I’m confused - isn’t the Steam Frame ARM based, and using FEX? The article talks about future devices but doesn’t mention the big new device that will be using FEX in 2026?

So bizarrely the best experience is to self host and pirate. That’s what you get when the entire entertainment industry is hostile to consumers.

When Netflix first became big, it was popular because it was a one-stop shop for almost all your content. It was like a big library of content in one place, you pay a reasonable monthly fee and it’s all there. Piracy dipped as a result.

Now all the content is fragmented into numerous walled gardens you have to pay separate fees to access. People can only consume the same amount but now they have to pay 4 or 5 fees as the content is spread out.

Unsurprisingly piracy is booming again.

The article names the game in the headline, not clear why your post needed to try to be click bait?

It’s about OpenMW, the open source game engine to play Morrowind on.

I think your auto-correct has gone wrong; patients rather than patents 3 times.

Totally agree with your point though. I’d extend it to include copyright reform as well as patents; intellectual property rights are being abused globally and used as a way to abuse citizens.

So in terms of hardware, I use a Raspberry Pi 5 to host my server stack, including Jellyfin with 4k content. I have a nvme module with a 500gb stick and an external HDD with 4tb of space via USB. The pi5 is headless and accessed directly via SSH or RDC.

The Raspberry Pi 5 has H.265 hardware decoding and if you’re serving 1 video at a time to any 1 client you shouldn’t have any issues, including up to 4k. It will of course use resources to transcode if the client can’t support that content directly but the experience should be smooth for 1 user.

For more clients it will depend on how much heavy lifting the clients do. I my case I have a mini PC plugged into my TV, I stream content from my pi5 to the mini PC and the mini PC is doing the heavy lifting in terms of decoding. The hardware on the pi5 is not; it just transfer the video and the client does the hard work. If all your clients are capable then such a set up would work with the pi5.

An issue would come if you wanted to stream your content to multiple devices at the same time and the clients don’t directly support H.265 content. In that case, the pi5 would have to transcode the content to another format bit by but as it streams it to the client. It’d cope with 1 user for sure but I don’t know how many simultanous clients it could support at 1440p.

The other consideration is what other tools are being use on the sever at the same time. Again for me I live alone so I’m generally the only user of my pi5 servers services. Many services are low powered but I do find things like importing a stack of PDFs into Paperless NGX is surprisingly CPU intense and in that case the device could struggle if also expected to transcode content.

I think from what you describe the pi5 could work but you may also want to look at higher powered mini PC as your budget would allow that.

For reference I use dietpi as the distro on my server, and I use a mix of dietpi packages (which are very well made for easy install and configuration) and docker. I am using quite a few docker stacks now due to the convenience of deploying. Dietpi is debian based, and has a focus on providing pre configured packages to make set up easy, but it is still a full debian system and anything can be deployed on it.

Obviously the other consideration in the pi5 is an ARM device and a mini PC would be X86_64. But so far I’ve not found any tools or software I’ve wanted that aren’t compiled and available for the Pi5 either via dietpi or docker; ARM devices are popular in this realm. I have come across a bug in docker on ARM devices which broke my VPN set up - that was very frustrating and I had to downgrade docker a few months ago while awaiting the fix. That may be worth noting given docker is very important in this realm and most servers globally are still x86.

If I were in your position and I had $200 I’d buy the maximum CPU and GPU capability I could in 1 device, so I’d actually lean to a mini PC. If you want to save money then the Pi5 is reasonabkr value but you’d need to include a case and may want to consider a nvme or ssd companion board. Those costs add up and the value of the mini PC may compare better as an all in one device; particularly if you can get a good one second hand. There are also other SBC that may offer even better value or more power than a pi5.

Also bear in mind for me I have a mini PC and pi5; they do different things with the pi5 is the server but the mini PC is a versatile device and I play games on it for example. If you will only have 1 server device and pre exisiting smart tvs etc you’ll be more reliant on the servers capabilities so again may want to opt for the most powerful device you can afford at your price point.

I have an AMD mini PC in my living room and it has changed how I game. I got it because my Deck was nice but I found I plugged it into my TV most of the time and wanted better quality graphics that would look better on my 4k screen. I now love to sit in front of the TV with a controller and play my games, mostly directly off the device.

Many people have similar experiences with devices like the Switch - if you have a couch and a big screen TV then it makes sense to dock it, and many choose to.

So I think the “steam machines” of old do have potential now. The idea 10 years ago was good but the software and the hardware wasn’t there. Now it is, and steam doesn’t have to even do much to build the things - they’re out in the wild already. They can offer something more powerful than the deck without necessarily cannabilising the market the decks have - it’s expanding to a new user group who are less interested in mobile gaming and more interested in using their big screen TV to pc game.

