It doesn’t help that the gains have been smaller, and the prices higher.

I’ve got a RX 6800 I bought in 2020, and nothing but the 5090 is a significant upgrade, and I’m sure as fuck not paying that kind of money for a video card.

Well, I did say “maybe with a real d-pad”, it’s just the thumbsticks that aren’t necessary.

I actually did play with the Steam Controller for years using the trackpad as d-pad. It was more of a comfort thing that made it less than ideal which was due to the shape/texture of the original SC, but I could live without it personally if it’s done right.

I’ve even played shmups with it, with the right settings, but I get there is a learning curve and its easier to use a physical d-pad.

I run it even on a Steam Deck since there is a bit more flexibility to customise and it fixed some audio bugs I had with SteamOS (might have been fixed by now).

I understand the trackpads somewhat since they take up space, but the lack of back buttons is inexcusable.

Personally though, I’d buy a trackpad only deck (maybe with a real d-pad) but I know I’m in the minority on that one.

It’s just saying it’s not supported, not that it doesn’t work. Depending on your country, I doubt that warranty voiding claim is enforceable either.

Also, if you get one of their units that has an ARM chip inside instead of an intel one, there is basically no chance you’re ever going to be able to use anything other than the software that they have by default.

Their x86 models are fine as you imply, just avoid ARM and you can install any OS you want.

The ZOTAC handheld looks interesting, and while it’s nice to see decently sized touchpads, they are very low on the device and it seems like that would be uncomfortable to use.

A bunch of back buttons would have mitigated the issue a little, but it seems like there is only two, which is a shame.

It’s a bit of both, along with the Linux AMD drivers being superior in many cases to the Windows drivers.

I’ll add for completeness that vkd3d-proton handles DX12 titles, and of course OGL and Vulkan are supported natively.

For me, it’s not the steam machine itself but the peripherals like the steam controller that would come with it. There still isn’t a proper replacement for the original SC that has: trackpads, gyro, back buttons, and full steam input support.

Everything else is missing trackpads and aimed at emulating a console controller, so you get weird situations where one mode supports gyro because it emulates a switch controller but doesn’t support the back buttons and analog triggers, and another supports the back buttons and analog triggers but not gyro.

Funnily enough, the steam deck itself is the best option as a controller if you want all of these features.

Of course, a new steam machine wouldn’t be required for a new SC to happen, but it makes sense to pair them, as they did originally.

Not to mention decades of older content, and nobody could have possibly played everything good that has ever been released.

It’s mainly Linux Unplugged where that stuff leaks into it. I haven’t heard it on “self hosted” very much.

Calibre is used as a server all the time, see calibre-web.

calibre-web is technically not Calibre and is written and maintained by different people, although it does use the Calibre database (and I believe it must be created with desktop Calibre initially). But it’s a good option and I highly recommend it.

you just load your books from Calibre (or right through USB if you’re hardcore for some reason) and you’re basically off to the races.

There’s also an OPDS server option with calibre-web that you can use to load books from if you’re using koreader.

You can also use the Kobo server replacement option with calibre-web although I personally couldn’t get it to work at the time I tried it. But this will give you a sync option that works like the official Kobo server which is quite nice.

You can also set --accept-dns to false with the commandline client although magic DNS etc won’t work.

AMDGPU virtio native context is somewhat of an equivalent to the other options, although the pieces are not all available yet. Linux guest only as well.

And there’s Venus but that’s for Vulkan only (but a lot can be done with that alone on Linux guests).

Mailrise combined with an apprise notifier of your choice (I use gotify).

The other thing is that my libraries are alphabetical in Jellyfin, so “Anime” comes before “Kaiju”, and I truly can’t stand the idea that Godzilla gets sent to the back of the bus.

If you mean the order the libraries are listed in the web interface, you change that from “User settings” -> “Home”.

Plex is closed source and gradually being enshittified. You might not leave today, but you should have an exit plan.

btrbk works that way essentially. Takes read-only snapshots on a schedule, and uses btrfs send/receive to create backups.

There’s also snapraid-btrfs which uses snapshots to help minimise write hole issues with snapraid, by creating parity data from snapshots, rather than the raw filesystem.