smoothbrain coldtakes

Not without tinkering, but isn’t that always the case with Linux?

Well, the problem is honestly just Windows. It’s not designed for mobile or touch interfaces at all, and all the telemetry and crap bloatware degrades the battery performance. If you get rid of all of that stuff it’s actually on par with the Linux equivalent.

I dual boot my Ally and I actually spent time messing around with different OSes. ChimeraOS was not ready when I had initially given it a shot (around March) and it crashed constantly and didn’t have full support for things like RGB. I also tried Bazzite at that time and it was a similarly strange experience. It’s gotten much better in the last few months. I’ve been running Bazzlite on my Ally since early July. HHD has progressed immensely and offers a lot of good control over the device.

If you start off with the IoT version of Windows, it comes with essentially nothing. The store app isn’t installed, but neither is Teams or Paint. You don’t actually have to spend time “debloating” it, since it comes more or less bloat-free. You actually have to spend more time installing dependencies and drivers than removing things. Run the telemetry disabling script and then you have a version of Windows that still sucks to use in general, but is much less awful on battery life.

Bazzite is fine. It’s serviceable enough to get the job done. The hardware is supported through a bunch of different emulation tools and bespoke applications like HandHeld Daemon for hooking into power draw and managing extra buttons.

Bazzite is based on the Holographic base that SteamOS uses, but opts for a Fedora-based immutable back-end over Arch. Running SteamOS itself is going to be better once Valve implements native support for all of these things that are covered by HandHeld Daemon, at least in theory.

Due to the non-optimal nature of both Windows and Linux at this stage, they tend to perform about equally.

I get that the Fediverse is disproportionately made up of Linux users, but the reality right now is just that no operating system is fine-tuned for the hardware its running on besides SteamOS and the Deck itself. It’s not better yet, but it’s getting better at a massive clip - which is above and beyond whatever Microsoft is doing (looks like nothing) to improve their software for the form factor.

I like “Product Degradation” way better than “enshittification”.

I think it’s prudent to be on an older node, using stock that’s more abundant, even if it’s older - especially if it still performs the duties well enough. You’re 100% on the cost side of things, especially considering that Nintendo has never had any consoles that were crazy expensive. Everything was always supposed to be family friendly and therefore family attainable.

I still think battery life is a higher concern for them than sheer power when in handheld mode though, and that’s a key differentiating factor between a Deck and a Switch, besides the Nintendo first-party library and chip architecture. It’s really cool that the Deck is flexible enough to do both high performance and low performance tasks with toggles for the draw.

The performance was never the consideration for Nintendo. They want a handheld that can last a long time, so they will always clock their chips down. You can’t compare 30 watts all the time to 30 watts plugged in, let alone 5 watts in handheld mode.

Steam Decks are great, but lets be real; when you play a big AAA title, even on moderate settings, you might get two hours out of the machine pushing it to the limit at full TDP.

This is kind of a nothingburger story. We always knew Nintendo were not going to scale their machines up to the level of PC gaming handhelds.

It’s an atomic variant of Fedora that satisfies all necessities for gaming with Linux, like coming with built in drivers and the option to install stuff like Steam and Discord during initial startup.

Atomic varieties of Linux are really cool, they are much less prone to breakage because all updates happen at once or not at all. They are just generally more stable and you can rollback easily if necessary.

Personally I just like Fedora, so my preconfigured options are either Bazzite or Nobara. I also prefer the stability of atomic variants. It’s just a solid base to work with, regardless of if you’re using a desktop or a handheld.

If you use Bazzite anywhere, you need to apply this fix.

I had to fix this on my desktop and laptop.

You betcha. Depending on what the next iteration of the Deck is like, I might just pick up an OLED when they go on sale.

A full install of Windows runs games fine. It doesn’t last long though. Bazzite was not working well when I tried it a few weeks ago. There are a few things that don’t work properly including no control over RGB settings.

I put the stripped down IoT version of Windows on mine. It doesn’t have anything preinstalled. No store, no teams, no xbox, no nothing out of the box. Combine that with a basic telemetry disabling script and you can have better performance. The Armory Crate app handles all of the firmware and drivers. I’m able to stretch the battery almost an hour longer.

Windows actually can run kind of alright when you get rid of all of the bullshit. It’s not going to be as efficient as Linux, and it’s sure as hell not going to be as efficient as a Linux built around a specific set of hardware. It remains to be seen what kind of optimizations MS may introduce when they build a handheld.

I remember it being one of my favored chosen out of the plethora of random third party devices I had laying around. This was a step above Mad Catz for sure, but definitely still below the original controllers.

This is a Nyko Air Flow controller. I had one for the original Xbox. It was supposed to keep you from sweating during long sessions of gameplay, because it was ventilated and had a fan on the back. To be honest, I don’t remember it being excellent at keeping you cool. I think the fan was pretty lousy, but it was a great gimmick none the less.

I had a lot of weird controllers back then. Some good, some bad. Most of them Mad Catz.

I like how part of Meer’s logic is that he’s basically inescapable in the franchise otherwise, since he voices so many NPCs as well as BroShep. He boils it down to listening to him some of the time or all of the time.

It definitely is not an optimized game. It doesn’t run really well on my ROG Ally, so I can’t imagine trying to do it on a Switch.

This article takes a bunch of time to really just say nothing. Like of course if you ask non-techies what brands they can think of they’re going to rattle off Disney and Starbucks before Nvidia.

The average person doesn’t know Nvidia the same way they don’t know other hardware manufacturers down to the component, especially for datacenter scenarios. They’re not going to be able to list things that are driving forces in the tech industry, because it’s not anything they will be able to interact with day-to-day. The average person doesn’t run the LLM themselves. PC gamer knowledge is also pretty peripheral

As the most valued company during a gold rush, does it really matter how much the average person knows your name if all the people with the money already do? It’s not like my mother and my sister are going to be buying graphics cards to run LLMs any time soon. There’s clearly a clientele for this and it’s not the average person. The fact that they produce consumer equipment is literally not at all what’s giving them their new valuation.

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They can farm it out to an existing provider like Dropbox or something.

It doesn’t have to (and probably shouldn’t) be proprietary, just like Twitter integration wasn’t.

I wonder what kind of changes they will make to this iteration. I know VI was a big change from V, but eventually I learned to enjoy the different mechanics and have a ton of hours logged.

Yeah, the Windows handhelds are basically glorified laptops. This was kind of the approach with the ROG ALLY anyways with the XGM port, allowing connection to an eGPU enclosure with up to a 4090 inside. It just runs a full blown version of Windows and you can even put on a pro license and do dumb shit like have WSL or Hyper-V available on the device.

I have a ROG ALLY and I’ve debloated it to hell, but it’ll never match the power savings I would achieve if it was Linux-based.

I’ve been following Chimera and Bazzite on their progression for developing distros for the Windows handhelds, but it’s going to be a while before they will be fully viable on any handhelds.

Steam will always be ahead because they control the hardware and the software and they are able to fine tune the software to their very specific hardware, which is simply not happening for the Windows handhelds.

Yeah, but it doesn’t come standard on these devices. It’s literally just a full install of 11, with Teams and everything.