We acting like people in the art community weren’t hyped up over AI until they started generating images. Before chatgpt, it was all about automating coding/it and other jobs that arent considered art. Back then it was all about how everyone could pursue their passions. The only people not excited were all the transportation employees and factory workers that had been told by the general public how excited they were to replace them

Being 9060xt based is the main bonus over the Steam Machine. It’s a good bump over the 7600

A couple more years of FEX development and I’m betting we’ll be close to as compatible as year one Steam Deck

By the PS5 release date, I was over the cinematic AAA narrative style of game. That’s what Sony makes so I don’t have urgency to buy them. Really only interested in them when they’re really cheap and primarily to play a little to show off graphics to myself before I go back to playing games with graphics where uncapped I get like 300+ fps. Since the start of the PS5 gen, the only Sony game I’ve purchased so far is Ghost of Tsushima. Was only planning on Yotei but that’s off the table now

Impulse early on used to be as good as Steam and it had extra software in it to download like Stardock Fences that I liked. I felt it a bit infuriating that Stardock didn’t seem to see its potential and then the same for gamestop. It had Demigod and a handful of other games. It was a successor to Stardock Central. Stardock digital storefronts predated Steam but Stardock didn’t have the right vision compared to Valve and GameStop didn’t after buying Impulse

It was still mainstream to say PC gaming was dieing until like 2014 so I guess no surprise how little so many companies wanted to invest in a PC platform but that’s what makes Valve special. When PC gaming shelf space was disappearing in brick and mortar and old guard PC game studios were calling the platform a dead end (Epic), Valve was building up Steam as a relatively small company long before they had their live service sugar daddies in TF2, CSGO, and DOTA2

Then Valve again with Steam on Linux. Steam Linux share hits 5% this year in 2026. Steam Linux went into public beta 2012. They’ve been working on Linux for at least 14 years and it’s starting to look like it’ll pay off

I wanted Impulse to succeed as well because I thought PC gaming needed numerous major desktop client storefronts to save PC gaming. Turned out Valve would improve Steam beyond anyone’s expectations and doing that with anemic competitor challenges to push them

Definitely feels like it’s snowballing. From barely moving for like a decade after 2012 to really pumping after the Steam Deck came out. Hoping hardware shortages can be resolved well enough for the Steam Machine to hit. It’s the perfect form factor to me for my living room to finally make couch multiplayer comfortable for me and guests

Always complaints about battery/heat like the only thing people will try and play are AAA graphics champs. Hades isn’t hard to run. You can play the old Flatout games. Stardew Valley and Terreria with your cloud saves. There are tons of games coming out every year that looks like they could run on anything from a SNES to a PS Vita. Pretty much any game available on the Switch that is on Steam is super easy to run. Like the Ys games I’ve tried in Gamehub

On mobile Wuthering Waves, Zenless Zone Zero, Genshin Impact, etc are super popular. Warframe just released for mobile. Albion Online. People have some 5+ years outdated opinions mobile gaming

I want to first say that if it was 2005, hi-fi was expensive. Today hi-fi is cheap and you quickly run into diminishing returns at like ~$300 for around ear headphones but IEMs are cost effective and you get good quality starting at like $20. The gist of the history is that ChiFi changed the whole audio market for quality at affordable prices

Any bluetooth headset will work from what I’ve tried. You don’t have to spend a lot. You can use the Anker brand Soundcore bluetooth noise cancelling headsets

https://www.amazon.com/Soundcore-Cancelling-Headphones-Comfortable-Bluetooth/dp/B08HMWZBXC

https://www.amazon.com/Soundcore-Adaptive-Active-Cancelling-Headphones/dp/B0B5VHRX7F

Not sure if anything beats the Q30 at its price point but bumping up to the Q45 is an increase in build quality so even though my Q30 are multiple years old, I’ve heard from others who are more abusive of their gear it breaking. You can also use wireless TWS earphones. Like I have moondrop and earfun brand TWS (category of earphones that Airpods are). They’re cheap and are adequate at low prices though you can jump to the higher priced ones they have and get better mic quality. Examples such as

https://www.amazon.com/EarFun-Canceling-Snapdragon-Bluetooth-Detection/dp/B0D5M9SH1X

https://www.amazon.com/Moondrop-Space-Travel-Noise-Canceling-Low-Latency/dp/B0FGDBP2ZZ

