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TIL that there is an app for Garmin watches that will display your Parkrun barcode. Since I have forgotten my barcode at least a couple of times in the past (and I don't normally bring my phone on runs), this could come in handy.
Have yet to try it, but reviews are positive.
@emi200 I meant getting the games physically, not the device itself.
You are correct in that you absolutely can install Heroic on the Deck, as I have already done this and played a number of games that way.
I prefer GOG because I know that even if the platform holder turns nasty down the road, the DRM-free nature of those games ensures I will always be able to play them going forward. I keep an offline backup of all of the installers for games I purchase.
The relatively open nature of the Steam Deck hardware (and other PC-like handhelds) also ensures I will always be able to install Bazzite or some other gaming-focused GNU/Linux distribution and run all of my GOG purchases that way.
Steam is not publicly traded right now, but it could be one day. If Valve did some anti-consumer moves in the future, you would be out of luck because most of the games sold there still use DRM and require the Steam launcher. DRM itself is anti-consumer, many would argue.
Even so, Valve is still a lot better than most, and it's largely because of Valve that Wine is able to run so many games today (and the reason Proton exists).
@emi200 GOG is my first platform of choice these days. They suck when it comes to GNU/Linux support, but Heroic with Wine or Proton largely fixes that.
I used to get everything physically, but I'll rarely be doing that going forward (with everything going digital, and even physical carts mandating a download for the game, or updates, or DLC...). As such, there's no longer any point prioritising games on console unless it's a really good exclusive — and even then, it would need to compete for my time with similarly received PC games on price, so good luck to them with that!
So many computers in the e-waste bin today. I grabbed 4 Dells, all 3rd gen i3s with 4 or 8 GB of RAM. Three of them have half-height PCIe dGPUs. One has a HDD but the rest of the HDDs were missing. They probably just forgot to remove one before recycling.
I probably need to get a bunch of cheap SATA SSDs and 2.5"->3.5" drive brackets. Not sure what I'm going to do with all of this though! One will be Guix System. Maybe one for FreeDOS and such.
(I already found the pictured Acer in the e-waste bin a year or so back which runs Debian and Xfce.)
@indubitablyodin In my city probably any high-rise apartment building is going to have a big e-waste dumpster. Every time I take out the trash I flip the lid for a quick peak.
A bit off topic but it's absolutely worth checking. Especially if you're into retro gaming. I've found GameCubes and a stack of boxed GC games with manuals, official Nintendo GameCube controllers in EC (including a Wavebird), a Wii U Pro controller, a flightstick and flight pedals, a New 3DSXL with charger and original box, a LE Forza-themed Xbox One (sadly missing the power brick but am hoping someone throws one out one day!), a PS3 Slim, heaps of laptops (usually they're Core 2 Duos but sometimes you find something quite good, or can at least use the HDDs for backups if they pass a destructive badblocks test and SMART checks), so many perfectly good monitors (I feel bad not having a use for them — there's a couple of perfectly good small FHD monitors there right now, and I have to take a couple more down as I'm swapping them for an e-waste upgrade I found), NAS boxes, lots of wireless routers, tons of Ethernet and USB cables (including type-C), lots of brand-name Blu-Ray players lately as well... gosh I'm probably forgetting lots of things.
That's just the stuff I've found interesting over the past ~3 years and taken at least one of. Then there's power tools (eg. electric drills), home appliances (dehumidifiers, vacuums, kitchen appliances, etc,) most of which doesn't interest me much.
Don't even get me started on the amazing finds from my building's hard rubbish collection area. Seriously! 😁
@indubitablyodin Nice one. And if buying new, your suggestion is a great one.
I decided to grab that mini 8th gen Lenovo e-waste PC that's missing parts, as I realised that I think I might have everything missing from an old machine (ATX MB desktop) I have in storage. It can replace my existing 2nd gen i7 Acer mini-PC I use from time to time when I need a spare for something — and that too was from the e-waste bin some years back. ;)
@indubitablyodin I likely won't. I found a Dell Inspiron 5593 in the e-waste bin a couple of weeks back. It was in parts as someone had removed the SSD, and it was missing various screws and a power adapter — all very cheap to order online.
Specs:
Intel i7-1065G7 CPU
FHD screen
backlit keycaps
fingerprint reader
16GB RAM
spots for an M.2 and a SATA SSD (and so I installed one of each)
Windows 10/11 licence (if anyone cares)
battery in good condition
It's very quick compared to the 6th gen i7 laptop I paid thousands for quite some years back, and even that wasn't slow enough (when running Arch) for me to justify replacing it.
