When this gets AMD compatibility, it should be a really usefull tool for that steamdeck plugin project. Would be kind of neat if this could be controlled from the ...-menu

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: GuestI quite enjoyed Wheel of Time, and was reminded of it recently from the "tv" series adaptation (which I also enjoyed). Not yet read any of the books.

I'm opinionated about fantasy books, and Wheel of Time is no exception.
IMO, the first one is really very good, although it should be noted that the plot is very much Lord of the Rings reheated. In the second, it starts to bring you into the wider Wheel of Time universe, which has tons of interesting stuff. It's also very good. In the third, you get more of that, lots of cool weird magic stuff, lots of plot complication, lots of local colour of various sorts.
But some of the series' problems start to become noticeable around the third book; I started noticing that most of the characters were jerks, and some of the jerky things they did, the author didn't seem to notice they were being jerks. This was sort of even more so with the female characters. As complications piled on top of complication, the action started to slow down. As power levels stacked up, Jordan kept having to come up with ways to top that. Somewhere in there a new group of antagonists showed up whose defining cultural feature was indulging in squicky mind-control torture porn using these pain-conditioning leash things.
By the fifth or sixth book, I realized pretty much nothing was happening over the course of a many-hundred-page novel and I gave up. I feel like Jordan was a victim of his own success--the first couple of books sold like crazy, so someone, whether he himself or the publisher, decided he could do no wrong and didn't edit him.

I would not agree. First, I don't think characters are jerks. They have values and twists, some very opposing to mine, yet a lot of them grew close to me. There's also a ton of character development in the series and sometimes layers over layers of behavior. I very much enjoyed that part.
While some parts certainly feel long and stretched, the world building in these parts is rich. The scope of this saga is not to give you one high-fantasy culture, but multiple, sometimes very distinct, cultures. Also a lot is happening in the meta here, preparing the more dense chapters.
The TV series is cutting all that out, replacing complex characters with simple but proven motives and cutting away all cultural edges.
The wheel of time is about all that. World building and character development. If you want pure plot and action, look somewhere else. Amazon should have, too.

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I wonder if we will still discuss the stability of distributions based on own experience in a decade :D

This own experience depends on so many variables like timing, what you customized, what software and drivers you actually use, hardware... it's ridiculuous. In the end, every edge case will find distributions that are better and worse and it won't be the same. There simply is no best distribution for now.

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Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: PhiladelphusBut hey, show me a list of components that produce a device with the same features and specs as the Steam Deck and which cost less than $400 and I'll believe it.

... but volume discount has been around—as in, documented that people and companies have done this exact thing—for millennia.

True, I neglected that fact. But since it has been around so long, presumably we could look at history to make some sort of educated guess, right? Like, if I can put together a list of components that matches the Steam Deck for $500, is it reasonable to suppose that Valve have managed to shave >20% off the price to get it below $400? Or is the problem that there are so many components going into the Deck (all with their own independent economies-of-scale) that it's just impossible to make any sort of informed estimate about what Valve might (or might not) be able to achieve?

Why does a glass for storing self made jelly cost more then a glass of jelly? What does the jelly production cost? How much discount does the factory get on glasses? Are they selling the jelly at a loss?

Remember that consumer hardware is distributed with a lot of risk-management, postproduction and middlemen.
Packaging (even if sold as *bulk), multiple deliveries from factory to warehouse to warehouse to warehouse. Storage. Big resellers might jump some middlemen, yet they have their own infrastructure to care about.
Factory-to factory delivery with minimal storage is a lot cheaper then that. Also, Valve have taken over support for the chips, which was probably part of the bargain.
Considering the APU, you need to also factor in that this is a new platform for AMD so having a big customer to scale up a production line and proving the value for this will pay of for them twice. Contrary to their much more custom work for other consoles, this is a platform they can sell to multiple customers.

GPD, Aya etc. probably don't get continous factory-to-factory delivery. They buy the hardware in bulks and each bulk gets a new contract... They are probably not producing their units continuously, instead buying time-frames at some contractor. Every time that contractor changes context, things need to be rearranged, which costs a LOT of money. Valve maintain flow, only increasing production and further optimizing the workflow.

So they get the hardware a LOT cheaper and also production is a lot cheaper for them. This all comes with a lot of risk, because the money they need to put into that whole pipeline is immense and it will only pay out if demand keeps up. So, even if we knew how much Valve pays for the hardware, you can't really factor in the risk they take and companies like Aya and GPD simply don't/can't.

