I'm happy to see this! Hopefully Nvidia starts open sourcing a lot more stuff.
They’ve been busy moving the vast amount of the bits into the GPU firmware (not uncommon, this is how Apple and some others do it too).
I think the FOSS crowd made a bigger deal of it than it was because it appealed to their sensibilities.
The best new OSS-ish stuff from NVidia is their research, and things backing that research. They’ve released a lot of their nerf tech in the wild and Warp (a differential Python to CUDA transpiler) which are very cool.
That said, a lot of open source projects have console ports, they just can’t be shared publicly.
When the other people are talking about consoles, any sensible person knows they mean things like the PlayStation, Xbox or Switch.
So the differentiator these days seems to be running custom software.
Which Steam Deck is also running.
The remaining difference is "console = extra lockdown". That might be a good definition in general, but doesn't make sense in the context of the original post
> And only on PC and Mobile. Not on console.
And not the fact that it's, you know, a "console" that can be used to play "games"?
Practically? Yes, IMO. You can say it uses specialized hardware manufactured on a massive scale, with each gen being a distinct set of hardware with slight variations, but then you're describing an Apple M1 Macbook Air or Microsoft Surface.
People have and will always gain root access, but the OEM doesn't typically like this, and goes out of their way to prevent it. There may be APIs the OEM leaves open to allow the creation of, for example, XMBC, but an XBox is hardly an open, general-purpose, computing platform.
If you want to call it a console that can play games, then my custom-build Linux computer console fits that definition. Hell, I wouldn't have to even leave the computer console TUI to play Dwarf Fortress.