Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

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My main game console right now is one of those little gaming boxes you can buy on Amazon for about $400, where I have installed NixOS + Jovian to get the "SteamOS" interface.

I really like it. It really does feel like a "game console"; usually when I've made my own console using Linux, it always feels kind of janky. For example, RetroPie on the Raspberry Pi is pretty cool, but it doesn't feel like a proper commercial product, it feels like a developer made a GUI to launch games.

I have like 750 games on Steam that I have hoarded over the years, in addition to the Epic Games Store and GOG, which can be installed with Heroic, and the fact that I can play them on a "console" instead of a computer makes it much easier to play in my living room or bedroom. It even works fine with the Xbox One controllers; I use the official Microsoft USB dongle to minimize latency, it works great.

I think there actually is a chance that Valve could really be a real competitor, if not a winner.

That sounds interesting because with NixOS it should be very easy to move your config to the next thing, and honestly I prefer NixOS over Arch.

What I wanted to ask you: have you converted the device into a STB as well or is that still standalone?

I'm afraid I don't know what an STB is.

Set top box [1], like an Nvidia Shield TV [2], to play (digital) TV and other programs. My point being, would you be able to have this machine function as such (not so much portable, rather standalone with a remote control). Because that way, you take the hardware STB out of the equation, saving you (on the Nvidia Shield TV Pro) a good 200 EUR.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-top_box

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Shield_TV

Ah, sorry, didn't know the acronym.

I tried making it my main media center, but I couldn't figure out a way to get good quality streaming from the main services, since they limit the quality and bitrate pretty heavily for the browsers. I thought I could just live with it, but it was bad enough to really bother me. After a lot of effort to try and get things working with different emulators and user agent settings, I was unsuccessful getting the quality tolerable.

I haven't fully given up on that dream, but right now I'm just using an Nvidia Shield TV that I already had.

I installed NixOS + Jovian on my Steamdeck and it works great as well.

Nix support is built-in to SteamOS already btw, I used that to set up Ship of Harkinian for example.

Could you elaborate? Does steamOS ship the nix binary & mountpoints?

IIRC, the nix package manager can run entirely user-level on any distro. It doesn't ship on the Deck, but it's the same process there as anywhere else.

I meant they have set up the Nix directory so you can write to it without having to mess around with bind mounts, overlayfs, etc. because the system is normally read-only.

So all you have to do is install Nix as a user.

Which box is that? I personally have a Nvidia Shield with Steam Link to stream games from my gaming computer to my TV. I connected an Xbox controller and it works pretty well. I also use an old iPad for streaming games for games that don't lend themselves well to a controller.

It's obviously not a direct replacement since it still relies on my gaming machine, which not everyone has, but it gets a pretty good console experience, and it's portable.

Do you have link to the little gaming box?

Yep! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D733JFML?th=1

The one I ordered had 32 gigs of memory; this was more than a year ago so I'm sure there are better ones now, but I have to say that I feel like this thing "punches above its weight" in that it does seem to run a lot more stuff than I thought it would at a decent framerate.

These are the Beelink boxes.

They got very popular when they released a video of the manufacturing process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohwI3V207Ts

Wow these are so much more well made than I thought.

Hm, does it work well for games? I have a NUC I could use...

I have one of the higher-end beelinks. Super small, quiet, doesn't get hot and I can play modern AAA titles on it, driving my huge screen TV in my living room.

Sorry, I more meant "does Jovian work well?". I have a Beelink ME and love it, but I want a gaming "appliance" OS.

Jovian works pretty great actually. Once I got it set up it pretty much worked exactly as I expected.

Can you quantify this? Which Beelink? Are you powering a 4K TV? When you talk about playing modern AAA games, which ones, and what settings do you run at?

Fortnite, Cyberpunk, Starfield, probably others I'm forgetting

I believe the TV is 4K, yeah.

It's the Beelink SER9 AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 12core/24thread AI PC Turbo Freq 5.1GHz

Which is more than double the $400 box we are talking about

Very very cool! Every time I look at building a hot gaming PC I think to myself that I'm just going to play SNES games and Elden Ring, so what's the point? Something like this would be great.

Thanks for this! I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a 4K TV with my ROG Ally X right now, but I added an eGPU to get nicer 4K graphics. Very cool to hear that a mini is capable of playing it too!

Been pretty happy with my SER8 myself... though there are better models available now.

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