✧✦Catherine✦✧4d ago

steam deck has been probably the best thing that happened for my recreation in years

  • i can use it comfortably while in bed, when i'm in too much pain to do much of anything else
  • it lets me play the dozens of games i bought over the years only to never touch
  • it runs linux, goddamnit (positive)
  • it doesn't require me to manually poke winetricks ever, goddamnit (negative) (positive)
Aled;cd4d ago
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧

also someone actually gave a shit (a lost art) while designing the device, as a result of which it's probably my single most cherished electronic device now. not because of the specs or the price or anything, but just because it warms my soul to interact with something that has had so much effort and intentionality put into it. (i see the fact that it's good for running games as a happy downstream consequence of that)

for example: the specs are underwhelming if you look at the numbers... until you realize that it was designed by picking the display first, then picking a GPU that can drive the display within a given power envelope, then bolting a CPU to the side that's just powerful enough to feed the GPU. this isn't how anybody designs laptops for example. (i think some gaming laptops are better but generally the system integrators don't seem to design these things so much as just slap the roof of the latest reference design, make thermals inexplicably worse, and call it a day)

Mar 16 at 10:29pmWeb
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧4d ago
rare case where taking an existing platform and making it more like an embedded system improves quality and reliability, ha
Show threadEloy.4d ago
@whitequark I think people in general are too obsessed with specs, instead of simply asking "can it run the software I want to run?"
Show threadbeatrix bitrot4d ago
@whitequark genuinely heartwarming. it's amazing how good it can be to experience this kind of exceptional object. sometimes i look at the manual for my water boiler (CV-DCC50) and feel as though i am in a small way being healed
Show threadLuke Wren4d ago
@whitequark I love steam deck because for some people it will be their first (and for a long time only) desktop PC. Someone will install KiCad on their steam deck and design their first PCB on it. Someone will compile their first C program on it. It's a games console and it was never meant to do any of this stuff but it's weirdly good at it, and as someone who learned to program on an NDS Lite typing out Lua programs on the touch screen I love that the next generation gets to do that too.
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧4d ago
@wren6991 yes yes yes 100%
Show threadDaniel Borges3d ago
@wren6991 @whitequark lua on nds lite ? interesting, what was that ? I don't remember that from the time
Show threadLuke Wren3d ago

@msk @whitequark Using this: https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/DSLua

And editing programs with this:

https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/DSOrganize

Named Lua files with .cfg extension so DSOrganize would open them in its text editor, and edited the shell for DSLua so it would run them. Had to power cycle the console every time I wanted to edit and re-run a script, but that was pretty fast.

DSLua

DSLua is a port of the Lua scripting language to the Nintendo DS.

GameBrew