Hacker News Reader

Comment by d3Xt3r | Hacker News Reader

I doubt anyone's associating the Steam Machine with the term "hacker". The "hacker" type crowd already game on Linux, they're not the target audience here. This is for the normies, for people who want to play PC games with a console-like experience, without any hassles of manual setup and tweaking that the hacker crowd normally are into.

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> for people who want to play PC games with a console-like experience, without any hassles of manual setup and tweaking that the hacker crowd normally are into.

Until they want to play Fortnite/Roblox/whatever else.

There are a lot more games in the world than Fortnite/Roblox.. and besides, those are pretty bad examples since you can also play them on Android, so it's not like you need a PC to play them in the first place.

This only really matters for children, who probably aren't the bulk of the hacker crowd.

fyi: this very web site is called ... hacker news.

The "hackers" here who are interested in this article, fall in one or more of these categories:

a) they already use Linux, but want to buy this anyway just to encourage the ecosystem

b) they want to recommend it for the normies they know, who find Linux, or gaming on Linux, daunting

So my point still stands.

it's not like I'd ever expect only real hacker news here (whatever that even means) but let's be honest for a moment this is just an ordinary consumer item lacking anything novel or innovative ... it's basically just a very large smartphone with a game library for an app store.

I don't disagree, but what this does have is commercial backing and branding, and an excuse for game devs to target it - which benefits the Linux gaming ecosystem as a whole (and non-gaming ecosystem too, like look at all the improvements coming to AMD and KDE users, thanks to Valve's involvement).

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