I usually have to listen to a song several times before it fully “clicks” if I like it or not, so music streaming subscription is great for being able to grab any song I think I might like and throw it in trial playlist. Back when I bought/acquired music, I would skip over most music I might like because the effort wasn’t worth it for a song I wasn’t sure if I liked or not. So streaming has worked really well for me for music discovery at least.

On the bright side, I’m still getting my $8 a month early adopter price for Google music all access (now YouTube music).

I like your characterization of Doom Eternal as a nice relaxing game for when you need a break.

Yeah, it is priced kinda high. Especially since most people will want the bundle with DLC characters (Minecraft and SpongeBob characters officially confirmed, supposedly getting Avatar the last air bender, TMNT, Amogus, and others as well)

I’m bouncing between several games right now:

• Trails in the Sky First Chapter - the trails series is one I’ve always wanted to get into, so the recent remake of the first game seemed like a great place to start. Runs great on deck. Unfortunately they’re trying a new publisher (Gung-ho) for this version of the game, and they didn’t discount the game for regional pricing making it too expensive for many countries. Russia was one of the only countries with typical regional pricing, but after people pointed that out, Gung-ho decided to remove it from same in Russia rather than adjust pricing elsewhere. It’s a great game from a great developer, and it feels like some controversy over the publisher’s handling of the game is greatly hurting how it performs. It has a pretty lengthy (~10 hours) demo to try, if you’re interested.

• Sonic Racing Crossworlds - MKW was kinda disappointing (and also not on the Deck). Crosswords has been really fun actually and is scratching that itch. Runs really well on the deck, the only negative is it requires Internet when first launched (after that initial check you can go offline and still play single player or split screen multiplayer though).

• Cloverpit - this is from the same devs as Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, which is why I picked it up. It’s basically slot machine Balatro, with a horror theme (you’re locked in a room, have to earn money through gambling to make deadline amounts, miss the deadline and the floor opens dropping you to your death). Apparently the launch has been very successful (300k copies sold in 3 days), with a lot of YouTubers covering it.

Emails and other information used to buy from Jsaux’s website were being sold/passed on to spam advertisers some how. Jsaux denied they were doing it, and it’s possible it could be the company they use for payment processing or something, but it was definitely happening when using their site.

Gamingonlinux had a couple articles on it, but for some reason I’m having trouble finding them.

I have a cheap Ivoler brand dock and it’s worked really well. Not sure where to buy it besides Amazon though.

I would specifically recommend against buying from Jsaux’s website though, their website isn’t actually safe to buy from.

The two main advantages of the OLED deck are a drastically better screen, and much better battery life in demanding titles.

Games that max out the Deck’s power draw (Cyberpunk, Bladur’s Gate, etc) will typically get about 1:30 of battery life on the LCD deck, and 2:30 on the OLED deck, which is a pretty huge increase. It’s less of an issue for less demanding games, and you can always get a high output battery pack instead.

I vaguely remembered being told to ping someone over tariffs, so I did a search for tariffs within the community. The first post that came up was the one, and I found both your comment and mine pretty easily. Here’s the sopuli link to it.

I’m not sure they ever said it explicitly, but they said that selling the original 64GB LCD deck for $400 was a “painful” price point, and there were hardware pricing estimates that guessed each steam deck cost Valve around $500-550 at launch. It’s been awhile since I looked at it, I’ll see if I can get some of the relevant quotes together.

Valve originally expected to lose money on every Steam Deck sold, but thanks to high volume of units sold and other factors this ended up not being the case. Even with tariffs affecting that bottom line, I think the Decks still ended up being more profitable than they ever expected and they can afford to do sales like this, even if they potentially result in hardware being sold at a loss.

Speaking of which, @Railcar8095@lemm.ee you told me 6 months ago to ping you if tariffs come into effect and the price of the deck doesn’t increase.

You may need to switch the game from fullscreen to windowed, and try different scaling options.

It’s no longer called FSR, it’s now “Sharp” scaling filter.

To enable it, the game first needs to be running at a lower resolution than the display. You can either set the resolution lower than 1280/800 in game settings or in steam properties for that specific game. Once you’re in the game, press the QAM button (the “. . .” button), go to performance menu (circle with a lightning bolt), enable advanced view, then scroll down to the bottom. There’s “Scaling Mode” and “Scaling Filter”.

Scaling mode controls how it stretches the screen:

• auto - keeps the aspect ratio (max of x2 scaling)
• integer - scales while preserving pixel ratio, this makes it the best option for pixel art games
• fill - will fill the whole screen while keeping aspect ratio the same. If the game isn’t 16:10 ratio, it will clip off part of the video.
• stretch - fill whole screen, stretch to fit. Ignores aspect ratio, so can distort image.
• fit - preserves aspect ratio, scales to screen (like auto but no max scaling amount I think)

Scaling filter controls how it scales the game up:

• Linear - basic scaling, minimal performance impact
• Pixel - use this for pixel art games
• Sharp - previously called FSR, will add detail and sharpen the image. When you enable this, it will also add a sharpness slider beneath the scaling filter slider. Using this when upscaling to a much higher resolution display (like a 4k TV) can cause a noticeable performance hit, I recommend capping the max external display resolution to 1080p in the Steam>Display settings if you notice performance issues with this.

People with high end systems (5090s etc) are apparent having a lot of performance issues, and are unable to run the game at 60fps/4k without AI upscaling or frame generation.

There’s also a lot of complaints about stuttering, and the game wouldn’t launch at all for a lot of people when it first came out.

I wonder why they’re making a Linux native version?

I know that good Linux ports can have dramatically better performance vs Windows versions, it just usually doesn’t matter because few companies do actually good Linux ports.

I’ve long heard that his identity is an open secret and a lot of people know his actual identity. Solid chance the UK government already knows who he is.

Of the ones I’ve played, my favorites are:

• Bug Hunter
• Mortol
• Devilition
• Camouflage
• Warptank
• Progy

A lot of the other games seem really good as well. Just need more time in them. And I still have 24 games I haven’t even tried yet.

The Corvette update is awesome, it got me to reinstall the game. I need to spend some time in creative and figure out what I can really do with the system before I spend too much time on it in the regular modes though.

I recently picked up UFO50, and it’s fantastic. The individual game quality is far higher than it has any right to be for the number of games available.

I’m also trying to finish out some of my unfinished games before all the releases this month. Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, Cloverpit, and Sonic Crossworlds all are coming near the end of the month.

Wine is a compatibility layer, it works as a translator to let windows programs run on linux. You can think of it like having a translator who allows two people with different languages to talk to each other and work together.

WinBoat is completely different, this is actually running full windows in the background, and then only displaying the apps you want from it. There will be significantly more system resources used, and you won’t be able to run windows apps until the windows VM has started in the background, adding a startup delay. However the advantage is that it will support more software than wine does, with fewer issues.

Wine will always be the better option when it works, but for stuff that doesn’t work this is a decent option.

Unfortunately I haven’t used it either, so I can’t answer your questions on this. I don’t have a personal need for any windows apps on my machines, outside of steam games.