Is there a functional difference between what’s happening and martial law?

You answered your own question.

It will open PC gaming to people who couldn’t access it before. It isn’t for people who know how to build their own PCs, although even people who are tech experts would still want this sort of device.

This makes it easy for tech and tech adjacent people to recommend PC gaming to people with no tech ability.

That’s why it will be a blowout success. The Steam ecosystem is superior to every console gaming platform. Now we will have hardware that competes and exceeds current gen consoles with no maintenance or tech-nerd complications.

The steam deck was great but its specs made it a difficult sell when recommending it to people. You have to tweak a lot of settings and mess with stuff that most people don’t want to do.

This will change all of that.

Remind yourself in two years, and let’s see where it goes. I should still be here. Let’s touch base in 2 years.

A third of games? What are you smoking?

Over 95% of games in my experience work on Linux, and perform better than windows.

What kind of people are still using Windows, anyway? That supports one of the most terrible companies on the planet, invades your privacy, worms into your brain, and takes over your hardware…all for your 1 or 2 games you want to play?

This Steam Machine is going to be a blowout success. Linux gaming is superior in nearly every way. It’s cheaper, it’s more ethical, and it gives you back control.

I’m one. There are actually a lot of us, and there have been for a long time.

The fight might appear lost right now but it is far from it. The pendulum swings fast.

The creator didn’t have a good answer, so there may not be a good one for this project. But the value proposition is actually there.

These self-hosted solutions are riddled with configuration options, often obscure requirements, and countless maintenance pitfalls.

For a disciplined tech person, it is no problem to install and maintain.

For people less disciplined or non-tech, self hosting is ill-advised and can be dangerous.

But even for a tech person, when you have enough docker-compose services laying around, it can start to get a bit overwhelming to keep it all up to date, online, and functional. If you change your router etc you have to recall how things were set up, what port-forwards you need, what reverse lookups, etc etc.

There actually is a gap in usability and configuration management. I could see a product that has sensible defaults that unifies config across these self-hosted services without needing to access the command line.