MudMan

Man, this is true now, but this conversation makes me very nostalgic for the good old days of the 1080Ti, where PC games were absolutely a “max out and forget” affair.

Sure, that was because monitors were capped out at 1080p60, by and large. These days people are trying to run 20 year old games at 500fps or whatever. But man, the lack of having to think about it was bliss.

Well, sure, but that’s also because on PC I can choose to buy DRM-free games and have guaranteed backwards compatibility for the foreseeable future. Plus it’s not a closed system based on a console that launched with a drive. People (me included) already own PS5 discs, not from a previous generation, but from this one. It’s bad enough that I need to keep my PS3 around to play PS3 games, it’d be absurd to not be able to play PS5 games I already own because the thing is physically unable to ingest them out of the box.

So yeah, for people in that position the Pro is a hundred bucks more expensive than it says on the sticker, which is already a ridiculously high number.

I do feel for Sony’s PR teams. Trying to explain the concept of visual improvements in 4K over Youtube’s increasingly vaseline-smeared compression is an impossible task.

He shipped enough clunkers (and terrible design decisions) that I never bought the mythification of Jobs.

In any case, the Deck is a different beast. For one, it’s the second attempt. Remember Steam Machines? But also, it’s very much an iteration on pre-existing products where its biggest asset is pushing having an endless budget and first party control of the platform to use scale for a pricing advantage.

It does prove that the system itself is not the problem, in case we hadn’t picked up on that with Android and ChromeOS. The issue is having a do-everything free system where some of the do-everything requires you to intervene. That’s not how most people use Windows (or Android, or ChromeOS), and it’s definitely not how you use any part of SteamOS unless you want to tinker past the official support, either. That’s the big lesson, I think. Valve isn’t even trying to push Linux, beyond their Microsoft blood feud. As with Google, it’s just a convenient stepping stone in their product design.

What the mainline Linux developer community can learn from it, IMO, is that for onboarding coupling the software and hardware very closely is important and Linux should find a way to do that on more product categories, even if it is by partnering with manufacturers that won’t do it themselves.

You got it. The moment you surface the idea that there are multiple distros or DEs you’ve missed the goal the thread is suggesting. Presintalled, customized software built for the hardware is the way to ease people in with zero tweaking, which is crucial for newcomers.

I don’t know that I have used the SL/SR buttons on my Joycons once in years, so I don’t know that is a priority for me.

Drift is a problem, but I’ve had it more on PS5 controllers, frankly. I do think that at least some portion of drift issues are actually connectivity. The Switch fills in connectivity gaps with the last remembered input and if you have a weak signal that sometimes manifests as the stick being “stuck” off center.

I do think Nintendo should have gone for a slightly bigger battery and a more powerful antenna, although I see why they didn’t want to. Still, as far as form factor and usability goes, those things are the best controller this generation, if not ever.

Oh, how long do you have.

First of all, favorite for what? For accesibility reasons if it’s not a dual stick game I am defaulting to a fightbox-type device these days. I favor a WASD configuration, rather than a thumb-for-up configuration and I currently favor a tiny, minimalist haute board box with cherry switches (blue for buttons, greys for WASD). It’s great, it lies on my desktop and it causes minimal strain even in high APM games.

For dual stick stuff, it again depends. Is this a shooter where aiming is a factor? Because then I’m gonna want some gyro. The DualSense is amazing to hold, just bonkers build quality. It is heavy and ugly as sin, though. It also doesn’t work perfectly with every PC game, so it feels like a hassle to use it as my default. There’s the KK3, which has gyro in Switch mode and seems to be less fussy than the DualSense. Plus they are trying to sell their hall effect sticks to third parties, so those are very smooth. It is a jack of all trades, though, and I actively hate KK’s dumb extra button configuration, with start and select all the way at the top, I keep pressing the screenshot buttons by accident.

If there’s no twitch aiming, and thus no major need for gyro, Victrix’s Pro BFG is fun. It has modular design where you can put the dpad on either location. The dpad isn’t great, but hey, the fightbox’s there for that. It does have a six button configuration, too, if you’re a controller fighting game guy. The best feature, though? Replaceable eight-way gates for the sticks, Gamecube-style. If you’re a Smash guy or emulating Gamecube it’s such a no-brainer high end replacement.

But honestly? Honestly?

The JoyCon.

I know people hate the JoyCon, but the idea of a split controller is amazing to me, and everybody else who has tried to do it, Lenovo Legion Go included, gets it wrong. The big handles aren’t the answer without a middle segment to hold the controllers. The two little boards are fantastic for 3D action games, the amount of tech in such a small frame is astounding and the button-based dpad is so good I’m using fightboxes on the regular now. It’s a shame there are some reliability issues, but I would buy a device just like it for PC tomorrow if they could sort out connectivity reliably.

My series 1 ended up developing a pretty bad flaw with the input chip and is dead-dead. It also developed a sticky X button right away, which I could repair but went back to not being perfect. The Series 2 has been more reliable, but I also use it less.

I mean, I pulled it from reality. I’m just assessing the way it works for the OP, not representing what you said.

As for Disgaea 4, I do believe that it works for you, the threads on the Steam forums also include people who say it runs for them, along with several who can get it to run by fiddling with Proton versions or doing some combination of launch options, multiple retries and settings changes. But it does have problems. It won’t run at all for me and others report frequent crashes, endless loading screens and other issues. It should definitely not have a Verified rating.

That’s the exception, not the rule, I just mentioned it because you pointed it out and it happens to be one of the games that don’t run universally for everybody.

