MudMan

Eden/Azahar seem to be the current meta replacement for the newer Nintendo platforms. I wonder how much of that is a crowdfunded assessment of quality and how much is a result of modern emu communities being driven by preinstalled bundles in launchers, handhelds and install scripts (think ES-DE standards or Retrodeck/Emudeck defaults).

Either way, hey, they work fine, so… yay?

I suppose it makes more sense the less you want to do and the older your hardware is. Even when repurposing old laptops and stuff like that I find the smallest apps I’d want to run were orders of magnitude more costly than any OS overhead. This was even true that one time I got lazy and started running stuff on an older Windows machine without reinstalling the OS, so I’m guessing anything Linux-side would be fine.

After a OS update? I mean, I guess, but most things are going to be in containers anyway, right?

The last update that messed me up on any counts was Python-related and that would have got me on any distro just as well.

Once again, I get it at scale, where you have so much maintenance to manage and want to keep it to a minimum, but for home use it seems to me that being on an LTS/stable update channel would have a much bigger impact than being on a lightweight distro.

I’m sidetracking a bit, but am I alone in thinking self hosting hobbyists are way too into “lightweight and not bloated” as a value?

I mean, I get it if you have a whole data center worth of servers, but if it’s a cobbled together home server it’s probably fine, right? My current setup idles at 1.5% of its CPU and 25% of its RAM. If I turned everything off those values are close to zero and effectively trivial alongside any one of the apps I’m running in there. Surely any amount of convenience is worth the extra bloat, right?

Well, yeah, but those principles don’t typically relate to videogame companies nor to purchase habits regarding 30 year old videogames.

Voting with your wallet is ultracapitalist, self-serving non-activism people deploy performatively to make themselves feel better about stuff they don’t care that much about, not “principles”. No offense.

“Principles”? Man, is that self-indulgent.

It’s been EA since a different millenium. I think it’s time to get over it.

FWIW, the remake itself was made by an external studio including members of the original team and they apparently collaborated closely with some sort of consulting group of modders and preservation-focused community people.

It’s pretty good. Comes with both C&C and Red Alert, plus a bunch of extras. Definitely worth it.

I mean, they published Split Fiction and Tales of Kenzera this year and their Star Wars games were more than decent (let’s hear it for the atrociously underrated X-Wing revival they made with Squadrons). They also published the C&C Remaster that same year, which I feel doesn’t get enough credit despite getting a lot of credit. Probably one of the best examples of one of those in recent memory.

Let’s not be disingenuous, none of that is their bread and butter, but it’s not like they were entirely dormant.

I mean… I own both a LCD and an OLED Deck.

I would absolutely not use it as a computer without a dock and I certainly wouldn’t use it as a media player.

Other handhelds maaaaybe. The Legion Go has a stand and detachable controllers, so it could be a thing if it didn’t have the worst speakers ever devised by a human being. The GPD Win 4, the GPD Win Mini, the Ayaneo Slide and the Aya Flip all have some semblance of a keyboard, so you can get away with some stuff you can’t on the Deck or the Ally. I don’t think they make sense as a main computing device for the money, though, as they don’t have even the Deck’s low entry point as an excuse.

FWIW, the optical nub on the Win 4 is the best pointer device in any of these, and even with that and the physical keyboard I still wouldn’t use it to replace a laptop for media consumption if given the option. If I had a single device I could pick up I would sooner look into the ASUS Flow line of convertibles than into any current handheld, although you can certainly get a much cheaper all-rounder laptop than that.

Cool, so you really really wanted a handheld.

Which is fine. Go nuts. Love me a handheld.

But “the best all rounder” it definitely is not. There is a big difference between needing a dock, a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse versus just a mouse for fundamentally the same experience. If you’re into the ergonomics of a separate monitor then you’re looking for something else than “an all rounder”, you’re looking for a desktop replacement specifically. That’s not the same thing. And then I’d say the Deck still wouldn’t be how I fix that problem, honestly.

Also, FWIW, I don’t think the Deck is particularly good at anything that is not gaming. The 800p screen is not good enough for media consumption, especially given that the thing has no easy way to handle it other than gripping it with both hands. No stand, no easy way to one-hand it, tiny screen… Yeah, not how you want to watch a movie. Especially not on the LCD model, which is the only one under 500.

I agree that it’s a good cheap PC handheld. I don’t think it’s anything but that, though. If it’s the only device you can afford I genuinely don’t think it makes much sense, and in almost every other circumstance either spending more on a better desktop/laptop or splitting your budget between a cheaper work PC and a Deck is a better solution.

