Valve put together a good product this time compared to the first steam machines push. Most games work without fuss and it’s priced well. They didn’t start the handheld PC market but they sort of Apple’ed it by taking something other companies had been doing and streamlined it enough to get mainstream copycats, Lenovo/Asus/etc. Plus SteamOS/bug picture looks a lot better today than 10 years ago. So proven market/platform that can again try to undercut Windows machines in price because Linux is free and leverages the work of open source developers

I read the article and it just sounds like they’re praising ChromeOS for being web browser centric. Need office, open Google docs/drive. Pretty much a Linux distro but by default come with a bunch of progressive web apps installed for common applications?

Consumer expectations. On Linux you can just use the web browser just like most people already do on ChromeOS and I assume windows and mac’s. But on regular Linux, Mac, and Windows people expect more. So I guess a distro that brands itself and markets to users to just use the web browser for everything and maybe a store of progressive web apps/preinstalled ones

Also out of the box support. ChromeOS is Google backed. Laptop makers sell mainstream ChromeOS boxes. Linux doesn’t have major mainstream device support. It’d be far less fussy if hardware vendors were releasing plenty of Linux out the box hardware. Right now it’s some workstation centric hardware from Lenovo and Dell and smaller companies like System76

On that note I’d place my hopes with System76 since they’re currently focused on consumer experience. Cosmic DE is still not prime-time ready but maybe a couple more years. 26.04 release use as the default for their new hardware and it still effectively be early adopter phase for Cosmic DE. Then 28.04 ready for primetime. Keep trying to break into being a mainstream hardware brand. Other is what happens with KDE Plasma with Valve and SteamOS, Plasma Mobile, and maybe the TV interface. A bunch of consumer centric use cases driving development in KDE land. Maybe they’ll come up with a way to get flatpak permissions work in a way that alerts users on need and makes it easy to do like on Android/iOS

ARM and x86 are both proprietary but ARM licenses ARM out willy nilly while x86 is Intel, AMD, and watever VIA does these days with their license.

Steam as an ARM store just means Valve built a version of Steam that runs on modern Mac machines which are all ARM processor based. So any game that releases natively for Steam on Mac now means the developer has support for building ARM versions of their video games

ARM companies. Qualcomm, Mediatek, Samsung, Xiaomi, Nvidia, Amazon, Alibaba, Broadcom, …, a bunch of companies

Budget PCs? Maybe. There’s a lot more ARM CPU vendors out there. Just if they decide it’s worth targeting the desktop/laptop/handheld PC market with proper software support. Your TV probably has an ARM chip in it.

I am interested in ARM handheld PCs to see what they can manage in the sub 10w TDP range. Past that I’m even more interested in RISC-V devices. It’ll be many years for solid support though. ARM for Linux has been around for decades and ARM for Windows since at least Windows 8. It’s been a slow grind for high end ARM on desktop/portable PCs. My impression is on Linux box64/86 and FEX are pretty good and the MS one for Windows seems solid. Linux Qualcomm said they’d be fast on support and they’re definitely not AMD/Intel/Nvidia fast to support Linux machines

I’m sure RISC-V vendors will be better with Linux. ARM ones, Qualcomm has been mediocre. Mediatek+Nvidia, at least Nvidia is well experienced with Linux deliverables for hardware drivers.

Last game was mediocre but over 20 years they’ve been very consistent. I wonder how stable Playground Games have been with Fable reboot. I wonder if they’ve managed being a 2 game pipeline studio or it’s all hands on deck for Fable. If it’s all hands on deck for Fable and no Forza Horizon game on the horizon as a studio silver lining regardless of Fable performance, the pressure there after the last couple of years of MS Xbox slashing must be heavy

Forza Motorsport being cut when it has been a pillar for 20 years is insane.State of Decay 3 so far dodging bad news year after year while being publicly absent

Not weird. It’s the main reason to play. For me it wasn’t even really about the main plot line, ended up not caring for the Wild Hunt or the White Frost at all but every tidbit about the conjunction of spheres, Heart of Stone, and the various non-Wild Hunt factions and quests were pretty captivating to me. The small quest lines were usually interesting. The Crones were a lot more interesting than the Wild Hunt

Cyberpunk is edgy mature. Even more so than the Witcher series. I’m not saying that disapprovingly. I like both but I don’t think they’re a far cry from the previous 15 years of mature video game stories. They’re still stories that need direct physical violence to work. They have a grand scale.

Some standouts I remember, of course all violent, from the past would be KOTOR 2, GTAIV, Eternal Sonata, Xenogears, StarCraft 1/Brood War, Persona series has been consistently interesting, Yakuza games and that reminded me of Shenmue, Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age 2 is cool with the timespan of story in a single city, Bioshock games, the first 2 Fallout games, Planetscape Torment. There’s a lot. What makes Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk standout to me is primarily graphics and scale. A bunch of interesting questlines in single games. They’re all a bunch of violent games though.

Eternal Sonata I think was the most memorably unique of the games I listed and maybe across all the games I could remember that had high production values for the time. I wish that got a PC release/remaster

I only really check multiplayer games/live service. Single player games even when it says not verified, I’ve never had a problem. Probably no official check yet. I also play desktop Linux so poor Deck performance leading to a worse rating is mostly irrelevant to me

I’d take DA 1-3 over ME 1-3. DA2 should never have been shafted on dev time to rush something out because they didn’t expect DAO to be so popular

I’ve gone from almost certain a 9070xt and Switch 2 to probably nothing this year. Maybe not next year. Helps me stay disciplined I guess. I rarely play games that don’t run a Steam Deck level hardware anyways