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Quoting: GuestHow ironic,
Pipewire (apparently broken in Arch, which uses default upstream configs) has been created by Wim Taymans, Principal Engineer at Red Hat which in turns sponsors Fedora :)

Could be a big play to get more users.

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I consider myself a heavy Linux nerd, but distrohopping isn't my thing any more. A while back, I had terrible problems with my Nvidia graphics and decided to switch from Gnome to KDE. This didn't solve anything, yet I decided to test it for a while even though I didn't like KDE...
Now about 3 years have passed and I'm still on KDE even though I still wished to go back to Gnome. If I'm to lazy to switch DEs, I certainly won't switch distros without a proper reason :)
Also, I would never go back to a stable distro. Rolling Release has proven way less problematic for me. At least on devices I regularly use.

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Quoting: slaapliedje...

I stumbled upon this yesterday, because I thought Simpsons: Hit and Run might be fun on my SteamDeck. Couldn't find it in Steam, so I googled and was directly transported to a bunch of Abandonware sites.
I read the reasoning why it's considered Abandonware and might agree, yet I had no issues finding used copies on ebay...
For me, it's mostly ok to download games I already own, be it physical or in a walled garden. As I can't find my physical copy of Simpsons: H&R any more, I nearly bought it on ebay, only to find that I already kind of lost interest in it and wouldn't want to spend money on it. That kind of was the moralic question to myself: Am I semi-pirating it because it's free or do I legitimately download it from third-party because it's abandoned. So I just moved on without this game. Maybe I'll come back to this decision in a while :D

Anyway, I'd vote for a generous abandonware exclusion from copyright law any time. Having it official would make it so much fairer.

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Quoting: razing32

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: const

Quoting: GuestI quite enjoyed Wheel of Time, and was reminded of it recently from the "tv" series adaptation (which I also enjoyed). Not yet read any of the books. Safe to say that I'll be snagging that one. I know it doesn't have a native version, but for games that old I'm not exactly expecting it. That's what I use wine for.

Had you read the books (it's the most epic saga I've ever read), you probably wouldn't have enjoyed the series. It's a horrible adaption, yet it seems like it might not come of as horrible without the reference. :D
So, don't read the books until you finished the series or just switch completely. But be aware it's a long saga (~20000 pages iirc) with very detailed descriptions.

Ha, I read the first book, asked my friends how many books there were (at the time 7 was the answer) and I responded with "He is going to die before he finishes the story..."

Did he finish it ?
I'd like to buy the books but i don't want anything incomplete.

The story is finished but the last few books were written by Brandon Sanderson after Robert Jordan died. Luckily, his wife was very involved and Brandon Sanderson became my favorite fantasy author because of his work on this. He managed to catch the spirit and the characters but luckily didn't follow Robert Jordan in writing whole chapters about clothing and jewelry :)
Finishing this series makes for one of the most memorable times in my life. Reading the last books had become addictive, nothing else could grasp my interest and it may have been kind of unhealthy. After I finished, I fell into a hole. I suddenly had so much free time to fill and had to reorganize my life. Yet damn did it feel good, because luckily the ending was damn fulfilling, epic and left me in a good mood, so I took it as a chance to reorder my priorities, reconnect to some people and look into healthy habits I'd enjoy.
Anyone who watched GoT to the end probably knows it could have gone damn wrong :D
I'm still glad about that chance to reorder my priorities, but be aware reading this is a big endeavor and might become really unhealthy. :)

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Quoting: GuestI quite enjoyed Wheel of Time, and was reminded of it recently from the "tv" series adaptation (which I also enjoyed). Not yet read any of the books. Safe to say that I'll be snagging that one. I know it doesn't have a native version, but for games that old I'm not exactly expecting it. That's what I use wine for.

Had you read the books (it's the most epic saga I've ever read), you probably wouldn't have enjoyed the series. It's a horrible adaption, yet it seems like it might not come of as horrible without the reference. :D
So, don't read the books until you finished the series or just switch completely. But be aware it's a long saga (~20000 pages iirc) with very detailed descriptions.

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Quoting: elmapulthey are even more desperate than that:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/som87v/gpd_steam_deck_is_worse_than_win_3_it_is_a_closed/ [External Link]

This is all just horrible PR, but from what I heard about their RMA policy, they already disqualified for that alone. I heard repeatedly that they expect users that get faulty devices to buy replacement parts and are then left alone with that. Who cares about their social media bs at that point?

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