Absolutely, I agree. I think we are likely to see a shift in what indie devs use for their game engines (love2d, Godot, etc.) as PC specs stagnate, and I am of the opinion that GOG will see an increase in sales, too.
The “runs like shit” games have a shrinking market.
Inb4 we get astroturfed “Luddites” telling us to just abandon electricity and live like the Amish.
It’s not a win-win, it’s a silver lining amongst a shitstorm of suck.
Why? Because what if you’re not trying to upgrade but just maintain? What if your RAM fails? Or your GPU? Now you’re out there with the AI tech bros vying for a piece of a production line that you have no influence over, but they do. If you just built your rig, you might be safe to wait a while, but what if you built in 2020? Those parts are getting old, by computer standards; they don’t last forever.
We don’t actually know when prices will normalize, because nobody is calling in the IOUs, and nobody is clamping down on that circular economy; 2027 is just a guess. We might be waiting even longer.
You just described the AAA gaming market almost to a T.
The indie market, on the other hand, typically cares about what they produce, and you’re far more likely to get optimized games there that don’t require extra launchers, internet connections, or a massive GPU—not that it doesn’t happen there, mind you, but it’s going to tend to be more of a skill issue than a profit-driven one.
Also, there’s still very good games in the retro space.
This seems pretty cool. I have an old Android tablet I’d love to try this on, but it’s got pretty weak stats compared to more contemporary devices; I wonder if this could work…?
I would be curious to find out why, honestly. Is there some economic factor? Has Adobe thoroughly captured the market? Is it cultural? I know the comment author speculates that it’s a cultural/political shift, but I’m curious what the data would show!
It’s been a hot minute since I installed Bazzite, but it might even come with Heroic preinstalled. I think it did come with Lutris by default, as you say.
I sincerely mean this: thank you for your sacrifice. I wish there were more people like you who were willing to make the sacrifices necessary to stick it to the big corpos.
I’ll be excited if Linux hits 20% total market share, which is about where Apple sits last time I checked. That would put Linux squarely as a contender for normies.
First tech device I’ve ever bought where I didn’t feel some amount of buyer’s remorse. There’s nothing I dislike about it, and I can even install my own distro on it, if I so desire. Because of the form factor, I’ve even been able to tackle my backlog!
CachyOS has a handheld option, too. You can slap that on there to get a more typical Arch experience, or install Bazzite to keep the benefit of an immutable system but without the A/B system partitioning.
You just described Bazzite. You can literally install the KDE version, same as you’d find on a Deck, and get right to gaming. No tinkering required. Steam is installed by default, Bluetooth works as expected, USB controllers work when plugged in.
The only time you might “tinker” with gaming is when you want to install, say, an emulator or Heroic from the Discovery store (flatpak) to play your non-Steam games, all of which is optional.
SteamOS isn’t going to offer significant benefit, except it might get Valve-specific fixes before they upstream the patches. If you’re waiting around, expecting SteamOS to be some shift in the distro landscape, I think you’re going to be disappointed.
According to the article, it might be a company in China, but that remains to be seen. They could just as easily pivot into AI bullshit to try to get a piece of that pie before the bubble pops.
Exactly. They’re okay with the fascist Xitpool, but if any regular dev ever crossed those “guidelines,” they’d be banned in a heartbeat.
Probably true, but iirc, there are already people planning to keep X11 going, because change means fucking up their personal workflow.
I’ll just download some, no biggie.
Same with CachyOS, but Loss32 isn’t just trying to run an on-demand emulation layer within your DE, it’s trying to be the always-on default. It’s ambitious, to be sure!
…OpenAI now faces calls for sanctions and demands to retrieve and share potentially millions of deleted chats long thought of as untouchable in the litigation.
Proof that chats are never deleted, they’re just hidden and archived. Stop giving the slop bots free training data.
Similar ideas but different approaches. ReactOS is trying to essentially reverse engineer Windows, whereas Loss32 is going to run literally everything in Wine.
I’m kind of excited about this one, because it’s likely to uncover issues in Wine and upstream any improvements they make.
Same. I’m thinking about replacing the PSU, which is one of the original parts, to ensure the rest of the parts don’t fail due to improper power delivery.
At least PSUs haven’t yet spiked in price.