The IEM market is insanely competitive. You can google best IEM’s for $30 and see dozens of brands you’ve never heard of but if you aren’t deep in the placebo, you’ll probably find any of them pretty good

I have no cadence. Unless whatever software you’re using is unstable, you probably won’t notice updates. I update on a whim which is often because it’s habit. Though sometimes it can be weeks between when I run the update

Now with MGSIV PC announced, mainly care for God of War Ascension and Eternal Sonata. Eternal Sonata you can get through but you’ll have to change settings at different parts in the games that crash or when it crashes, you run the game again and successfully get past the part it crashed at. I tried a little bit of White Knight Chronicles and that worked. Just haven’t tried to get far. RPCS3 is incredible. I remember like a decade ago people were saying it’s design was a dead end and they’d have to start over. Good to see those people were proven wrong

I know Element sucks compared to Discord but with more users and potential funding interest from that user base growth, it can get a lot better and snowball to fast improvements. Blender was the butt of jokes until version 2.8. Like 15 years of being easily dismissed as major commercial production worthy. Element can get better. It’s the story of pretty much all the well regarded general consumer targeted open source software we use today

I really enjoyed the first game but couldn’t get through the second. Too much of the same without the interesting enough for me mystery. Enough reveals in the second game and my interest in the story tanked

Regardless of that, I ignored this news until I started reading that this is actually guerilla games studios work straight up rather than licensed out development with them more as narrative/art consultants. The game doesn’t look small. What’s the developmental state of a third game when this is a main studio game rather than a licensed out game

I feel like a lot of any residual bad talk on KDE stems from when Plasma 5 was new. It was rough for years. I’m guess by the Steam Deck it became pretty close to as visually consistent as all the default gnome applications. It’s a lot more stable now too compared to a decade ago. Not just the desktop environment, stuff like really wide appealing applications like Kdenlive are way better than they used to be. I think it makes sense that it’s only recent that Fedora promoted KDE Plasma to default/flagship along side gnome as equals. A decade ago, KDE Plasma 5 wasn’t there. Today KDE Plasma is. So maybe because of that and the Steam Deck, KDE is going to be more default than gnome in the future. I’m on KDE and I feel like a decade ago hot corners felt way more pleasant to me on gnome than KDE. It’s how I switch windows along with alt tab. Maybe more often use hot corner to see an overview of windows. Animations are great now

For me, needs to be good on a handheld. GOG mostly sells older games. Mobile/handheld gaming should be a major target to onboard users

At least GPD Win now considers Linux important enough to now try to make up claims to some sort of partnership. Lenovo ships SteamOS devices. Zotac ships Manjaro devices. Good trajectory for Linux on handhelds

They can’t really be trying as well as they can afford. The Steam Deck is almost 4 years old and they still have no answer for Steam Big Picture. No built into the EGS client remote play to an Android/iOS phone. They’re just a Fortnite company with a vestigial game engine and traditional games storefront. Their real video game storefront is now in fortnite

Last I tried MGS4, I was able to get to the first meeting with Drebin before I put down the controller. One of these days I’ll try to play through the whole way

Switched when the OG Steam Machines came out. It wasn’t great then. It wasn’t really good until Proton Steam integration. Became great after the fast iteration with the Steam Deck

I know the hot thing is Bazzite but if you want to use it as a desktop as well, please at least use Fedora Kinoite or Silverblue. Personally I use the latest Kubuntu release so now I’m on Kubuntu 25.10, will upgrade to 26.04 when prompted, do the same with 26.10. Update cycle not so different than the larger windows updates each year. Just that every now and then a new Windows software ports to Linux, it’ll almost always be a deb installer is reason enough to me to prefer Debian based distributions than Fedora or Arch especially for new users. Don’t need to get people to install distrobox and boxbuddy. Kubuntu should just be enabling flatpaks and flathub by default rather than it being a option in the software center settings

Improved over the last year

https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-b580-opengl-vulkan-eoy2025

How it compares to Windows I wouldn’t know. I did use an Intel Arc for a while on Linux but switched to AMD for performance and idle power draw before the start of 2025. It was stable though. Probably pretty good performance today relative to what it can do on Windows today compared to 2023-2024 when I was using Intel

When I first got the card, Switch emulation did not work. I think it was around mid 2024 when it started to work well

Still need to try this game. If you want a game way more like the main Pokemon games, Nexomon Extinction is good. Really looking forward to the third game