You mean the one that was released in 2015, and they stopped selling in 2019, then continued to support for at least four more years?

That’s the one?

And we compare that to what? Can I get support on my Xbox 360 wireless controllers still? How about my dual shock controller for a PS3? Google surely still updates the stadia controller, right? They didn’t give up on it less than a year after the stadia service was taken down… Right?

With the exception of maybe 8bitdo or something, their support for that controller was extremely good, and the fact that they made it 10 years ago, and stopped selling it 6 years ago, but only stopped supporting it 2 years ago, that’s pretty good, IMO.

Exactly right. And this is driving my point. There are options. If you don’t like one option, try something else.

Pretty much every controller design has positives and negatives that change depending on who is using the controller. I enjoy the xbox one/series controllers for the most part, and they’re fairly reliable and my usual go to. I also have a dual shock somewhere that I don’t really use, and a stadia controller that was patched to work with anything, which gets more action than the dual shock, but not nearly as much as the Xbox controllers.

I usually play with kb/mouse, so controllers are already pretty rare in my gaming experience, but they make an appearance from time to time.

With these new steam controllers, I might see a good reason to use a controller more frequently… Especially if I can afford the $900+ that the steam machine will probably cost… They said it would be “competitively” priced in relation to PCs, not consoles. So I’m expecting $900+ right now. Time to start saving.

I would argue that, as long as valve gets it out the door, they support it. Index owners are still supported and that’s from a headset released in 2019. The oculus rift CV1 released in 2016 and it was killed around 2020 when oculus was purchased by Meta. Four years, and the headset is basically a paperweight for anyone who still owns one. A $600 USD paperweight.

Considering that the connection cable was the first thing to die and in 2020 meta stopped selling those cables, anyone I know who had one, including myself, either stopped using it, or was forced to stop when their cable inevitably broke.

There’s a dozen examples. The og steam controller, the steam link, and more recently the steam deck, which is still going strong.

Yes, they have issues getting ideas out the door, but when they get out the door, they’re supported for a good long while.

These don’t look like “we have an idea to build a thing” that will never make it to market… This looks like “we finally got a delivery date for these finished units and we’re excited about it”

I’m looking forward to it, no matter what. Valve has time and time again proven itself to be more consumer focused than other tech companies. More from them is good IMO.

That’s a big challenge, but a worthwhile one. The reason that Microsoft exploded in the DOS era was because it ran on everything that was “IBM compatible” aka x86. Meanwhile Apple was over there with a competitive product, but you could only run the software on their OS that ran in their hardware. People were able to get cheap third party x86 compatible computers and run MS-DOS (and later Windows), and they were not locked into a specific vendor doing top to bottom hardware/software support.

If they do this right, they’ll be the go to option for a lot of people who generally use their PC primarily for gaming.

As someone with hands on the larger side, small controllers suck for us too.

The point you should be focused on is having a diversity in controller options, not that any one controller is good/bad.

It is entirely subjective to say the controller is good. Your definition of good won’t be my definition of good. Your taste and opinion is just as valid as mine, and I don’t impose my preferences on you.

I don’t know how big that controller is, since no banana was provided for scale. It could be huge and unwieldy, or it could be very tiny. One size never fits all.

At the end of the day, if you don’t like it, don’t buy it, and/or don’t use it. This is +1 option in the controller space, and that kind of competition is good no matter what opinion you have.

Yup. I agree. I was just checking to see if that was the case.

I was certainly hoping it was, but I wanted to see what other people’s experiences have been.

Thanks for the conversation.

See, that’s what I was thinking. I’ll have to do more research, but I would think all the overhead from Windows being Windows, would kind of diminish the gap between running it natively on Windows, and using proton or something so you can run it on Linux.

The overhead on both should be fairly similar, though with how Windows is, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was slower.

Okay, real talk.

I know there’s probably 100 videos on this, but I don’t have time to watch any of them right now…

How much performance is lost/gained from using Linux to play games via proton?

I’m certain any game with a native Linux version will work great, I’m mostly concerned with the ones that need some kind of emulation layer.

I know there’s doubt as to the validity of the claims. I only want to say this: when “AI” takes jobs, who is there to plug things in to make the “AI” machine go?

Sounds like Amazon fucked around and found out… Allegedly.

I work in IT and far be it for me to tell you what OS to use on your own computer.

The only thing I want to die right now, is the AI bubble. Just pop already. Holy fuck what a worthless endeavor this has been.

We live in wild times

I’ve been meaning to donate to those guys.

I use their site frequently. I love it, and it can’t be cheap to keep that stuff online.

This is a completely valid concern. I recently moved my homelab from core 2 era xeons (not second Gen core i-series… Core2), over to Xeon E5 v4 processors. I looked today and the systems take about the same amount of power, but now instead of six cores, I have 10, and they’re newer, faster in every way…

Power draw didn’t change but now I can run something like 3-4x the workloads, which means I can cut the size by 1/3rd and I would drop power consumption and gain more computing power.

There is absolutely a limit to what’s useful. You won’t find anyone running a Pentium 3 anymore, even with Linux. It’s just not sensible.

