The poor vita rejected by Sony is so good I’ve decided to skip on a switch for now because it is that good.
I hope the steam deck goes down the same path and am eagerly waiting for prices to drop on the used market.
Along with easy persistent soft mods.
I expect in the coming gens, console hacking will reach borderline impossible levels when things get replaced with memory safe languages. Probably all that’s left is cpu glitching with power and clock attacks.
The hardware exploit is still usable in the latest models but it’s harder to access. You require soldering a mod chip to the switch rather than sliding a jig in the controller rail.
But regardless, I think hardware security is outpacing hackers abilities. The cat and mouse game is becoming increasingly one sided.
I got interested in this from CollapseOS and Collapse Informatics, imagining a day when we lose our ability to make advanced microchips, but still have salvagable ones laying around.
In terms of actual power, once you get the steam deck hooked to an external monitor with whatever peripherals you need like keyboard, it's just fine as a dev device, or for editing photos in dark table or running music production software. And, obviously, for gaming, works well, all in Linux.
In terms of using the onscreen keyboard as a "handheld dev device" I think one of those competitors with a miniature sized physical keyboard built in would probably be better, or there's a whole scene I glimpsed once of people making mini clamshell designs of machines with mini keyboards. The touchpads work ok but it's just infuriatingly slow compared to a keyboard, especially once you start needing brackets, parentheses, etc.
On a related note, mine is in almost mint condition, but I'll make sure to let the modders know if I decided to get the upgraded one.
If you try it out drop the devs a donation! They’re super talented and deserve all the respect.
- 5G radio
- SD card slot
- HEADPHONE JACK!
Then 3 weeks later LG quietly announces "yeah we're not making phones anymore. Sorry!"
Which, sure, fine. Fair enough LG. But at least let us unlock our bootloaders and put custom ROM's on the thing! What are you afraid of, we won't go out and buy a new Samsung phone instead?
For lots of folks, as long as things are working, they don't care how. Limiting such a law to out-of-support hardware would give a clear value-add of "Your phone stopped working, but if this legislation got passed, it could keep working".
(I personally would love the right to control all my hardware, but that's a much tougher sell.)
Haven’t reached the ID or update server for weeks? - probably no need to complain to the user every time they connect to a network. Even better, implement “Service Discontinued”, so the device either stops checking permanently or only checks occasionally and doesn’t report the now expected failure.