Mentioned in the article, I use LACT. It’s good

Every laptop I’ve bought has come with Windows including gaming ones. Up to really powerful computers. Like having a 4080 in it or down to just integrated. I could be doing nothing and you’ll hear the fan spin up hard on Windows.

On hardware with just integrated graphics, Windows just sucks compared to Linux. Fan spins up but you’ll still get animation hitches as Windows background services are doing something. Switch to Linux and resource usage just matches up really well with what you know you’ve installed and set to run. Just whatever is popular: Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, Pop_OS, etc compared to consumer Windows editions.

Plus it’s nice installing an OS and not having to go through pages of telemetry opt-outs, encouragement to buy O365, OneDrive, Copilot+, Gamepass, create online MS account, etc. Windows went from a relatively neutral marketplace, besides the bundled software, to a platform for marketing MS and other companies subscription services

Neutral base of fairly standardized open source Linux operating systems is going to show itself overtime as preferable as these controlled platforms get monetized harder. Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android are all in varying stages of being subscription and marketing data farms

Definitely. I got Oblivion in April of 2006 about a month after the game came out. Xbox 360 had just come out months prior in November 2005. Morrowind was not a mainstream hit. Oblivion also not being a mainstream game yet. Mainstream for the series was Skyrim with the arrow in the knee and fus roh dah viral stuff

Steam started supported 3rd party games in I believe 2005. Peak concurrent users on Steam was probably in the low hundreds of thousands compared to today’s ~40 million. PS3 would launch end of 2006 and Oblivion wouldn’t show up on it until some time after launch

I don’t know if it’s the same law but they’ve already said they’d move countries, anywhere with laws suitable for the service

The controls I thought were really easy but I played on PC so I could swing the mouse around and I don’t need to looks at the keyboard to hit almost any key. So for me I thought it was real easy to control contrary to what I read online

Then I played on a console and then I understood the hate for Witcher 3 controls. I remember it feeling very heavy. Weird to control the camera and Geralt

One thing about these handheld is that i feel like they’re price competitive with miniPCs and laptops with the same CPU/GPU

This and any other that will come with Linux out the box, guaranteed hardware drivers exist for everything so then it becomes about as appealing as a Steam Deck minus the price advantage Valve can do as a software store vendor. I already run a Legion Go with Bazzite.

What I’m waiting for now is a PC Handheld that weighs less than a Steam Deck that is solidly priced but is performance competitive with the Z1 extreme devices. At that point I would actually feel comfortable recommending them to people on the fence. The weight, price and minimum performance to be able to play at least Switch 2 level games. I think that’ll be the UDNA generation of AMD APUs

I would bet that for Zotac, they still want a support/integration contract and maybe Manjaro have setup to actually have a business plan now. SteamOS, maybe going to Valve for support is more expensive or they’re not staffed well enough to onboard Lenovo, maybe Asus and any of the actual big PC vendors

I had family with a Sega Nomad. I thought that thing was a unit and I was so jealous of it. Now everything’s significantly bigger than that. I remember how anything over 4.3" 16:9 phone display was too big to be portable. PC Handhelds go up to I think 10 inches now with GPD Win and the lightweight one soon being a Switch 2 is 7.9" 16:9 display

I’m pretty sure Steam has been able to do that since launch, though I do remember the legendary loading bar that would progress then regress then progress and regress all with the same text message there so it wasn’t perfect in 2003. Roller coaster early on but by like 2007 it was pretty solid

I’m pretty sure EA Origin was able to do that day one or within a year of release. Origin was OK from what I remember just that it took stayed stagnant and I’m guessing onboarding games to the platform being a terrible process considering how sparse releases were on there

Steam is a mature platform. It doesn’t roll out new user facing features often. Yet somehow I think the gap has widened since 2018 vs EGS

It’s been I think about 7 years and it’s not feature competitive for end users with 2011 Steam even though they definitely make more money than 2004-2011 Valve and by 2018 had 14 years of history to look at and feature target based off what competition offered

The CEO was regularly on Twitter complaining about Windows but refused to help grow Linux adoption. Valve has been doing that since like 2012. He constantly talks about standing with small developers but then in the Apple court case admits they would have been quiet if Apple gave them a special revenue split deal. He complains about Steam and mobile store cuts but doesn’t complain about consoles having the same.

Exclusive deals in lieu of providing a better experience for the end user. Talked up so much about being superior because they’re developer focused; didn’t have self publishing tools until the end of 2023 - 5 years after EGS launched. It’s been 7 years. They haven’t made PC gaming any better. They made it worse for a time when they were throwing cash at exclusives rather than store platform feature development

Recent example of how bad they are with pushing minimal viable products. EGS mobile store was launched the beginning of this year with no library view. You just scroll up and down, side to side looking for games you own mixed among games you don’t own. Their concept of minimal viable product is insanely mediocre for how vocal the CEO is and how much money they make and their turnaround time on improving these stores is awful.