Plus as a console the game library is massive compared to a PlayStation or Xbox or Switch, and with an OS that allows users to do so much more with their device.

Plus what Steam offers is something Windows can’t offer on handheld and doesn’t offer on a living room TV - a great interface. Steams gamescope and big picture mode are great on a mini PC.

So I think a steam “console” is not unrealistic. They can leverage what they already have with the Steam OS and steam deck with a standard branded hardware model of mini PC from existing OEMs, and allow others to use the OS for their own machines. I suspect if they make steamOS freely available people will also be doing this themselves with their own devices.

As a place for Valve to expand into, it’s reasonably low hanging fruit and relatively low risk as they’re not having to focus on the hardware and they already have the software working.

I used to use Homeplug to get network from my router front downstairs of the house to the my office upstairs and back. It’s a small house, and I thought the homeplug was ok - I was getting about 150-200mbps of my 900mbps; not great but I thought it was a good as I could get. The electrics are about 10 years old but I could see there was a lot of noise and error correction when I looked at the software that came with the plugs. Simple direct wifi connection was atrocious as the walls are largely solid brick.

Then a couple of years later I read about how good they Mesh systems could be so I decided to try a cheap one. I was skeptical as wifi hadn’t worked for me. I got a Google Wifi system (not a fan of google but it was a cheap system compared to other mesh networks); it has no backhaul connection, just 3 wifi points (one in front room, one in hallway and one in office), and my speed jumped to 500mbps and low latency. I also hadn’t realised how bad the latency had been on my homeplug set up - it was night and day.

I have since upgraded to an ASUS XT8 system; 2 units only and I now get close to 800mbps on a good day, and 600-700mbps floor. My PC in my office is where I work (which involves high data transfers) and also game and chill, it’s been a huge boon.

So yeah, Homeplug does the job but it’s not great in my experience. It was cheap compared to a mesh network, but you get what you pay for. You can get some of the cheaper and older mesh systems 2nd hand on ebay - but unfortunately a good system is pricey. In my experience it was totally worth it.

I wonder why they’re making a Linux native version? It is one of the ironies of Proton that windows native games are so easy to install it seems a bit pointless? But also making games for Linux is ironically difficult as it’s difficult to support long term as they can break as libraries change over time.

It feels like we need a Flatpak style set up for Linux native games which may help games launch stable long term versions that won’t “break” if newer libraries don’t work with them. Flatpaks “bring your own dependencies” approach is more similar to how windows games often work with their own dlls (even to the point of installing old versions of directx when needed) except without windows annoying set up of spraying dlls all over your hard drive making them difficult to clean up when you uninstall a game.

Although arguably Steam already deals with that on both Linux and Windows currently. But it is proprietary. And maybe Flatpak is already that solution? Maybe Appimage too although not sure how well a 30gb would run from a single file virtual file system? Is it native speeds or have some overhead?

All PCs are a frankenstein mix of parts, that’s the beauty of PCs. Components can be mixed and matched and usually work together well.

So instead of a new PC think of how you can evolve your current PC. You may be able to upgrade the CPU or even better replace the motherboard and CPU but keep the case and other components for now until you can afford to make more changes. If that’s too expensive then look at upgrading other components until you can do a big shift with the motherboard and CPU. For example get an SSD if you don’t have one, maybe uograde the graphics card for a gaming boost etc.

Don’t think of a PC as being a single thing - any component can be upgraded and switched out at any time and you can gradually move to your dream PC over time in steps, which spreads the cost over time. It’s easier to find a few hundred pounds / dollars / euros every 3-6 months than it is to find £2k in one go, and you can still end up in the same place if you’re patient

The most important base components are definitely the motherboard and CPU though (it determines the ceiling of all the other components) - so make sure any changes you make fit with your long term plans for those. For example if your PC is old then start with the motherboard and CPU so you aren’t restricted in other components (E.g. RAM options are better on newer motherboards so it’s worth waiting to buy RAM if you intend to do a big motherboard upgrade).

E.g. If I were starting from a basic ATX desktop, I’d aim to get a new motherboard first and ideally a good CPU. But I might get a decent motherboard with a modern socket and a cheaper CPU if I was short on cash. Then later when I have money again I’d sell the cheaper CPU and upgrade it to something better that my new motherboard can support. I might keep my current hard drive and then when I can afford it get an m.2 to make better use of the new motherboard. RAM can be brought from the old board, and even upgraded in steps to get to an eventual goal amount. Like start with 8gb or 16gb but eventually move to 32gb or 64gb when I can afford it. I might keep my current graphics card and then upgrade that once the other components are good. I might even buy a second hand older card so I get a boost until I can afford my dream card so I at least move forward of I had a crap one now. It’d take time but I’d be moving forwards every few months getting a better and better PC without having to find a huge amount of money in one go.

