Having worked retail sales earlier in my life and working as a developer in e-commerce in later parts, single day drops mean nothing. They’re often a statical anomalies, even when there is a “reason” for it. If the business is short on monthly or quarterly goals they can always make up a single day loss with a strategic sale or product marketing & placement.

If we really want to hurt these companies, we need to orgaize larger than a single day of “fuck you”. A single day might be good for awareness, but TBH, it’s comes across more as virtue signaling and enabling social media bragging “I’m doing my part for TODAY”.

All that said, I am doing my part for today, and have been doing my part for quite some time now, and will continue doing my part for the coming months and years.

I was on the fence of asking for one for my birthday late last year for exactly this reason.

What tipped me over was that I took a look at my Steam library and realized I literally have hundreds of indie and AA games that I’ve never played or have less than 4 hours in that I always meant to go back to. And that was it, I decided the Steam Deck was going to be my indie gaming experince platform. It has been amazing at doing this, and I’ve been chewing through my indie game library like crazy, and have picked up so many more that I’m loving gaming again! I can see myself keeping the current steam deck around and will be used regularly for at least the next 5 years.

If you’re looking for a portable machine that’ll tackle most modern & higher end games, either look at the alternative SteamOS portables or wait for the next Steam Deck (the touch screen, D-Pad, Sticks, and dual touch pad make it the best choice for best I out options for game compatibility).

However, if you want a great machine for indies, AA, older AAA titles, and console EMU, the current hardware is amazing and worth the price

“AI” text prediction runs locally. Microphone is for voice to text functionality.

As for the keyboard itself. Ehhhhh. It’s lacking UX features to make it actually usable. I dailied it for a month and had far more typos, text prediction broke whenever a number or symbol was fat fingered into the string. Finding symbols you need was worse than gboard & SwiftKey.

I really want there to be a great open-source keyboard, but none actually deliver on UX atm.

Somebody was so triggered by the graphic being off center they just had to break that window.

Somebody was sobtriggered by the graphic being off centered they had to break the window didn’t they?

If you want to see a good modern take on an RTS, check out Mechabellum.

Just an HMD. He’s largely a sim pit VR user.

Samsung Odyssey w/ GTX 2060.

He’s using Monando built with Envision without the steamvr-monado Plugin because “it slows everything down”.

I have a friend that regularly games in VR in Linux. Admittedly, he’s always faffing around with it to make it work. But he’s also a bit of a chaotic person that runs Arch, so that could just be him and not a failing of the current level of support.

Time & effort. Everything that you do means something else doesn’t get done. Whether that be gaming with friends or an item off your project/chore list.

We know that gaming centric distros are great for getting up & running, but it’s still a time sink, and will require effort. Not everybody has a backup drive with their games and will have to re-download everything too. There’s also a risk their favorite game isn’t compatible with Linux

Windows 10 also works just fine. I still have it on 2 of my 4 computers (2/5 if you count my Deck), and haven’t switched those over yet because I’m being lazy on one and the other is a perfect candidate for the SteamOS UX experience since it’s a HTPC. However, I have done some looking around at other HTPC experiences and just haven’t pulled the trigger. Which will be awesome, since Windows did away with their HTPC UX years ago.

I haven’t run across a game that hasn’t run on The Deck yet. I know it’s capable of running quite a lot, but I got it to play indie games. It’s been great and does what I want it to do phenomenally. Additionallh if I ever wanted to do something more demanding on it, I could.

Aboit ten years ago I had XM Radio in my car. Came for free for the first year, then renewed me for $30 for the following year as part of the promo of getting the car. I occasionally used the service for Comedy Central radio and a couple other things, but was largely playing audio off my phone from Spotify/MP3s.

After those two years an XM rep called me since my subscription was about to expire. They wanted $15/mo or $150 for the year. I laughed and said the most I’d pay would be $50 for a year. They tried to argue with me before I cut them off and told them “Look, here’s the deal. Either you find me some special that brings the price down to that rate and get some money from me or you get no money from me since I’ll be canceling my service. You’re selling a service that I don’t need and has limited benefit to me that my phone hooked up to my car can’t do.”. After a few minutes they found me a special and got approval from their manager. That wound up being my last year of using the service.

It’s dumb how much publically traded companies try to squeeze their" customers" and staff to drive up value for their true customers, the share holders. It’s such a short term view on life and value.

Sealion infestations are problematic. Be sure to call your local exterminator promptly whenever you encounter one.

Off-topic comment.

I appreciate the misuse of isle instead of aisle. The mental imagery of navigating around stores compromised of isles makes me want to go shopping so I can go on an island hopping adventure looking for booty to haul back to my kingdom.

This shouldn’t be our responsibility to “fix”.

This is what charge backs are for FYI.

“I’m sorry, but you failed to provide a service. Either give me a full refund or I will start the charge back process with my credit card company and you’ll be forced to explain why your refund policy violates their ToS and any penalties that arise from that process.”

Elden Ring is probabaly the easiest game that From Software (FS) has made.

I however don’t like the default multi-player design of FS games and waited for the Seamless Co-op mod to be released and then picked it up to play with friends as a tough open world MP adventure.

RE: Default MP Design -

I think it’s poor design to offer incentives for players to be anonymous assholes to other players. Game Studios have spent millions of dollars investing in research and technologies to reduce game community toxicity. And if you attempt to play a FS game outside the first month of release in MP mode, prepare to have your fun ruined.

You’re complaining about a chin on an anthropomorphic cat woman that only has 2 breast’s instead of 6 to 8…

You’re right. Had to dig into my memory for this one and fact check myself.

IRC, BBS, and most forums (of the era) used PM or SP. MUCKs and a few other tools used Whisper. ICQ introduced “IM me”. Part of me remebers using the term “DM” for IRC messages, but I used IRC fairly regularly well into the 2010s.

However, the forum I spent a ton of my younger years on used “Direct Messages” which has likely polluted my memory. Since it was a technology related forum, that was probabaly a customization from the operator to distance everyone from the idea of “private” since everything was clear-text and unencrypted back then. That or I’m confusing “IM me” from the ICQ/AIM/MSN days.

Point being, nobody thought “PM” meant secure and not visible to the server operators back then. It just meant that only you, the recipient, server operators, and 1337 h4xx0rz could see your messages.

What a trip down edited memory lane that was. Thanks for fact checking me.

Umm… People have been using the phrase “Direct message (DM) me” since forever in the game and online comms world. Private message wasn’t a concept until after DMs were later encrypted. And we always knew, that if we didn’t control the servers, even encrypted, those messages were subject the server operators.

Your logic is giving me the impression that you’re younger and didn’t go through these experiences.