No u

Jerboa uses my Firefox app

I have no idea if this works iPhones because Apple pretty restrictive (Do they allow anyone to use anything other than Safari or are they still on that anti-consumer kick), but on Android you can set the browser engine the in-app browsers use. So you can set it to Firefox and then have plugins.

I’m using that now.

Or you can just turn in-app browsers off.

Depends on which browser is the default, I think. Even if that doesn’t work you can set you private DNS and block most things though.

XBMC became Kodi, you can still get that 10ft UI and it integrates with local media files like ripped DVDs and Blu-ray, or it’ll interop with any streaming service, or it’ll interop with high seas URLs.

That gave way to Plex, which is a webapp to host your local media, which has grown very large and is out of favor. Jellyfin and others have taken up the mantel.

In-between the two are the *arr suites of software which automate file sharing.

It’s a rabbit hole if you’re interested. Feel free to google any of these names and you’ll find a glut of how to articles online.

Or it’s high seas.

It’s always the high seas.

HTPC wasn’t a Windows thing though Microsoft did have Windows Media Center, which was a pretty slick interface for HTPCs

I used to use XBMC, which is now Kodi, for an interface. Before that I just used a PC running Mandrake Linux with a wireless mouse and keyboard. Haha.

Had a TV tuner, acted as a DVR, and also could play my library of SNES and NES games through it.

Same reason they spend time and money making games work on Linux.

Libreboot nowadays would most likely still contain blobs in the BIOS, but not as much as regular Coreboot. I don’t know why you’re being downvoted lol. If Coreboot is supported, they can port it to Libreboot.

I wouldn’t expect HDMI 3 given the HDMI group are openly hostile to open source implementations of HDMI 2.1.

Racing and Sports games for sure.

The community appreciates your input to the discussion.

You can almost build something like that for this price. Or you can do it if you buy some second hand stuff. But for an OEM building a few million units it would definitely be doable.

It would perform as well or better than any equivalent Windows PC. I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here.

For the average person, that is impossible. Also, you lose a lot of features compared to SteamOS. Also, the controls are (at least to me) a main selling point and there is no controller on the market that comes close to the capabilities of the Deck.

Yeah duh. A real gaming PC you’d want to hook up to your 4k TV would need to have a GPU, not just an APU. Also, having to install everything yourself kind of defeats the purpose. Do you think the Steam Deck would have been successful if it had shipped with Windows?

the point is that you don’t have to fiddle with anything, you can trust the product sold by valve to be good, you have everything preinstalled and configured, and because thousands and thousands of people have the same device it’s easy for developers to target it.

that looks like a console

Not just looks, but provides the UX of a console. So you buy it, plug it up, log in, and immediately start playing. Even consoles don’t provide that streamlined UX anymore, but ppl want all the benefits console used to provide with all the benefits PC gaming provides now. But the key part is the PC benefits don’t get in the way of the ease of it. You don’t have to install or administer a linux distro, you don’t have to twiddle settings for every game (unless you want to), etc

They released the new steam os?

Previously it was only the Debian one available

an evo212 cooler

So I only bring this up because I had my world shattered like 3 months ago when I built a new PC - the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo cooler is really expensive these days, like, $80-$90 (there are some models that use the same name but have different heat pipe configurations that drop down into the $50-$60 range, but aren’t the ol tried and true 212 that we all bought in the 2010s), and a complete ripoff, and it’s really sad.

You can get some Noctua coolers for a few more bucks, or pay a third of that price for a Peerless Assassin, or pay about half again that price for something from ID-cooling, all for similar or better performance to the 212. It’s no longer the automatic choice it once was. The king has been dethroned.

So a PC in a cool case?

The problem with going proprietary is that then, well, it’s proprietary. So either they use off the shelf components in which case it’s basically a PC, or they use custom stuff which might improve performance depending on what they do, but will make it difficult to repair and upgrade. Then you rely on Valve producing hardware components, and they’re not really a hardware company, although in fairness they’re also not doing badly at it.

Like you said, these are Steam Deck prototypes, not the controller. They made a cheap controller with the same potential profile of the Deck without the screen because it’s cheaper. It was to iterate on the Deck quickly and cheaply. They’d never release a controller like that. They do the same thing for all their products.

They already tried a ton of designs for the Steam Controller to figure out the ergonomics of that. They’ll likely iterate some more with Version 2, but it’s likely to follow the controller design, not the deck design. It has very different considerations since it doesn’t need to contain a screen.