I mean, even Valve has tried it in the past, and it was a failure. Look up Steam Machines from 2010s. I consider the success of Steam Deck (thanks to flawless execution this time) as almost a minor miracle.
It's not very crazy to me. Most corporate teams are overrun with feature creep that "is very simple" (i.e. it takes 3x as long as estimated, because the codebase is a mixture of overengineered spaghetti for that one customer with edge-case requirements and legacy, combined with tests that are meant to be run in a jenkins job which takes 4h to complete).
Then, the engineers are expected to write the docs in between these tickets, and doc is seen as something "to be done within 30 minutes" - of course the docs will be comically (or tragically, depending on your perspective) bad.
Most people have 0 idea on how to write good docs, so in 30 minutes, they write stream-of-consciousness docs and return back to the ticket hell.
This is certainly true for me. As a kid, I used to pirate movies/tv shows on my slow 1Mbps connection. Nowadays, I just want to turn on my TV and start Netflix/HBO/Disney/...
But, with the advent of pretty severe content locking and geolocking on various services, pirating is starting to be very enticing once again. The thing I would miss the most is the recommendation algorithm, which tends to be pretty good on Netflix.
Perhaps orthogonal problem - imagine you join a new company that has an enterprise product with hundreds of tables. Is there a way to connect Dataherald to my DB, and ask basic questions about the DB? E.g. "where are stored records related to X".
Oh I definitely miss the N900 keyboard! That was awesome!
The OS, on the other hand, not so much. I remember it slowing down (after ~2 years? Maybe 3) where if someone called me, it took roughly 30s for the phone to get responsive again so that I could accept the call. It was cool to run Linux on it though :)
As Windows continues its enshitification, and as Valve continues investing into its awesome Steam Deck, I do hope the trend continues.
Personally, after using Steam Deck a lot, I bought a desktop and tried a standard distro (OpenSUSE in my case) for gaming. The experience has been not ideal, but doable. My issues:
- My Xbox controller worked, then suddenly stopped working. I've been using a PS controller instead which works great, but would vastly prefer the Xbox one.
- NVidia has been such a pain that I'm thinking of selling my current card and buying an AMD one. NVidia drivers are truly horrible. For example, during boot time, the proprietary drivers randomly fail (like 1 in 7 reboots), which is not catastrophic (the system recovers by itself) but does lengthen the boot process by roughly 1 minute (very noticeable when the whole computer normally boots in ~10s). Note that this is with the latest driver version, and even after modifying kernel parameters as per NVidia devs' advice.
- Some games still don't work great under Proton (anticheat, mostly). This is expected and I'm quite fine with the current state of gaming compatibility on Linux, but might be surprising to some folks that are coming from Windows.
But overall, I can just play whatever is in my Steam library, and I truly love that.
> Somehow the mold issue appears to be solved by now as a house-painter told me recently.
I'm not persuaded that the issue of mold simply disappeared. It might be the type of foam they use nowadays, or the way they insulate the houses. For example, I've seen houses insulated from the front and not from the back. At first, I thought it was a cost cutting measure, i.e. "look good, be cheap," but it's actually so common that I don't think that's the answer.
Molds can become toxic in extreme cases, and once they appear, it's amazingly difficult to get rid of them. It's possible that in a town that's highly historic, there are companies that specialize in insulating historical buildings (though I assumed that the vast majority of historical buildings in Germany was destroyed during the wars).
As a side note, I'm not saying it cannot be done. My point was that it was far from "slap some foam around the house". I'd love my building to be insulated.
Insulating a house built in 1700s is definitely not a matter of "put foam plates on the outside/inside". If you do that, you are likely to create molds inside of the building. Insulating old buildings is typically a specialized and highly delicate work that tends to be quite expensive. I live in a building from the 1900s and the insulation process would be fairly difficult.
> Fail0verflow have stated in the past that Jailbroken consoles are not worth it anymore since they are so close to computers in features and functionality
Interesting. I don't own a PS5, but Xbox seems to be pretty much a PC [1] (weeeell, like a Chromecast-style PC anyways). The main reason to legitimately jailbreak a PS4 back in the day was to get back the Linux functionality Sony took away from its users, and to run emulators possibly.
It's interesting that the hacker communities acknowledge that the legitimate reasons for jailbreaking your PS5 are not many, at least not yet.
The problem is that if a person wants to learn how to deal with it legally, they have no other possibility than to come to a place like Amsterdam.
Wouldn't the solution rather be for Amsterdam to create a "newbie coffee shops" or something similar?
1. Create safe newbie-friendly places that provide an opportunity to safely experience a legal drug X.
2. Mandate that for a foreigner to buy a legal drug X, they must have an ID-like document that says they are experienced with X.
3. Once a tourist experiences X in a newbie-friendly place, they award him/her with an ID-like document that enables the tourist to buy X on their own.
Surely that create more jobs and opportunities in Amsterdam than the "bug off!" rhetoric I've seen from the local Amsterdam government.
In Europe, you'll never impress anyone with Europass, but you're highly unlikely not screw anything up.
It is well structured, people know what to expect, it's machine readable... Personally, I like it a lot, as opposed to some flashy website PDF that an applicant thinks it's amazing, but it takes me extra 30s to find a piece of data on it.
Containers on Mac rely on virtualization, don't they still? Will the new CPU arch have a native virtualization SW? Because if not, I suspect that the virtualization layer might break with the translations to and from X86, and/or might take pretty significant performance penalty.
A wild unsubstantiated guess of course, at this point (or rather, a worry of mine).
> Overall, at the price they're offering the Mac mini (haven't really considered the other models for myself), I think it's ok to take the plunge.
I thought the same. I actually wonder whether the low prices aren't due to the App support being extremely limited at this point (basically only first party stuff)