My living room gaming PC is also an e-waste rescue computer I got a year or so ago; a 6-core i5-12400, also with a 1TB SSD, Win11 licence, etc. It mainly just needed a new CPU cooler and GPU, and it too is also very fast. Works great with SteamOS. Good enough even for gaming that it may be hard justifying PC purchases going forward.
Heck, just yesterday there was another PC in the e-waste bin that was an 8th gen i7, but someone had gotten to it before me and stripped it down to the motherboard for parts.
Yesterday I switched my living room PC from an old, dated HoloISO install (from before it switched to immutable) to Valve's SteamOS 3. It was smoother than expected!
Just grab the latest Steam Deck recovery image (which is from 2023...), flash it to a USB drive, boot it, open an xterm and run the recovery script. It will completely wipe /dev/nvme0n1, but that's where HoloISO was for me anyway (with Windows 11 on /dev/nvme1n1).
Once imaged, it should boot if your hardware is compatible. I'm using a 12th gen i5 with a RX 6900 XT and 32GB of DDR4, YMMV. However a couple of services were failing and boot time was slow.
I had a third NVMe drive in a PCIe slot adapter that SteamOS was having trouble with (causing it to get stuck on lvm2-monitor.service) so I removed it and that was sorted. There was also a service related to logging Steam Deck hardware info, and one for managing Steam Deck firmware, both of which I simply disabled.
Lastly, I had to modify Grub. I wanted a menu restored to be able to boot back into Windows when needed, with a timeout to auto-boot one of the operating systems if nothing was pressed. That was just a matter of reading through the contents of /etc/defaults/grub* and /etc/grub.d/* and reverting some of the changes such as screen rotation, resolution settings, etc. I'm somewhat familiar with Grub so it went smoothly.
One more change I did was get a Bluetooth 5.3 dongle for my Xbox controller. I now have the controller paired with the Xbox wireless dongle in Windows (and have disabled Bluetooth in Windows) and use the Bluetooth dongle in SteamOS with the same controller. You can turn the controller on by pressing sync for two seconds for Bluetooth mode, or press the middle button for the regular wireless mode. I did this because installing the xone kernel module on an immutable distro seemed like a bad idea.
Also, brew is a good package manager for SteamOS, for the odd program without a Flatpak (eg. pass). #SteamOS #LinuxGaming
@darkghosthunter One aspect of next gen that will be interesting to pay attention to is how digital purchases will work going forward. We know Microsoft wants games to support cross-buy (to work on both the Windows Xbox app and Xbox consoles) but what happens if the next gen Xbox can run both (either via a compatibility layer, or by just mandating cross-buy going forward)?
On one hand, one of the biggest incentives to purchase games digitally on Xbox over other consoles for me is because games will often work on both my Xbox console as well as my gaming rigs (which are both dual-boot).
However, if Xbox purchases effectively become Windows Store purchases for everything going forward, and the next gen Xbox can play games from other digital store-fronts too, I might as well just get all of my games from GOG or Steam. That way, I can play them on Xbox, or my gaming rigs using either operating system — not just Windows.
It will also be so much harder for Microsoft to sell GamePass subscriptions, when everyone can play all of the games they got from Epic Store at no cost, and the Xbox app has nothing on Steam. That people are basically forced to ask questions about problems with Xbox versions of games on the Steam forums speaks volumes. PC GamePass already has to cost less than the regular console version because of these kinds of issues. It will be interesting to watch how Microsoft attempts to navigate these waters.
They'll likely use a next gen handheld to completely transition away from consoles from that point onwards (with successors just being Windows machines with an Xbox dashboard component like Steam's Big Picture mode) so it opens up the possibility for Microsoft to exit the the console business relatively cleanly after that, if they decide to throw in the towel and just focus on selling AAA games.
@darkghosthunter First you need to know what the next console is going to look like. If it's a handheld that is similarly priced or cheaper than whatever the Steam Deck is at the time, with better specs, I could see a lot of people picking it up. Then add support for also running Windows software (such as existing PC games, 3rd party launchers, etc.) and it could be a killer console.
Sell a dock and also let it stream games from the cloud to a TV at a 4K resolution.
I think it's a likely move. They want/need to get people away from physical media, and a handheld is the only way I can see the public justifying ditching it for their next system. I say that as someone with most of my console games on physical media, including for Xbox.
There is also the GamePass component to the equation. If Microsoft can release enough AAA games and put them on GamePass at the right price point, and if all of these games are too advanced to play well portably unless you stream them, and if GamePass doesn't come to the Switch 2, the next generation Xbox suddenly starts to look a lot more attractive.
I just wonder if they'll still be able to make a handheld look like a box. :)