amlib

You always had to keep whatever youtube video downloader you were using updated at a minimum. For a good while login cookies were only required for downloading restricted videos (whatever youtube considered 18+). Now you need half a web browser to do anything and the update cadence is even crazier.

Except for the hundred thousands if not millions of people who lost their Minecraft account due to the way Microsoft handled multiple successive account migrations, also including the many accounts that were stolen due to lax security.

And since digital ownership legislation is a joke consumers have pretty much no recourse.

Upon reading your comment I just booted quake3 in q3dm17 nightmare mode and immediately started having a blast. Was about to win the match but a bot took both the rail gun and the quad damage, it was a blood bath.

I mean the devices where steam operates are fully open, even the ones valve makes. You can install any OS you wish, any software or competing store front and thus give them 0% cut.

You wouldn't complain that Walmart takes a X% cut when you have a healthy competitive market and can chose other store fronts with better prices.

They are the only platform owners championing for an open platform. That should be enough to consider them above all others, no trust required.

It looks great on youtube at 4k, at least if you are somewhere where they are transmitting it through youtube.

But also the reality is that most people have their devices connected through a shitty wi-fi connection and may be effectively limited to 50 or even less mbps, specially if you consider the unpredictability that comes with it.

I remember noting how many of my games ran worse back in 2009 when migrating to windows 7. Most people discredited it as nvidia drivers being worse due to the new vista driver model (wdm or whatever), but I was never convinced.

And if you spent all that money on a single computer there was the expectation of sharing it with the whole family.

And with modern streaming software like Sunshine/Moonlight you can easily defer high performance tasks to a powerful machine at home. You are truly free to use any device from the last 15 years as a somewhat dumb terminal if you invest some time setting those things up... or even easier if you just need ssh.

I also fail to see how an ML model is necessary for what is essentially an AGC (Automatic Gain Control). Even something fancy following the EBU R 128 standard like https://lsp-plug.in/?page=manuals&section=autogain_stereo will be orders of magnitude more performant.

I do find the "out-of-band" solution of adjusting volume with an IR remote interesting but this thing is so vibecoded to hell and back and there is no source code to speak off... hard pass.

I just think that phones and specially old ones are quite bad at being repurposed, its hard to work with them when they were purposely engineered that way. You will have much better results with an old pc desktops or pc notebook. Some may even be as performant as the steam machine, just don't expect low power usage and something small and good looking for the living room, a sore point in pc desktops that the steam machine tries to address.

> when an old sub $99 mobile device can power three generation old games as well, and connect to a monitor

Running an outdated, out of support version of android with limited app availability and a crappy selection of poorly maintained emulation forks... with a buggy GPU driver that causes so many visual and performance issues on a digital platform that does everything they can keep you from installing your choice of OS, let alone the lack of usual niceties that desktop operating systems get you. It will do in a pinch but I don't think anyone who likes emulating stuff enjoys using a system like this. Even a new flagship phone will share some of these issues and if you have an iphone you will pay to have an still inferior solution that can vanish at moments notice if apple decides the emulator your purchased isn't compliant to their draconian guidelines or isn't compatible with newer apis. I guess at least the UI/UX will be nice.

> he expiry date is enforced for signing new binaries

Does this means that updating my system kernel would fail or even break boot?

Your response is essentially OPs reasoning, read it again :)

Anyways, just wanted to add that the steam machine and PCs killer differentiator: a truly open platform that no mac, ps5 and other consoles can offer. Do whatever you want, install whatever software you want, whatever OS you want. Break the rules, face the consequences. Live life like a living being, not as a slave to some corpo.

It's still missing wi-fi, bluetooth, sc dongle, sd card reader, (frugal) led bar, the hdmi cec functionality and whatever you value yourself for assembly, installation, troubleshooting and tweaking time (between half an afternoon to a whole day). Dealing with pc bioses is tedious and tweaking fan behavior and thermals could take a whole other day, which you are gonna need because the cheapo case you've picked up only comes with a single loud fan and poor ventilation for pc case standards, so you either gonna have a loud motherfucker or a cooked to perfection unreliable rig.

Let alone having to put the PC on the floor because it won't fit anywhere else in the living room.

Of course it was, they are talking about the 2012~2015 (not sure about the exact date) steam machine that was released and failed. It took a long time for enough pieces to fall into place that would lead to the success of the steam deck and now the, too soon to call a success, launch of the new steam machine (2026).

If that's the cost of a _working_, well supported and _viable_ open platform, than so be it. People, especially the ones here at hacker news, ought to give way more value to this, else we lose it all.