Think of it like the ship.of theseus. Genuinely my current PC has evolved gradually since 2015 but I don’t think I have a single component left from that original PC apart from maybe some screws and the case. I’ve done 1 big motherboard change and 2 CPU changes since then, I’m onto my 3rd GPU and about to move to my 4th, and have replaced the RAM and then doubled it later with 2 more sticks. I’ve changed the power supply once, and lost count of how many hard drives I’ve been though - currently I have 2 m.2 cards and some SSDs of various ages.

I went down the route of a Raspberry Pi 5 and Installing Dietpi as the OS. Dietpi has loads of recipes in its main app that makes it easy to get going, plus if you install docker you have a huge range of stuff to try.

There is a learning curve but it’s not too steep and I’ve enjoyed it.

I’ve been going down the slef hosting rabbit hole recently.

First, Home Assistant is worth doing - you’ve not got a smart home yet but this is the easy way to get one going. So worth it. You can buy a few cheap WiFi plugs, and plug in devices like lights or stuff you don’t want on stand by and you have the start of a smart home. A smart thermostat and smart radiator valves are surprisingly easy to set up if you want to save some money and keep your home efficient - a bit more of an investment but worth it if you find you like the ease and power of WiFi plugs.

I also recommend Pihole - it’s an ad blocker for your entire network. You can run it on Docker on x86 machines - you just point your router to use it as the DNS and it then filters all requests for you. It’s really improved my experience on all my devices.

Next, Paperless NGX - scan your documents and paperless NGX will OCR read them to make them searchable and keep them in a database for you. You can use it to go paperless. Just make sure to sort our a backup.

Joplin is quite a good note taking app which you can self host to sync your devices and keep your data secure.

Syncthing is fantastic for syncing files between devices. I sync my main PC and living room theatre PC, plus in my case my Raspberry Pi as an always on broker and local backup.

Some good advice already in this thread.

Also worth considering QEMU as an alternative to VirtualBox. The Virt-manager tool is decent way of managing machines, and it’s relatively straight forward to create a base machine if you’re duplicating it. Virtualbox is perhaps initially more user friendly for absolute beginners, but once you have any familiarity with virtualization I’d suggest QEMU offers much more.

Also I find integration between the guest and the host linux system is generally more straight forward. Most linux systems already ship with samba and other relevant tools QEMU uses to interact between host and guest. There isn’t a need to faff around with the guest-additions stuff. Plus KVM virtual machines can run with near native performance.

I have one of these, it’s a decent mini PC. It’s decently powerful - I used to play some steam games on it; a bit equivalent to steam deck or a bit more powerful. I used it for streaming on my home TV. I upgraded to a even better one as I liked it so much - and wanted to do more gaming.

It’s a full PC basically. Whether it suits your purposes really depends on what you want to host? It could be overpowered and a bit redundant for a lot of self hosting uses.

I have a Raspberry Pi 5 which is cheaper than this, and am hosting docker with Home Assistant, Sync thing, and fresh RSS running on it at the moment with plenty of spare memory and cpu resource.

This mini PC is considerably more powerful and will have a higher power use at idle. You may struggle to use it at capacity so may be a bit wasteful?

And even the rasp pi 5 is over powered and expensive for a lit of common home server users.

So whether this PC is a good price and choice really depends on what you want to do with it. It’s at the end of the spectrum of being able to comfortably play 4k video. So it’d likely be a decent Jellyfin streaming host if that’s what you want?

Yeah its wine/proton and linux together. Wine/Proton efficiently handles translating the Windows programmes API calls into POSIX calls while Linux seems to offer a lower OS overhead so there is more system resource available for the games.

I do think Proton gets a little too much credit. Its wine plus faudio, dxvk and other open source projects combined. Proton is great but it is standing on the shoulders of giants.

Yeah, Transport Fever is not a city building game. Its a transport game, like Transport Tycoon.

City Skylines has a great transport element to it but its ultimately a city builder.

Cities 2 has been an unmitigated disaster. The single biggest strength of the first game was its user generated assets easily accessed via steam workshop but cities 2 still has no official way of doing it even now. They seriously compromised and broke the game by trying to make something that works the same on PC and Consoles. Its been 18m and that still isn’t fixed and they’re still focused on trying to release for consoles rather than fix the single biggest fundamental flaw.

Transport Fever 3 is a game people are looking forward to, but not as a replacement for cities skylines.

