Include adding kernel level anti cheat to that. This should just give us an option to get a full refund.

I guess you could sell a literal copy, yeah. But ironically, the lack of DRM binding that copy to an account by a user makes a “proof of original ownership” harder, if that’s what you want.

That’s not how it works with digital goods, but that’s a limitation of digital goods really.

They don’t even know what they want to do themselves.

If you’re talking about Steam, while it provides its own DRM system, games can be published on there without any DRM whatsoever, so you can do whatever you want with the downloaded files and then play the game without Steam.

iFixit rates it “Difficult” for the Steam Deck OLED and says the time required is 2-3 hours:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+OLED+Battery+Replacement/168676

This is a slight improvement from the original Deck’s estimated 2-4 hours:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+Battery+Replacement/149070

It requires removing quite a few parts but the most annoying part is getting rid of the adhesive. It doesn’t have easy-to-access pull tabs or whatever.

They can certainly improve this. Either add pull tabs to the adhesive strips, or better yet use the mechanism from the iPhone 16 where you apply voltage to the adhesive to make dissolve/no longer stick. Or even better make it a screw-in battery without any glue whatsoever. Then update the routing of several cables so they aren’t in the way of removing the battery.

Understandable.

What I will say though is that I personally wouldn’t mind regular spec bumps at all. The Deck isn’t exactly a cheap device and to get the “latest and greatest” for your “investment” at any given point of purchase would help longevity.

But as I said, in this case it makes a lot of sense (for Valve). SteamOS is still under heavy development, even more basic stuff such as the update mechanism and also power management is something they’re still working to improve.

They also use a custom APU designed in collaboration with AMD, and these designs cost a lot of money. It’s not just a rebranded 7840U like the Z1 Extreme for example. This custom design makes a lot of sense in terms of focusing on gaming performance and efficiency, and it clearly shows in (very) power limited scenarios.

Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a new Steam Deck based on Zen 5 and RDNA 4 with another custom designed APU sometime in 2025 or early 2026. Zen 2 is really starting to show its age and Zen 5 is a solid leap even over Zen 4 (not talking about desktop CPUs here, but Ryzen AI 300). RDNA 4 will likely improve quite a bit over RDNA 3(.5) (with the current Deck having RDNA 2) and include some type of hardware-accelerated machine learning upscaling with FSR4, which could make a lot of sense on the Deck as long as enough games support it.

I’d also like to see a few other improvements. The OLED display is great in many aspects, but VRR would be a great feature to have. Internally I’d like to see an easier way to swap the battery, maybe using similar tech to what Apple does with the iPhone 16’s battery. Currently, swapping the battery is one of the most complex repairs on the Deck, but it’ll also be the most common a few years down the line when all these batteries really start to show their age.

I think we’ll get at least one more x86 Steam Deck generation before it moves to ARM (if it moves to ARM at all).

The Snapdragon X isn’t anything to write home about when it comes to efficiency under load, with the newest CPUs (with iGPUs) from AMD and Intel keeping up or maybe even exceeding it.

Bitwarden keeps working just fine.

While I mostly agree with your first paragraph, I don’t see Nintendo as the innocent and awesome third player. They are certainly doing well in terms of sales numbers right now, but they’ve proven time and time again that they’re hostile towards their fanbase (and I’m not talking about pirated games here).

I also don’t see how the Switch brought a “fresh, intuitive control scheme” to the table. The hybrid console concept was the first well implemented take and quite a few people certainly like that flexibility, but in my opinion the best way to play Switch is on a TV with a bunch of “Pro” controllers.

And in terms of games, I think Nintendo makes consistently good games (for the most part), but most of them are also very safe bets. You have your 2D platformer Mario games, 3D platformer Mario games, some fighting and sports Mario game spin-offs (again, nothing new), and a bunch of games set in the Zelda universe. Splatoon was something else, but we’re at Splatoon 3 by now as well. I personally thought Mario Maker was the most “revolutionary” title in somewhat recent times. I enjoyed some of these games especially for their coop (or pvp) experiences, but there wasn’t much in there that truly surprised me.

YMMV of course, I know a lot of people absolutely loved the Zelda games for the Switch for example. Nintendo games are also pretty much feature-complete out of the box, which isn’t something you can say for a lot of these live service games popping up everywhere.

I personally think indie games or games from “large-but-based” studios are more important than ever and that’s where I got the most original and memorable experiences from in recent years.

Not really, just some wording…?

There was a vulnerability in Project64 so a malicious ROM could escape outside of the emulator. So while unlikely, it’s certainly possible.

I waited for this so long that I eventually just played it on an emulator (that’ll no longer receive updates). I somehow doubt that the experience will be much better with a new PC version. I played it at 3x internal render resolution and at 60 FPS.

The absolute scenes if this guy wins.

Yuzu devs and others be like “we could’ve easily won?”.

(I know, not happening)

Exactly, and I’d rather devs focus their time on making sure their Windows version works well via Proton than using that same time for a half-assed native Linux version.

In my experience, even when a game has a native Linux version, the Windows version run via Proton can often be the better choice.

In Tabletop Simulator, I wasn’t able to join my friends’ multiplayer sessions with the native Linux version. No problem with the Windows version via Proton.

The Linux version of Human Fall Flat isn’t feature complete/outdated.

There are better examples though. Valheim runs fantastic aside from a bug that it picks the first instead of the default audio device for sound output on startup. It even supports mods and r2modman supports Linux as well.

Didn’t have any problems with Spiritfarer either.

Probably Tetris Gym?

EDIT: The “kill screen” in NES Tetris is just the game getting too fast for most people to keep up. Then there’s some bugs that can crash the game in later levels, but Tetris Gym fixes these bugs. So you “just” have to be good enough to play Tetris for long enough at insane speeds.

This is the way.

Missing built-in FDE is one of my main gripes with SteamOS. It’s why I don’t really do anything besides gaming on the Deck. It’s a portable device that could easily be stolen or lost, so this seems like a major oversight.

Well, then you can’t be the next Tim Sweeney :(

You have to sue every single storefront first as well and go cry to the press that companies don’t want to do business with you when you break their ToS.