That's because you've been making a concerned effort to buy usb-c stuff. The average consumer has way more usb-a stuff than usb-c, even more so when talking about pc desktop users.

I even bet many mac users wished their device had a usb-a port or two in order to not be so dependent on adapters, hubs and docks.

> indie devs have easy access to release on PS5, latest Xbox, Switch alongside Steam simultaneously

And yet steam's indie library far outpaces what all other consoles indie games combined provide. Also you get access to a vast amount of games distributed independently and other stores that the PC ecosystem has available.

> the subscription any of those users have (a prerequisite for online or multiplayer access) also comes with many many free games, games that are otherwise $4 - $25 without the subscription

I don't think most PC gamers like being told every month what games they have to play in order to maximize their subscription value. They view it as wasting 100$ yearly just to have the ability to play online along other features that are free on PC.

> people already in those ecosystems have been accumulating (unplayed) titles just like Steam users meme about, and as soon as they sign in on their new console all are available

That's a legit improvement from the console platforms but since it was only a change made in the previous gen you can only go back a single generation for now. On steam your library might encompass stuff sold three generations ago and if you are willing to take advantage of PC gaming outside steam you can go as far back as the invention of video games itself with emulators.

Given that it's an open platform your device isn't hostage to valve's whims nor are you powerless to overrule any DRM you judge unfair.

> - MusicBee. There just does not seem to be a good music manager for Linux that can replace MusicBee. I rarely use it as a music player, there are dozens of great options for Linux music players, but MusicBee feeds my Airsonic instance, and I have not found a good way to manage music graphically in a way that maintains this setup.

For a traditional "all batteries included" collection management music player try Strawberry and Quod Libet. You should also look into the MuiscBrainz Picard tagger, it's a bit unwieldy to use but is very powerful once you learn it's wonky workflow.

> Try doing a full screen rdp session from Linux at 4K resolution.

You should be using Sunshine/Moonlight for that anyway. You will get ultra smooth low latency 4k@120fps streaming to and from linux.

I regularly play games streamed from my noisy big linux pc all the way across to the living room linux pc. It's brilliant.

I bet that $5000 PC came only with a 3050 and some high end shaders lag on it lol

Is it really worth it to cause a global economical collapse and harm society well-being to an unimaginable degree just to find out if it is viable?

Why cant it naturally grow and prove it's worth?

> titlebar

Consistency of titlebars has been dead in every OS for decades now. This is not even a flatpak problem anyway, but I do think wayland/gnome ought to have some kind of fallback decoration. This wouldn't even be meant to solve this problem, but would be a nice gesture for situations where a dev really don't care about how the decoration functions or looks, like when opening a game window or movie player like mpv or even just having a friction-less experience when creating your first window in a new app.

> tray icon w/light and dark mode support

Flatpak and specially gnome are championing the background app portals. I have reservations on how it's not a full replacement for tray icons, but Desktop Environments are free to implement it like a tray icon.

> global keyboard shortcut

AFAIK it's a solved problem, but there is an adoption lag for DE's and apps.

> redraw events after resizing

Not sure what you mean by that? Apps resize fine in flatpak

Every problem in flatpak can be addressed. It sucks they weren't addressed sooner but I suggest you look into the efforts being made for flatpak-next. Even right now it's the closest thing we got to a unified gui experience in linux.

But then you run into the problem of apps assuming the tray icon exists or is visible, but isn't, leading to problems such as the program just disappearing when you close it's window with no way to reopen it (some do reopen when you try re-executing it, others do nothing or just spawn a whole new instance...) or even having no access to some function that is exclusive to the tray icon menu.

All these issues can happen in any platform, Linux is just the more annoying/unpredictable one, with GNOME taking the cake for being so obtuse. There is either a carelessness from the developer or the ad-hoc nature of those "tray icon" systems is to blame.

I think this is expecting a full block down to the domain? But most browser ad blockers are a lot more granular than that, and for good reason. Blocking a whole domain can have a lot of undesirable side effects.

Until you connect a second monitor.

Random? I saw it happen on every linux machine running X I came across over the last two decades, it wasn't just mine, it was colleagues machines and so on. Maybe if you combined KDE, AMDGPU drivers, the right distro and X from around 2022 and onwards you could get a mostly smooth experience, but the behavior when pushing the system a little bit or trying high refresh rate would prevail.

The point is, even if you could get a smooth experience it was at best an exception, specially across most of X11 life. There are many reasons why the Steam Deck shipped with Steam running through the gamescope micro compositor, and one of them was sidestepping some of the X11 jank.