As per your other thread, incase others are interested. I dont own one but on searching options seem to be limited. It can be jail broken and Kodi installed.

That may be a jumping off point for doing more but I can’t see that anyone has successfully installed linux on it for example.

https://github.com/NSSpiral/Blackb0x

Mine is about the same. Totally forgot it included by Steam Deck and my Index. Makes me feel a little better!

But then when i look at the number of unplayed and unfinished games in my library I feel bad again.

And then I feel worse remembering I also have a large GOG library which isn’t in that Steam spend and also lots of unplayed games…

How is it misleading? Plex Pass is a subscription? It would be confusing to many people if it said “Plex pass” instead of “Subscription” as not everyone would necessarily even know what that is. Subscription is very clear.

I use Jellyfin as a home media server - in my set up I have it running on my desktop PC, and I use it to stream a media library to my tv.

A home media server basically just means its meant to be deployed at a small scale rather than as a platform for 1000s of people to use.

Your scenario is exactly what Jellyfin and Plex can do. If you have 5 users then you just need a host device running the server that is powerful enough to run 5 video streams at the same time. The server can transcode (where the server takes on the heavy lifting needing a more powerful CPU) or direct play (where all the server does is send the bits of the file and the end user’s device such as a phone or smart tv does the hard work of making a quality play, so a lower power server device can work).

If this is contained within your home, your home wifi or network should be fine to do this, even up to 4k if your network is good enough quality. If the 5 people are outside your home then your internet bandwidth - particularly your upload bandwidth - and your and their internet quality will be important determinant of quality of experience. It will also need more configuring but it is doable.

This doesn’t need to be expensive. A raspberry pi with storage attached would be able to run Jellyfin or Plex, and would offer a decent experience over a home network if you direct play (I.e. just serve up the files for the end users device to play). You might need something more powerful for 5 simultaneous direct play streams but it would still be in the realms of low powered cheap ARM devices.

If you want to use transcoding and hardware acceleration you’d need better hardware for 5 people to stream simultaneously. For example an intel or amd cpu, and ideally even something with a discrete graphics card. That doesn’t mean a full desktop PC - it could be an old PC or a minipc.

However most end user devices such as TVs, PCs, Phones and tablets are perfectly capable of direct playing 1080p video themselves without the server transcoding. Transcoding has lots of uses - you can change the audio or video format on the fly, or enable streaming of 4k video from a powerful device to a less powerful device - but its not essential.

Direct play is fine for most uses. The only limitation is the files on the server need to be in a format that can be played on the users device. So you may need to stick to mainstream codecs and containers; things like mp4 files and h.264/avc. You could get issues with users not being able to playback files if you have say mkv files and h. 265/hevc or vp9. Then you’d either need to install the codecs in the users device (which may not be possible in a smart tv for example) or use transcoding (so the server converts the format on the fly to something the users device can use but then needing a more powerful server)

I prefer Jellyfin as its free and open source. It has free apps for the end user for many devices including smart tvs, streaming sticks, phones, tablets and PCs. Its slightly less user friendly than plex to set up but not much. And the big benefit is your users are only exposed to what you have in your library.

Plex is slightly more user friendly but commerical. You have to pay for a licence to get the best features and even then it pushes advertising and tries to get your users to buy commercial content. Jellyfin does not do that at all.

Finally if your plan is to self host in the cloud, again this is doable but then you stray into needing to pay for a powerful enough remote computer/server, the bandwidth for all content to be served up (in addition to your existing home internet) and the potential risk of issues with privacy and even copyright infringement issues around the content you are serving. A self hosted device in your home is much more secure and private. A cloud hosted solution can be secure but youre always at risk of the host company snooping your data or having to enforce copyright laws.

Edit: the other thing to consider ia an FTP server. If you just want to share the files, its very simple to set up. What Jellyfin and Plex offer is convenience by having a nice library to organise things, and serving up the media. But direct play from a media server is not far off just downloading the file from an ftp server to your home device and playing it. But you can also download files from a Jellyfin server so I’d say its worth going the extra step and to use a dedicated media server over ftp.

Yeah took them years to recognise the value in FiveM. At first they trued banning its makers, even sending private investigators after one, and accused it of being a tool to facilitate piracy. Then they changed the rules to allow non commercial mods online in 2022, and finally bought the makers in 2023.

I still find it a bit bizarre they’re not launching on PC at the same time as the consoles. Its the PC landscape where all the modding comes from, and PC is the single biggest gaming platform. But in fairness simultaneous launches are risky, and PC launches are more complex in terms of the breadth of hardware that needs supporting. But it’ll be PC that facilitates the most user generated content.