I’d argue that anything core i-series 4th Gen or older, probably needs to be decommissioned soon, if not already. Most of the workloads that you could use that stuff for can easily be handled by a raspberry Pi, which will use less than 1/10th the power to do it.

Basically, if what you’re doing can be 100% completed in whole on a pi, either you need to upgrade, or simply move it to a pi. Simple as that. Anything else is just burning power and heating your home with little benefit.

A combination of warranty expiry, the tenancy to replace instead of repair/upgrade, Windows 10 being the go to, even after W11 launched, and the W10 end of life, all combine into a neat pile of ewaste from enterprises that’s flooding the market.

It’s a great time for those of us that use enterprise company discards as computers.

I’ve seen worse deals. The platform itself is probably worth that much (meaning the mainboard, chassis, and all the accompanying stuff like heatsinks and power supplies)… 6th gen CPUs are probably dirt cheap, assuming those systems use a socketed CPU, and you wanted to upgrade to something more than an i3. I can’t imagine RAM would be much more.

You can probably turn these into very decent little machines for under $100 each and a bit of effort.

It really depends on whether you need the extra capability for a bit of effort or you’re fine with the i3 with 4G RAM.

I usually want to replace the storage on a used system with something new or refurbished because of wear and tear, but that’s me. Still, that’s not a bad deal. Free would be a great deal, but I’m not sure you could ask for better.

My go to for reliable Linux platforms is anything off-lease. Workstation class systems are extremely robust most of the time. I have some that have been in 24/7 operation since I bought them years ago and they’re showing zero signs of slowing down. I love it.

Ewaste is also a good place to look for still good but deemed unworthy of use by a faceless, soulless corporation stuff. Usually tends to be a bit older, but it’s usually fine.

Have fun friends, there’s no wrong answers.

Big thumbs up from me on the no iPhone/iPad policy.

That crap is ewaste as soon as Apple inc, decides it’s not worth supporting anymore with no option to load a different OS on it. Arguably, it’s ewaste before that, but I digress.

It just sucks that the hardware is made specifically to be incapable of running anything but the OS it was built for, which is entirely controlled by a profit-driven company by way of closed source software.

Say all the bad things you want about them (I certainly do), but it’s hard to say that their hardware isn’t good. It’s just sabotaged at the factory by their firmware and OS, condemning it to a mediocre and finite existence.

That’s fair. The Wi-Fi problem of everyone dogpiling everything onto it, needs to be solved for. We either need to make it easier for people to use alternatives, or we’re going to continue to see growing demand for more Wi-Fi spectrum allocations that will never quite be enough.

Powerline holds promise if they can get the technology to a functional level where each household can get setup with powerline in such a way that it works adequately, and is cheap/easy for end users. then the tech industry would need to basically build the standard into power supplies. Even power units for cellphones, tablets, laptops, etc, could have powerline integrated so you’re off Wi-Fi while charging, and the power brick would operate a bit like a USB connected charging dock…

But all of this is based on an easy to deploy, consumer friendly way to add powerline networking that doesn’t suck… So far, the companies making powerline adapters have not solved that problem.

You see, people in rentals have more reason to want to run wires, because usually the wireless airspace in rentals is more saturated than other locations.

There’s more interfering devices and networks in an apartment buildings just simply due to the density of people. Everyone wants/needs their own Wi-Fi, and because of the relatively limited bandwidth available on all the bands, you’re very likely to be stomping on someone else or have them stomp on you.

I actually knew a guy who took the time to hack into all of his neighbors Wi-Fi networks to change everyone’s wireless channel settings so that he would have a clearer Wi-Fi channel for himself. This was back in the mid to late 2010s some time. That person has since relocated, and they never had any malicious intent for the people they “hacked” into. Either way, the fact that he felt like he needed to do it is the point. There’s a lot of networks and a lot of interference in those situations.

The irony is that if everyone put up a couple of access points at relatively low power each, then they would interfere less with their neighbors, and with their neighbors doing the same, they would be interfered with less, and everyone would have a better time with it. I don’t think I’ve met someone besides myself, who didn’t buy the biggest and most powerful Wi-Fi router they could, and crank the amplitude up to 11 just to push signal through walls and overpower the signals coming from their neighbors. With everyone doing this, is a race to see who has the most powerful Wi-Fi to drown out everyone else. These two ideas are in direct conflict with eachother.

I ran two wireless N access points when I lived in an apartment. I identified pretty early on that there was a wet wall in the middle of my unit, in the kitchen, which sat between the bedrooms and the living room. The washroom had a different wet wall, and that was in the corner of the unit, so no problems there. I basically placed one access point on each side of the wet wall, one in the living room, the other in the bedroom, and enabled all of the roaming features I possibly could. I didn’t really ever notice any trouble switching between access points on my phone while moving around the place, so the two acted as a single network, and I never had an issue with dead spots. The system I used also monitored channel usage, and would change the wifi channels if the channel got busy, so I didn’t really have any trouble with people interfering with me. It wasn’t the fastest, but neither was the Internet, we only got about 50mbps service there.

By all accounts, apartments should be the one place that needs alternatives the most, but I have yet to find any apartment that has Ethernet built in.