive names, it doesn’t matter. However you want to call them will work.

I mean, it’s less of an issue on Linux for both design and user profile reasons, but imagine a world where somebody can send all the normie Windows users a file called Chromesetup.exe to sit alongside ChromeSetup.exe. Your grandma would never stop calling you to ask why her computer stopped working, ever.

He shipped enough clunkers (and terrible design decisions) that I never bought the mythification of Jobs.

In any case, the Deck is a different beast. For one, it’s the second attempt. Remember Steam Machines? But also, it’s very much an iteration on pre-existing products where its biggest asset is pushing having an endless budget and first party control of the platform to use scale for a pricing advantage.

It does prove that the system itself is not the problem, in case we hadn’t picked up on that with Android and ChromeOS. The issue is having a do-everything free system where some of the do-everything requires you to intervene. That’s not how most people use Windows (or Android, or ChromeOS), and it’s definitely not how you use any part of SteamOS unless you want to tinker past the official support, either. That’s the big lesson, I think. Valve isn’t even trying to push Linux, beyond their Microsoft blood feud. As with Google, it’s just a convenient stepping stone in their product design.

What the mainline Linux developer community can learn from it, IMO, is that for onboarding coupling the software and hardware very closely is important and Linux should find a way to do that on more product categories, even if it is by partnering with manufacturers that won’t do it themselves.

Yeah, right? Are we pretending that having case sensitive file names isn’t a bad call, or…? There are literally no upsides to it. Is that the joke?

You got it. The moment you surface the idea that there are multiple distros or DEs you’ve missed the goal the thread is suggesting. Presintalled, customized software built for the hardware is the way to ease people in with zero tweaking, which is crucial for newcomers.

Hah, I handed one to a kid just this week, too, and they loved their time on it. I’m just assuming a lot of people aren’t actively playing theirs.

I’ll add the homebrew community to what I said above regarding the emulation community, too.

I would have loved a stereo Switch, for sure.

And I hear you on the impact on 2D games. Man, the 3D remasters of Sega classics on the 3DS are amazing and it sucks that they will remain trapped in there indefinitely.

And yeah, emulation. You can get stereo output out of it right now, but it’s just such a hassle even if you have the hardware. You can do it, but the 3DS was so seamless that it just isn’t the same thing. Pulling that thing out of mothballs if you haven’t played it in a while is immediately magical. It still looks sci-fi because it just works. Having some convoluted emulation-to-VR setup or whatever is fundamentally different.

Well, the fact that not everybody has good stereoscopic sight should mean that, on accessibility alone. But I’ve also never bought into that particular criticism.

I mean, I also don’t have a useful game mechanic for super detailed graphics and you don’t see me complaining about games looking good. I thought playing through little dioramas looked great and was super fun, and that was all I needed. When the DS had its phase of shoehorning touch controls on everything I found that extremely obnoxious. Not every gimmick needs to be at the core of every game.

The original implementation without eye tracking gave it an (undeserved) reputation for that, but I don’t think the current version of it is givin people headaches at all. Having played a 3DS with 3D on full just this week, I also don’t find the resolution was the dealbreaker. Obviously the Switch is way ahead of its performance, but coming from the DS they delivered a big bump in 3D performance along with the stereoscopic display.

What I think they had is terrible timing. The 3DS had a rocky launch and then had to make that back during the peak of “stereo 3D sucks” cyclical backlash coming from rushed movie conversions sold at a premium and TVs doing it poorly in the living room. Weirdly a lot of that was coming from the same people that keep hoping that VR would be the next big thing. At the same time. The cognitive dissonance was harsh there for a bit.

Still, it was a thing, and everybody lumpled the 3DS along with it. “Turn the slider down and never think about it again” was a meme, which sucks, because plenty of 3DS games look great in stereo.

I mean, there are seventy million of them out there, so collectors will be fine for a while, but… man, we really missed a step not embracing the crazy cool 3D display tech in these. I really loved it.

Also, point people at this thread next time Nintendo comes after the emulation scene, because… yeah, this is why.

Oh, ok, so is the joke that ICE T, like me, got Poe’s lawed into boosting this or that he boosted this funny comedian guy? I am too detached from whatever is cooking in whatever is left of Twitter.

We are burying the lede here.

He has John Wayne statues? Multiple?

I don’t know who this is, but that’s like half a step from having an anime pillow. I mean, enjoy your kink, but that sounds really judgemental for someone with such… specific proclivities.

See, this is a tough one. Privacy concerns are legitimate, but also, when people keep reminding that Meta was a key player in acts of terror and genocide what is often not said is that a lot of it happened over Whatsapp groups and direct messages, as in India and Burkina Faso. Direct messaging apps are also social media.

I don’t have a solution for this. It’s a mess of an issue and honestly, I don’t know that I trust anybody with a strong, aggressive position one way or the other.

This was how all glass bottles used to work during most of the 20th century.

I mean, good for them, but returnable packaging isn’t that crazy of an idea. It’s not surprising that someone came up with “hey give us back the thing instead of trashing it and we’ll use it again” before the year we figured out talking computers.

Oh, that works for me, definitely. It just takes maybe two hours, instead of 20 minutes. Same principle, though.

How do you get motivated in the afternoon? I have maybe three, four hours of semi-effective brain function between waking up and what seems to be some form of power saving mode that lasts the rest of the day. If I’ve eaten food with a fork that day, doing things is a struggle. Send motivation tips for post-lunch humaning, please.

Absolutely, and if you can’t take the plunge on either do whatever feels right.

But I’ll say if you’re anxious about it at all, shaving is a good way to not have to think about it. Not everybody has an easy time just getting over the way they look and not giving a crap, obviously.

Plus if you’re worried about your hairline, going to get a haircut can be a stressful time and shaving means getting it out of the way. And it’s super cheap and fast by comparison.

Well, then you don’t need a phone review, do you?

Which is fine. Most people don’t need a phone at any given time. You go check reviews for phones when you need one and when you care about the differences between them. If you just need a phone-ass phone you can just go to your carrier and grab whatever is packed-in, no need to check reviews for that, most phones just fine work out of the box these days.

Okay, I’m here to help.

Shave.

Seriously. The amount of pressure put on guys around balding is horrendous, and it can consume your attention if you let it. The moment that superfluous, vestigial hair comes off, it’s such a breath of fresh air (no pun intended). No more fussing, worrying or stressing about it. Plus, in many cases it looks pretty good. Give it a couple of weeks and it’ll just become your face.

Give it a couple of months and the moment there’s a scratchy, annoying milimeter of hair on your head will be a natural call to give it a shave for the comfort alone.