Well, I didn’t want to compare it to RTS or arpg games that work better with keyboard and mouse.

I’ll say Hollow Knight was much better played with a controller. My kid used his laptop keyboard and beat the game. More power to him, but that didn’t sound like fun.

A decent gui, not fiddling with settings, widespread hardware specs. Games that expect a gamepad and will work with it. Novel input techniques.

I know I came out swinging on consoles, and I absolutely am biased. Instead of trying to one-up you, the best I can do is explain my position.

My biggest gripe on consoles is that it’s a form of vendor lock in. Unless you follow in the footsteps of someone like Gary Bowser (Canada), you aren’t playing newer Mario, Metroid, or Zelda games on a PC. That’s pretty much the same with all exclusives.

Emulation is just now catching up to the PS5, and I suspect that’s part of why they are moving from physical media. Xbox series x has no emulator, likewise Switch 2. This means that one needs to purchase several consoles to play these exclusives. I’m not going to lie, I have probably spent $2000 on mid-grade hardware over the past decade, but I just finished my major upgrades last year-unless I was need RAM.

As far as the GUI goes, I think it’s fit for purpose. My desktop is configured differently because I use it for many things. If I wanted a gaming system that has a UI built for navigating games I could build one, but that is not a skill or expectation I would have for many. Supposedly, SteamOS can handle this, but we are getting pretty deep here. I think this gets deep into fiddling with settings.

So, as far as fiddling with settings goes, that is one of the biggest strengths a console has. If you have no technical skills, and like most can’t navigate from your documents to your program files, I can’t blame you for buying a console. Or, like some technical people I know, they spend all day fucking with settings and don’t want to touch a computer when they get home.

I’m not sure what you mean about widespread hardware specs. The game is optimized for that particular hardware. Assuming the devs did their job right—and that’s not always true—the game should run flawlessly on the console. Same goes for PC though. I bought a beefy video card last year because my 10-year old system was struggling with Clair Obscure. The same week they released a patch that fixed the issue.

Can you explain about games that won’t work with a game pad? Steam I believe allows you to force a gamepad to work, but I’m far as away from my system at the moment.

For novel input techniques, motion controls are just not making it to PC. I played Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom (both of which I purchased and have hardware to pay it on, TYVM) holding my phone under my game pad to add motion controls. It sucked. I have searched for an alternative, I don’t have one.

Wow, sorry about the roommate.

Like, I get the sinking in the chair and just going feeling, but I don’t feel like I get there that much faster with a console.

It works that way for my TV and sound bar, but it’s not consistent. Sometimes I have to power cycle the sound bar before it works. It’s probably the decade-old sound bar though.

I believe you need to power on the television and the PS, locate the correct input, log in?, navigate to the game, and then play. You may need to locate a controller. I imagine it still has regular software updates, etc.

My process for gaming PC Linux is to awaken my PC, log in, click the game and wait for Steam to launch it. From there, it’s just regular updates. I might still need to go find a controller, depending on the game.

The biggest difference is that the console game is (should be) optimized for that platform. There have been plenty of terrible ports both ways, but you usually know that the game will just work. I on the other hand spent an hour or so getting to know Wine so that I could play og baldurs gate. I could have just bought it again, but once is enough.

Wow. Tell me again the purpose of a gaming console.

Slopware. Shovel-slop.

Honestly, I used to seek out Linux for beginners, Linux for dummies, and Linux+ guides. It’s all relatively similar information. The first two may start a little lower and the Linux+ guide should dig a bit deeper.

Do web searches for terms that you don’t understand, and feel free to ask when you have conflicting information. We love to answer questions where you already tried solving it yourself and bicker about the answer.

I advise strongly against dropping it. That’s only handy if you need to recover data. A shock will most likely reduce the life of the drive. If it doesn’t work as expected after my advice, do not put data on it.

My thought is that the USB enclosure may not have enough power up spin up the drive. I have had up purchase separate ac adapters in the past to spin up mechanical drives for exactly this reason.

The easiest test is to just put it inside a machine with standard cabling and power it up. If it works, it’s your enclosure. If not, move on. Don’t use it.

If it works fine in the system, get a different enclosure. This one should work.

https://www.amazon.com/Enclosure-CLAVOOP-External-SATA-Recovery/dp/B0D6RH6JBH

Find a used one for sale. Bonus points if it has any kind of management. Replace the battery. If at all possible, have it unmount the drive at a certain percentage.

I have nfs shares on my truenas for my docker containers on proxmox. I put the info in my guest’s fstab and they usually mount at boot to /srv folders I created and specified.

I purchase a bunch of machines off government auction, patch then up, and pass them back out for very little. Anything with 4 cores and 8 GB memory should do it. If you can get something with DDR4, that’s a big step. Bonus points of it was made after 2018.

I started with docker desktop on Linux thinking it was the easiest way to get started. It initially ran well, but I started having weird stability issues. Moving to the cli resolved this. Relying on the documentation and web searches will help you quickly gain familiarity.

$60 seems to be the comparable price. I’d buy now before there is a run on PSUs.

Woof, good theory. There is (or at least used to be) a section of board next to the CPU that controls the voltage, inherently controlling the internal clock speed and the FSB. As the temps increased, resistances and compositions possibly changed, causing that area to perform out of spec, theoretically damaging the board, CPU and memory.

Just to be safe though, I would not trust that PSU either. Another idea is that the PSU was malfunctioning and sent inconsistent voltages, resulting in a multi-component failure.

If you were a business that could afford to gamble on it I’d say risk it. $50 is a low cost for peace of mind. That PSU can go to local market at $10, with a disclaimer.

I revived my second WAP today by soldering on a serial header and reloading the firmware. Sounds badass, but I broke it myself and then did a crap job trying to improvise and revive it the first time. I had to buy the correct tools before I could try again.

On the other hand, my SMB shares were mysteriously down this morning. Easy fix, but weird.

Wow, it’s super weird to have a system catastrophically fail and kill all the memory like that.

Ok my 20 and your 20 are not the same.

I was saying the large numbers didn’t make sense if you don’t have a large fleet of drives. Say you have ten servers, each with ten drives, and the MTBF is 100 million hours (yay, easy math!). That means that half your drives will have failed after 100k hours, or 11 years of use.

Some of the sites I have been looking at are saying that this number will increase significantly because 8 hours of daily use would give you about 33 years of use.

I think I like the annualized failure rate better, but I don’t think either really tell a great picture.

https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/hard-disk-drive-reliability-and-mtbf-afr-174791en/

https://ssdcentral.net/hddfail/

I would rather if the annualized rate were recalculated annually.

Regarding the controllers, that has been nagging at me this whole conversation. Most SATA peripheral cards do not have heat sinks, but most SAS cards do. The SAS cards at least have a more rugged appearance.