The weird part of this post is I’ve spent a couple of days trying to get Disgaea 4 to work on my Deck and it really, really doesn’t. I know I’m not alone because the game’s forums have several threads of people complaining about it.

Slightly embarassingly, I also tested it on a Windows ARM device and it ran fine.

Look, compatibility on the Deck is… good for what it is, but it’s certainly nowhere near universal. Especially if you have a big library of games outside Steam, which I do. I’d still say it’s the easy go-to for a casual gamer mostly interested in older single player stuff or indie games, particularly for the price.

Oh, that works for me, definitely. It just takes maybe two hours, instead of 20 minutes. Same principle, though.

How do you get motivated in the afternoon? I have maybe three, four hours of semi-effective brain function between waking up and what seems to be some form of power saving mode that lasts the rest of the day. If I’ve eaten food with a fork that day, doing things is a struggle. Send motivation tips for post-lunch humaning, please.

I genuinely think Linux misses a beat by not having a widely available distro that is a) very closely tied to specific hardware and b) mostly focused on web browsing and media watching. It’s kinda nuts and a knock on Linux devs that Google is running away with that segment through both Android and ChromeOS. My parents aren’t on Windows anymore but for convenience purposes the device that does that for them is a Samsung tablet.

I keep trying to explain how Linux advocacy gets the challenges of mainstream Linux usage wrong and, while I appreciate the fresh take here, I’m afraid that’s still the case.

Effectively this guide is: lightly compromise your Windows experience for a while until you’re ready, followed by “here’s a bunch of alien concepts you don’t know or care about and actively disprove the idea that it’s all about the app alternatives.”

I understand why this doesn’t read that way to the “community”, but parse it as an outsider for a moment. What’s a snap? Why are they bad? Why would I hate updates? Aren’t updates automatic as they are in Windows? Why would I ever pick the hardware-incompatible distros? What’s the tradeoff supposed to be, does that imply there is a downside to Mint over Ubuntu? It sure feels like I need to think about this picking a distro thing a lot more than the headline suggested. Also, what’s a DE and how is that different to a distro? Did they just say I need a virtual machine to test these DE things before I can find one that works? WTF is that about?

Look, I keep trying to articulate the key misunderstanding and it’s genuinely hard. I think the best way to put it is that all these “switch to Linux, it’s fun!” guides are all trying to onboard users to a world of fun tinkering as a hobby. And that’s great, it IS fun to tinker as a hobby, to some people. But that’s not the reason people use Windows.

If you’re on Windows and mildly frustrated about whatever MS is doing that week, the thing you want is a one button install that does everything for you, works first time and requires zero tinkering in the first place. App substitutes are whatever, UI changes and different choices in different DEs are trivial to adapt to (honestly, it’s all mostly Windows-like or Mac-like, clearly normies don’t particularly struggle with that). But if you’re out there introducing even a hint of arguments about multiple technical choices, competing standards for app packages or VMs being used to test out different desktop environments you’re kinda missing the point of what’s keeping the average user from stepping away from their mainstream commercial OS.

In fairness, this isn’t the guide’s fault, it’s all intrinsic to the Linux desktop ecosystem. It IS more cumbersome and convoluted from that perspective. If you ask me, the real advice I would have for a Windows user that wants to consider swapping would be: get a device that comes with a dedicated Linux setup out of the box. Seriously, go get a Steam Deck, go get a System76 laptop, a Raspberry Pi or whatever else you can find out there that has some flavor of Linux built specifically for it and use that for a bit. That bypasses 100% of this crap and just works out of the box, the way Android or ChromeOS work out of the box. You’ll get to know whether that’s for you much quicker, more organically and with much less of a hassle that way… at the cost of needing new hardware. But hey, on the plus side, new hardware!

I’ll take persona, although it’s been way too many games with the same setup. Ditto for the Trails series.

Honestly, I don’t think it got any better than ATB systems in FF 6 and 7. Everybody else is either riffing on those or spending so much money they think they can’t be those and need to be Devil May Cry instead.

It is really cool. I don’t always love the achievement design some of the volunteer coders land on, but it’s still a wonderful way to revitalize old games. And the recently added completion tracking stats, where you don’t just get an award for 100% every achievement, but also for beating the main campaign, is incredibly fun and useful to track which games you’ve playted through. Sony and Microsoft should steal that immediately.

They put Reatroachievements on Gamecube games so apparently I’m now balls deep into OG Animal Crossing. Don’t even know how it happened, but Tom Nook is saying my kneecaps are at risk if I don’t come up with 150K bells by the end of the month.

Eh… where? This seems like a very location-specific question.

I do for many things. It’s just convenient and their logistics muscle at this point is wild.

That said, I will go to first party online stores for things like hardware most times. It’s often just cheaper and delivery is about the same.

An interesting observation: Back when I lived somewhere else there was a local alternative, because it was a country far enough out of the way that Amazon didn’t directly support it, and it’s interesting that the local alternative wasn’t meaningfully worse at the logistics or availability. Amazon’s existence does, in fact, heavily suppress competition. You don’t need to be as big as they are to do what they do, it’s just impossible to do it if they’re already there.

I don’t have feelings about corporations.

“Loving” or “hating” brands, let alone massive oligarchal conglomerates makes no sense at all. I want them well regulated and split down to reasonable size if necessary. Ideally competing in a well populated marketplace and restricted in their ability to cause damage.

That’s not “hate”. And it certainly doesn’t stop me using Google products and services and judging them based on their quality and performance.

Yes, I am a riot at parties, thank you very much.