Sometimes I forget the Steam Deck has a touch screen. I definitely wouldn’t want to support the Deck one handed for more than a few minutes.

Maybe I don’t play long enough sessions for this to be a concern, but I just…hold the Steam Deck. Elbows on the couch is a pretty solid mount lol.

This kind of thing didn’t used to bother me at all before it very much bothered me and now I’m somewhere in the middle. I think cartridges/discs for consoles should not require an Internet connection to play them. That said, this isn’t the PS2 era anymore. Many games release with patches day 1 and most will have at least some updates post launch. A lot of games kept offline end up missing out on a ton. Keeping a physical copy of a game is only preserving a portion of the game for a future without the servers to supply the final version, which is my main concern when it comes to physical vs digital media. We still have to rely on hacked consoles running custom firmware or emulation to properly preserve games.

This is the second plug-in I’ve read about in the last two weeks that causes major system crashes on the Steam Deck. Why are these little add on tools breaking the whole OS? That’s nuts.

Hype: The Time Quest, a 90s PC game by Playmobil that was a formative part of my childhood. Surprisingly dark story for baby’s first 3D action adventure game. Took quite a bit of work to get it running on Steam Deck, but I’m about 3/4 through it. Starting to lose my patience with the awful fucking tank controls, though. Tried to modernize them a little with Steam Input, but the platforming is killing me.

I’m planning on checking out the Wario Land series myself soon. Recently got a cheap retro handheld and that’s on my list for sure.

That’s the feature I’m hoping for. Maybe I’m misunderstanding how the constant record feature works, but I really only want to keep maybe the last 5-10 minutes in temp storage, but it’s holding way longer than that for me.

Psychonauts 2. Was a huge fan of the original on PS2 and I can’t believe it’s taken me years to try the sequel. The animation, level design, and writing are all at the level of quality and creativity that I wanted to see videogames progress to some day when I was a kid. This is a playable DreamWorks film.

Ooh, I want an 8bitdo Steam controller.

I’m sure Nintendo intentionally throttles the Switch to improve battery life, preserve the integrity of the hardware, and provide a consistent experience. Not to defend their decision at all. I just think it’s funny how people tend to react to learning about how much the Switch is artificially held back, as if Nintendo is just being stupid about the potential of their own console. I think it’s very likely they did plenty of testing and concluded that the specs they targeted provided the best balance of positive overall user experience with the least amount of complications for developers. And it clearly worked because it’s one of the best selling consoles ever with a massive catalogue of titles. The small handful of power users who want a Switch 4K Pro are just destined to buy a Steam Deck anyway. Nintendo doesn’t want anything to do with that niche group of gamers lol.

Taki Udon demonstrates a Switch emulating a Switch running Minecraft with better performance than Minecraft just running on Switch stock firmware.

Holy shit, I forgot about Artifact lol.

Steam is already the biggest fish by far in the digital games market for PC. Only reason for them to do this is if they’re worried about losing that dominance. Basically, is Epic keeping them up at night enough to warrant a major push into a new hardware loss leader?

Considering every Fallout game from the last two decades made top 20, I’d say yeah it’s probably the show lol.

I would love a federated network of video platforms as long as they can all be searched collectively. Would be great if videos could even be migrated to other instances if storage becomes too limited on one of them. Yeah, it probably isn’t ideal that YouTube is all one platform, but it certainly makes it easy to find what you’re looking for most of the time.

I understand where you’re coming from. I’m not personally a Linux user despite a lot of what I value overlapping with the Linux community broadly. I do think much of the technology we use today can and should be replaced by open source alternatives and I’m optimistic about growing interest globally in that regard. I’m not at all suggesting we submit to the new corporate-controlled Internet or go back to a pre-2000s lifestyle.

But I think we’re talking about different things, so let me just bring it back to YouTube. A lot of what we can do is limited by inescapable expenses: server costs and labor. We can say labor is optional because a lot of open source projects are developed and maintained by volunteers. But people do need money to live, so this project becomes the side gig, not the full time job. YouTube’s already a mess with moderation. Imagine a video platform with no full time staff to review illegal uploaded content, DMCA requests, comments, etc. But the bigger issue is the scale of YouTube, trying to make billions of videos play seamlessly at all times all over the world and just work. I can’t fathom the infrastructure needed for that. It would cost far more than it would make in donations if that was all it was accepting. No ads means the budget is that much smaller. If the small percentage of users with YouTube Premium doesn’t bring in enough to keep things running, the open source version wouldn’t either. And fewer people would be willing to pay for it.

This is what I mean by services that are unsustainable. Yes, clearly the technology makes it possible. But there is a cost to it and I think we’re entering a time when we don’t get those things for free anymore.

History would suggest that, but I’m starting to believe we’re in a tech service bubble that’s ready to pop. I touched on this in my comment, but it’s becoming clearer than ever that the vast majority of the services we use today are not sustainable on a number of levels. Economically, they’re all a mess.

Food delivery services are bleeding money constantly in the hopes that one day they’ll find a way to profit. They won’t. It’s an insane business model. The actual cost of the service is many times the price of the food you’re buying. Uber/Lyft already isn’t keeping prices low enough to be a cheap option anymore because they’ve coasted too long on VC funding and it’s time for them to start making money. But they still aren’t and if they charged what it actually costs to operate, no one would use it. Many online platforms can’t sustain themselves despite being major social media hubs. Streaming services spend more on buying up movies, shows, IP rights, and other streaming services than their subscriptions bring in.

The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse. I think we’ve already had it as good as it’s gonna get and we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade. It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.” I think a lot of what we expect from the Internet is not sustainable and it’s not going to stick around in any form we would want.

Please don’t leave me hanging.

It kind of is. YouTube has decades of history. Unfathomable amounts of video. No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast. It would cost an unbelievable amount of money in servers and maintenance let alone moderation. The problem is this is a service, like many others that exist today, that does not bring in more money than it costs. YouTube exists because it’s a branch on a megacorporation tree, but even Google will eventually need to find a way to make it profitable. It is impossible to fund this for free or anywhere close to free.

Seconding everything you said. Rocking a third party launcher and surprised at all the useful features. I don’t think I’d want to give up Routines if I were to ditch Samsung next phone.

Revanced and UBlock Origin still working for me on Android and Firefox respectively. As the new Chrome update launches and every Chromium based browser follows suit, I do wonder if Google will just straight up block Firefox in the near future. Eventually, I think Google will win this by breaking YouTube on everything except their own apps. Unfortunately, YouTube is kind of the only ubiquitous platform that could pull a disastrous move like that and remain on top.