There are numerous Android storefronts that don’t have Unreal Engine and Fortnite money keeping the companies funded and somehow Epic comes out the gate mediocre again where its marketing is free games but it’s mobile games so what’s available is way less headline worthy. They learned nothing from 2018 about the difference between what they consider a minimal viable product and what the market would consider a market competitive minimal viable product

Years ago Epic put out a kanban board to display a public feature development tracker to assure people they were working on improving the store. They abandoned that quick and I’m pretty sure what few they had on that, most still haven’t been implemented

Their support for handheld is at the level of GOG which barely markets itself and is pretty low revenue as it rarely gets any games that aren’t years old. Whether Windows or Linux, Epic for all their billions haven’t created a gamepad/TV centric interface. EGS is about at the level of GOG Galaxy which because of its DRM free policy will probably never be a big money maker. That’s just insane to me how badly managed EGS is to have so much more money backing it and so little to show for it in the product

The CEO is a regular blowhard virtue signalling about liberty/freedom on Twitter but can’t be bothered to try and pioneer anything for users as a storefront. Since 2018 EGS has been so stagnant while Valve has been expanding Steam as a platform, that EGS is less relevant to me today than when they were throwing out major free games every month. I have no faith in the platform to integrate WINE/Proton, put together a TV/gamepad interface, do something like Steam curators, comparable user review system, crowd sourced game tags - a lot of useless stuff makes it in those but I find them regularly useful at a glance as it’s usually pretty obvious which are probably jokes and which are probably legit, user gamepad mapping repository, I’ve used the guides before. Steam forums are not a place to browse, they’re a place to find when you Google a question and the answer is in a Steam forum thread Google/other shows you

I’d be happy with a suitable competitor. It’s just EGS has been terrible at it. I was sad that GameStop did nothing with Impulse. I had higher expectations for EA Origin. Ubisoft/UPlay was always garbage from day one AC2 always online DRM nonsense. I was hyped on GFWL before I learned they were charging for online multiplayer until that failed, also the install limits GFWL had where you had to call support when you reinstalled the game too many times. I was even excited for Windows 8 store until it was eating up peoples storage only reclaimable with a reformat of the drive

Only GOG exists with a unique selling point, DRM free. Every other competitor has existed just to try and have exclusives to make more money rather than try to attract users with a good service. In the end it turns out there’s so many solid to great games released every year that exclusives aren’t such a great point anymore. There’s not enough of them and exclusives not varied enough to make a storefront platform better than the total Steam package

I never get the mind blowness some people get about a hypothetical future Xbox branded handheld that could runs all these stores that can play PlayStation games. It’s a PC. You can play PlayStation games on Windows devices for years now. It’s not a gotcha big brain strategic masterpiece on Microsofts part. Pay Valve to play PlayStation games. Current Xbox gamers in the future pay Valve to play 3rd party games rather than Microsoft

It’s its fabled secret sauce. Every console has has a secret ingredient inside

Not buying it. GTAV was the least played for me in the series besides the first 2 games. I thought it’s story was a major downgrade compared to Vice City through GTAIV. I feel like GTAV was a pullback from any bit of endearing human spirit to leaning heavily into wacky self-aware sarcasm. Not that the series wasn’t that. Just that 5 to me was an edgy non-clever series parody. It’s not that different than Far Cry. Empty commentary. Just mocking everything. Felt more affection in the 3 series and 4

Regardless since GTAIV, we’ve had a gluttony of open world games. Even the battle royale games I think fill in a niche for social multiplayer that’s wacky and real world pop culture referential. GTAVI and it’s RP community support I think will be what sends it past or below GTAV success. High unit sales expectations but I’m more tepid than most. Maybe it’ll be even more effective at whale hunting

Microsoft may as well just cancel their whole Xbox hardware business. Xbox Series is a secondary market for Microsoft games after PlayStation and any console successor they release is going to limp to the starting line. At least the XSX had hype from the Bethesda acquisition and previous Obsidian/Inxile/etc acquisitions

Really we all need a Steam Deck 2 and a stronger Valve produced Strix Halo mini-PC

I think it’ll happen soon. Tariffs threw a wrench in everyone’s plan but Strix Halo currently exists. Ryzen 395+ is in minipc’s now and should give a solid ~PS5 level experience that should come down in price over time as AMD releases successor generations. At least now could be cheaper with Valve putting somethings out with razor thin margins expecting to get return from software sales

The more users on Jellyfin the better shot it has at getting more developer attention and users willing to contribute financially even if just occasional one off donation. How it goes with any open source application. More users, more developer interest, more feedback from users, subset of users willing to financially support the project

Even going back to the 90s video game magazines and their reviews were ragged on as marketing material for publishers but there was still some semblance of reverence over the years for the big magazines and websites (IGN and Gamespot. Maybe 1Up). After the Kane and Lynch Gamespot review fiasco, that to me was when gamer internet discourse over game journalism tanked to ever worsening hostility towards games reporters/journalist.

That Kane and Lynch review scandal tanked Gamespots reputation. That was probably also the era of making fun of the game awards guy as the Dorito/Mountain Dew Pope with that Spike TV video game award show

Says bought by parent company of thegamer and gamerant. I associate those with click/rage bait

It’s the cycle most gaming publications go through. I don’t think even IGN has much of any critical/cultural/marketing value anymore so good luck to any other website

Become games media big and then become more and more a game guide completionist blogspam website and milking a single interview into like 30 articles. Then terminate out as an AI generated articles Google SEO advertising revenue farm putting out articles like, “Has Persona 6 been Announced Yet?” that somehow instead of a yes/no is instead an article of 20 paragraphs saying nothing

You ever try Alpaca?

https://flathub.org/apps/com.jeffser.Alpaca

Open source alternative to LM Studio for simple chat with local LLMs

I loved Speedy Eggbert and played Oregon Trail. Also played Math Muncher.

Eventually started playing StarCraft, Warcraft, Red Alert, Quake, Doom, UT, Half Life. Then didn’t bother with educational stuff on my PC until I tried Blender and tutorials had you trying out generating models with Python