If you want more like this, there’s Bunnix, the UNIX clone someone recently built in a month. You can follow its progress here.

Only if it were bound handsomely in leather with gilt lettering, as befits its divine purpose.

It’s the cryptocurrency of handhelds: futuristic-looking, impractical to use, and quite possibly a scam.

Sounds locked down, and the main people involved have a crypto background. I might give this a miss.

The Steam Deck generally does not use an external PC to set up. It is a PC, and can be put into a (Linux-based) desktop mode, which is generally what you’d use for any configuration beyond what the Steam menus give you.

Calling the Steam Deck a handheld sounds a bit odd.

I bought a thin case with a protective front panel that clips on magnetically. That is enough to protect it when thrown in a backpack without adding noticeably to bulk.

Steam Deck

Steam Deck with OLED screen

Steam Deck with aromatherapy cartridge slot

There are, but there are also wartime regulations giving the military priority over resources. If they decide they need the Steam Decks being imported, they won’t make it to the normal people.

OTOH, the military was hollowed out by corruption, so there’s a chance that some of the Decks requisitioned for the military might end up diverted to the black market.

I wonder what proportion of Steam Decks in Russia are being used for controlling combat drones. Apparently, the Ukrainian armed forces have found the Deck to be a very suitable drone controller.

If you’re paranoid, you can convert the FLACs to WAV on an isolated computer (or VM), copy them and recompress them to FLAC or other formats. If there is a vulnerability in FLAC, it won’t persist through transcoding.

On Windows, there is a Secure Audio Path API to prevent interception of the audio signal. Not sure if macOS has something similar, though it can prevent screenshotting of DRMed video. On Linux, any such protection is probably impossible unless Spotify requires a kernel module.

Note that the audio quality on Spotify is not very high (256kbps .ogg, I think), so anything thus recorded is going to sound lossy, especially after you recompress it a second time.

I wonder whether, when the faster Steam Deck 2 comes, it may have ditched the x86 architecture altogether and leapt to a high-performance ARM CPU, yielding more power per watt and generating less heat. If so, that would presumably require Proton to be supplemented with a Rosetta-style translation engine that can convert x86 machine code into ARM.

Currently, outside of Apple’s proprietary M/A-series CPUs, there don’t appear to be high-performance ARM CPUs that would fill such a role, though this probably won’t still be the case in a few years.

If it’s proprietary, it’ll be enshittified as soon as shareholder value demands.

If it’s proprietary, it’ll be enshittified as soon as shareholder value demands.

It’ll be hard to do when the bailiffs have seized their building and all their servers

Four whole marijuanas