I think if you’re considering a Deck or a console it’s a different conversation, but as your main computing device? Yeah, no, not a recommendation from me at all.

That’s a bad use case, honestly. I mean, sure, you can do it, but… why?

The deck starts at 400 bucks (yeah, I know there’s a sale now, that’s not the base price). But that SKU comes with only 256 Gigs of storage and 16 gigs of RAM. You need a keyboard, mouse, monitor and dock to use it as a desktop PC, and now… well, it’s a desktop PC, you can’t move that set up with you to do anything other than play games.

What you want is… you know, a laptop. If you want some gaming ASUS will throw in a dedicated GPU for the price of all that loose hardware. And, you know, your keyboard and monitor can go in your backpack instead of being locked to a desk.

It’s fine if you really really want a handheld and your other tasks are a secondary concern, but if you can only afford one cheap device and you want an all-rounder to do both desktop replacement and on-the-go entertainment laptops still make the most sense.

No.

Hell no.

That’s so bad.

For one thing this was clearly written by a human and fairly decently so, as these things go. Assuming you want humans to do journalism instead of shitty corpos outsourcing it all to chatbots, it may help to engage with it as intended every now and then.

For another thing, never assume anything you see on social media exists at all. It probably doesn’t. At best it’s a slice of it selected to get a rise out of you in one way or another. Yes, including here. Algorithms didn’t come up with the notion that people react more to stuff that makes them angry. I’m not saying to touch grass, but… like, touch some astroturf at least. Find a human who has touched grass once and ask them about it. Don’t live your life mediated by social media posts, what the hell.

And if you’re going to inhabit a semiotic ecosystem that exists primarily in the dregs of cyberdystopia at the very least put the work in of either understanding what’s being thrown at you via the firehose of constant worldwide anger or… you know, not reacting to it. You really have no obligation to add to this crap.

To be clear, I was going “we suck as a species” before I realized you’re saying if someone doesn’t plagiarize or summarize the content for you then you’re not gonna read it but will still react to the version of it that pops into your head. I wasn’t even considering that level of suck to be on purpose, let alone self-righteous.

I’m gonna go not be on the Internet for a second.

I feel the desire to grade sucking in a curve is part of the sucking.

FWIW, I don’t want people to copy/paste the body of the article when they share it, but I do want people to read the article before responding instead of reacting to an out of context headline. Which in turn would remove the need to use a crappy out of context quote in the headline to try to make people mad enough to click through.

I don’t know, I get the impression that we have plenty of suck to go around.

So raise your hand anybody who has actually read the article and realizes the ragebait quote comes from Limited Run games explaining that Xbox owners just aren’t buying their physical releases the same way Nintendo and Sony people do?

No? Nobody?

We suck as a species.

This isn’t particularly new, they’ve been calling it a genocide for a while now and taken several previous actions.

I’m not sure what the EU finger pointing means, though. Them following suit or the opposite? I don’t think they’ll have much to say either way.

My Windows machines seem to be just fine with the couple of NFS shares I use for easier cross-platform mounting on boot. It comes at the cost of some security, though, so I use it to share unimportant stuff I want to mount very freely, like some media libraries. I use SMB for the rest.

I’m curious, what’s the issue with NFS on Windows for you?

Ah. That’s more of an accessibility issue than an advertising issue, then. I imagine even without ads a bunch of modern websites expecting higher resolutions and smaller scaling factors will look cramped.

I was not kidding before, if you have vision problems that don’t play well with desktop views, mobile versions of websites tend to be a LOT friendlier to large text sizes. Have you tried setting your browser to a vertical window and calling up the phone version? On Firefox at least you can set the resolution of the phone you’re emulating and zoom it all the way up. The setting is buried in the developer tools, but there are tons of tutorials out there (TLDR, press F12, look for the button that looks like a tablet/phone). I’ll try to add an image of what it looks like on my device for the site you shared.

What resolution are you browsing at? I have a hard time showing that ad at all in my setup, but I’m not even at 4K and I get a HUGE picture of the rocket in question and still see more text than you show in the screenshot. That’s what? 720p?

I man, don’t get me wrong, ads are annoying, there’s a reason why I have so many layers of blocking I couldn’t even shut them all off to test this, but you seem to be browsing at what I’d call… legacy resolutions. You’d almost be better off twisting that screen 90 degrees and asking for the mobile version. Or, you know, you could lower the UI scaling in your display settings.

You went for an Intel handheld? I salute you, sir, that’s a deep cut.

As one of the five people on the planet who own an Intel GPU I firmly believe we are in a very exclusive club that will one day do wonders for hardware archaeology.