smoothbrain coldtakes

You betcha. Depending on what the next iteration of the Deck is like, I might just pick up an OLED when they go on sale.

A full install of Windows runs games fine. It doesn’t last long though. Bazzite was not working well when I tried it a few weeks ago. There are a few things that don’t work properly including no control over RGB settings.

I put the stripped down IoT version of Windows on mine. It doesn’t have anything preinstalled. No store, no teams, no xbox, no nothing out of the box. Combine that with a basic telemetry disabling script and you can have better performance. The Armory Crate app handles all of the firmware and drivers. I’m able to stretch the battery almost an hour longer.

Windows actually can run kind of alright when you get rid of all of the bullshit. It’s not going to be as efficient as Linux, and it’s sure as hell not going to be as efficient as a Linux built around a specific set of hardware. It remains to be seen what kind of optimizations MS may introduce when they build a handheld.

I remember it being one of my favored chosen out of the plethora of random third party devices I had laying around. This was a step above Mad Catz for sure, but definitely still below the original controllers.

This is a Nyko Air Flow controller. I had one for the original Xbox. It was supposed to keep you from sweating during long sessions of gameplay, because it was ventilated and had a fan on the back. To be honest, I don’t remember it being excellent at keeping you cool. I think the fan was pretty lousy, but it was a great gimmick none the less.

I had a lot of weird controllers back then. Some good, some bad. Most of them Mad Catz.

This article takes a bunch of time to really just say nothing. Like of course if you ask non-techies what brands they can think of they’re going to rattle off Disney and Starbucks before Nvidia.

The average person doesn’t know Nvidia the same way they don’t know other hardware manufacturers down to the component, especially for datacenter scenarios. They’re not going to be able to list things that are driving forces in the tech industry, because it’s not anything they will be able to interact with day-to-day. The average person doesn’t run the LLM themselves. PC gamer knowledge is also pretty peripheral

As the most valued company during a gold rush, does it really matter how much the average person knows your name if all the people with the money already do? It’s not like my mother and my sister are going to be buying graphics cards to run LLMs any time soon. There’s clearly a clientele for this and it’s not the average person. The fact that they produce consumer equipment is literally not at all what’s giving them their new valuation.

The peak status any Canadian can achieve is to be commemorated by the Americans.

It’s a great concept but such an awful name. “Return of the ugly” is just such a bad and clunky title.

Housing Bubble 2: Impending Crash Boogaloo

Housing Bubble 2: Boomer Madness

Housing Bubble 2: Ah shit here we go again

You can check the md5 hash checksum provided by Microsoft to verify the authenticity. Massgrave gets it from Microsoft, it’s a legit ISO just rehosted.

Yeah, the Windows handhelds are basically glorified laptops. This was kind of the approach with the ROG ALLY anyways with the XGM port, allowing connection to an eGPU enclosure with up to a 4090 inside. It just runs a full blown version of Windows and you can even put on a pro license and do dumb shit like have WSL or Hyper-V available on the device.

I have a ROG ALLY and I’ve debloated it to hell, but it’ll never match the power savings I would achieve if it was Linux-based.

I’ve been following Chimera and Bazzite on their progression for developing distros for the Windows handhelds, but it’s going to be a while before they will be fully viable on any handhelds.

Steam will always be ahead because they control the hardware and the software and they are able to fine tune the software to their very specific hardware, which is simply not happening for the Windows handhelds.

Yeah, but it doesn’t come standard on these devices. It’s literally just a full install of 11, with Teams and everything.

As an alternative you can try using the streaming service through any Chromium browser.

Whenever I’ve used Linux to stream, it’s always been through the browser, and it’s generally worked fine for me.

Yeah I tried it last night just to fuck around and so much stuff doesn’t work properly.

When you flip into desktop mode it just immediately crashes.

I am pretty sure the entire library is not available to stream, but you can install all of it on Windows. Bazzite is also not fully compliant with the hardware yet.

There’s a list of problems and workarounds, but it’s listed as gold rating which is better than a lot of other handhelds. I would not be able to stand the LEDs being at full brightness all the time, it would infuriate me.

How long ago did you try this?

I’ve been keeping up with Bazzite and Chimera, and it looks like they’ve made some progress.

The ROG Ally is listed at gold level compatibility, denoting it requires a few workarounds and has some caveats. I would not be able to get over having no control over the LEDs, so I’ll keep an eye out for a bit later as well.

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There are a few projects like Bazzite and Chimera which have versions for desktops and other handhelds, but they’re not really at maturity yet for the handhelds other than the Steam Deck.

Since they’re all running AMD hardware, what I anticipate is that eventually the Linux variants designed for them will be significantly more optimal for the devices, much more than the bullshit full Windows install. You do lose out on Gamepass games though, but that’s pretty much the only thing you gain by going Windows in the first place.

I compromised with my ROG Ally and ran a bunch of debloating scripts so I could have my Gamepass games available. I would rather be running Bazzite on it, which runs excellently on my laptop. It requires some funky BIOS fuckery to achieve basic functionality right now though, so it’s definitely a project to undertake later.

I think you are misunderstanding the article.

Windows for ARM is designed specifically for ARM, and it has the translation layer. The translation layer effectively allows it to function as if it’s running an x86 Windows install off the bat by offering the ability to run x86 applications on the ARM hardware. It’s not actually running an x86 OS.

The chipset is very powerful but it doesn’t require additional hardware to achieve this translation. The additional processing power built into these chips are NPUs (Neural Processing Units) which are designed to more effectively run ML/AI/LLM workloads. The translation system just works on the normal raw processing power of the machine, just the same as the M-series Macs.

The same amount of fools who created the largest civilian surveillance network with Ring doorbells.

On paper the Intel processor is much better than the Zen 1 Extreme chip, but lack of optimizations remains the main bottleneck.

I knew Intel would incrementally improve the support for the device, because we saw how they handled the Arc cards. They were not great at first but then a driver update was pushed that increased efficacy by almost double bringing the cards on par with low and mid-rangers from the other manufacturers.

Hopefully Intel’s support improves more and the field becomes additionally competitive.

Microsoft has a translation layer like Rosetta. It’s called Prism.