There are a ton of PC gamers who think the only way to play a video game is 1440p 60-144fps and anything below that is unplayable. The reality is the steam deck is a 720p 30fps handheld device that can occasionally make it to 60fps if pushed far enough.

IMHO a device that can run a game like God of war Ragnarok at 30fps in handheld mode and still play fine when docked is succeeding on the performance front in several aspects. In comparison, the switch version of Wolfenstein the new Colossus had to remove entire sets of geometry to even hit 30fps where the deck can hit that easily with the same settings without removing geometry and using AMD FSR. I think the deck has at least 3 more years in it before we even start to see any needed upgrades at that performance. Only time will tell.

AI peaked a while ago IMO, the nail in the coffin for me was Microsoft making deals for nuclear power plants to power their data centers for ML and AI. It’s great they’re using nuclear power since it’s at least a clean source of energy, but it’s also extremely telling of the limitations and power requirements for these languages models. Without some kind of power reduction breakthrough, AI will continue to stall while these companies think of new ways to sell snake oil and gimmicks.

It’s irresponsible because making it sound like it’s true AI when it’s not is going to make it difficult to pull the plug when things go wrong and you’ll have the debate of whether it’s sentient or not and if it’s humane to kill it like a pet or a criminal. It’s more akin to using rainbow tables to help crack passwords and claiming your software is super powerful when in reality it’s nothing without the tables. (Very very rudimentary example that’s not supposed to be taken at face value).

It’s dangerous because talking about AI like it’s a reasoning/thinking thing is just not true, and we’re already seeing the big AI overlords try to justify how they created it with copyrighted material, which means the arguments over copyrighted material are being made and we’ll soon see those companies claim that it’s no different than a child looking up something on Google. It’s irresponsible because it screws over creative people and copyright holders that genuinely made a product or piece of art or book or something in their own free time and now it’s been ripped away to be used to create something else that will eventually push those copyright holders out.

The AI market is moving faster than the world is capable of keeping up with it, and that is a dangerous precedent to set for the future of this market. And for the record I don’t think we’re dealing with early generations of skynet or anything like that, we’re dealing with tools that have the capability to create economical collapse on a scale we’ve never seen, and if we don’t lay the ground rules now, then we will be in trouble.

Edit: A great example of this is https://v0.dev/chat it has the potential to put front end developers out of work and jobless. It’s simple now but give it time and it has the potential to create a frontend that rivals the best UX designs if the prompt is right.

OpenAI doesn’t want you to know that though, they want their work to show progress so they get more investor money. It’s pretty fucking disgusting and dangerous to call this tech any form of artificial intelligence. The homogeneous naming conventions to make this tech sound human is also dangerous and irresponsible.

Does it improve the bandwidth so higher quality codecs can be used without having to switch between good quality sound and shitty mics to shitty sound and good mics? I mean seriously, we’re in 2024 and we still can’t have quality parity with a wired headset when using Bluetooth because the bandwidth sucks so much ass that better codecs just can’t be used. Bluetooth can die in a fucking fire.

With the recent crowdstrike nonsense and Microsoft reviewing their kernel access policies, it may be a non-issue in the future, but we just have to see what happens. I do wish valve would start really pushing these companies with kernel anticheat solutions to support proton and steam deck. It’s like they pushed for the first 6 months of the steam deck’s life and then gave up. They are really on the cusp of something truly disruptive in the pc gaming space with the steam deck, getting those last few games like cod, fortnite and valorant would really push that momentum away from Windows. Maybe they simply don’t want to pick a fight with the 1000lbs gorilla that is Microsoft, only gaben knows.

Yep, every competing product, whether it’s the rog ally or legion go had to compromise on something and it’s usually battery life, which defeats the purpose of having a handheld. I can get close to 4 hours in some games, you can’t say the same for the competition putting 1080p VRR panels with high nit values and more powerful GPUs when the SoC itself hasn’t reduced in power consumption. I just don’t see any compelling reason why valve would make an incremental product like a steam deck pro.

So are they going to reassess the capability of kernel level drivers like crowdstrike and anticheat solutions like vanguard? Because of they keep this capability open then they’re just asking for another fuck up.

For those who want to escape this bullshit, Linux welcomed you with open arms and gives you control of your PC. Microsoft doesn’t respect you, ditch them and move to something that will.

I also would love to know why cachy

This right here, the whole tpm requirement was most likely pushed from OEM’s wanting to sell new hardware.

That’s never going to happen. I’m not sure on what stipulates a monopoly in this scenario, but the fact that there’s bing, duck duck go, kagi, and a handful of others means it’s not really a monopoly which tells me there is some specific ruling here that they’ve determined is monopolistic behavior.

Edit: yeah after reading the article, wtf Google…

I tried bazzite, unfortunately I had some odd quirks that I can only attribute to an immutable OS. Things like window and UI scaling wasn’t consistent. My mouse cursor would blow up to twice the size when hovering over one window then shrink back down on another. I can only guess this is because the base filesystem is only readable and it can’t write any values for scaling on certain themes/window decorations. While not a huge deal, it comes off as sloppy and inconsistent. It’s not a great user experience and first impressions are everything. It’s easy to make a first impression, it’s damn near impossible to make a second one, and my first impression of an immutable OS has been soured. I installed mint 22 and it’s been a completely different experience, from window decorations, to time shift backups, system updates, Bluetooth, cinnamon theming, it just works out of the box with little to no setup.

My main issue with mint has always been the reluctance to use a newer package base. Fortunately I think that’s changing since they’re adopting Wayland support and have their edge iso now. Currently running bazzite and it’s pretty rock solid with a couple quirks, but I’ve always thought about going back to mint when they start updating their package base.

A word of caution, I’ve done this over a dozen times today and I did have one server where the bootloader was wiped after I attached it to another EC2. Always make a snapshot before doing the work just in case.

It would if I were using Nvidia but I use AMD.

Latest mesa + plasma 6.1.1 = janky as well

Window dodging recently broke on me so I can’t dodge windows on any of the panels properly anymore, was working great on 6.1. Certain windows will cause the desktop to lock up and I can’t click on any windows or icons in the panel task manager. The global menu only works half the time now. I’m getting severe mouse cursor stuttering on a 120Hz display on the desktop, certain games running proton that were fine before have micro stutter. It’s been a pretty terrible experience on the AMD side recently.

Hal effect or GTFO

So what happened to Blackroom? I’d love to know what happened to that game and the fallout of them pulling the Kickstarter. He clearly moved on to sigil but man I really think he could make a cool new IP with gzdoom if he actually tried, instead of just living in the past with sigil.

I use an Anker USB hub with power delivery and it’s completely hot swappable, I would be incredibly surprised if the official dock wasn’t.