Neat! I’ll check it out. Thanks!

Providing competition against media monopolies is illegal.

If they can’t sell you your memories, they think no one should have them. They will let your memories burn and be lost before they let you own or share them.

They’ll keep this up and they will continue to work to make intellectual property never enter the public domain.

I’m too chicken to be a pirate, myself. But I’m aware that pirates and librarians are the only ones with any intent to preserve works of art for the public.

Annecdotaly, a recent patch had notes that implied it fixes this issue. I got so tired of the dock being unreliable that I haven’t confirmed it, though.

I have both the official dock and some random USB C multi-connector. The random one is far more reliable, in my experience.

Makes sense. I suspect it may still not work due to Proton likely being compiled for Intel, rather than ARM chips.

If you run into that, you may be able to work around it by logging into the Raspberry Pi, cloning the source code and installing: (if you’re able to get that to work, it’ll likely work equally well on Ubuntu or Raspbian). But it’s not for the faint of heart, they (Proton) don’t include many details, so it looks like there will be a lot of learning about their tool chain. https://github.com/ProtonVPN/proton-vpn-gtk-app#installation

(Edit: Since ProtonVPN is Python based, it may be fine, as long as there’s not too much C in the project. If it works immediately, my gut feeling is it will also work fine on Raspbian, if you need to switch for any other reasons.)

I know a lot of people have Pis set up like this and surely they can’t be administering the whole thing through CLI, right?

We are, indeed. I use a combination of SSH (for quick stuff), and Ansible for stuff I need to do repeatedly.

How do I get a similar setup to my Synology such that I can just get a desktop interface in a browser?

The tool you’re looking for is a ’VNC’ solution. There’s lots of them, and the best ones are free.

You can enable VNC on your Raspberry Pi through Raspi-Config. You’ll also need a VNC client on each device you want to connect from. Fin linked one above, I think.

And now some un- requested advice from me:

You mention running Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi.

If you choose Ubuntu, I believe you will encounter many recipes online that will not work, because Ubuntu does not come with various Raspberry Pi specific tools pre-installed, such as raspi-config.

Raspbian and Ubuntu are extremely similar (this is intentional).

But I have found:

• Many Raspberry Pi recipes will not work on Ubuntu, because Ubuntu does not include Pi specific software that is included in Raspbian.
• Most Ubuntu recipes work perfectly on Raspbian.

I think the Raspbian software can be added on top of Ubuntu, but I’ve never cared enough about the minor differences to even try.

The Ubuntu recipes I have found that don’t work on Raspbian also don’t work on Pi hardware at all, until I compile additional tools from source code. (A Raspberry Pi uses an ARM chip, which is cool, but makes it harder install some software that doesn’t support it.)

Yeah. I could figure out how to make a PC do all that, but I would rather pay for a Steam console that does all of that for me out of the box.

Ooh. Nice.

Incidentally, this is a perfect example, because the automotive industry ran a series of ad campaigns to change public sentiment after cars got more common and children and elderly citizens started dying in the streets.

Nintendo is working equally hard to change public sentiment against the innocent.

Source: https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history

Sweet.

As a SteamDeck player, does this mean I can start saying I use Arch, by the way?

On the stable channel, it seems like (from comparing notes with friends) a recent update introduced crashes into older games that did not crash previously. In my case, Proton is always involved.

Yeah. If Valve releases a remotely viable desktop console OS, I’ll immediately build one for my living room. If for no other reason, to keep the rest of the family away from my SteamDeck.

As in if you live in a state with sales tax but down the road is a state without sales tax- why ever shop in your state?

Mostly the states are quite big, so it’s not worth the trouble. But along various state borders, it distorts the shopping experience in odd ways.

I’ve been to towns that are missing common retailers entirely, because everyone drives to the next town over (in another state), to avoid a tax.

We also have a rich history of driving across state lines to purchase stuff that’s illegal in our own state. It’s also illegal to bring it back, but the borders aren’t patrolled, so the only way to get caught is to have a traffic violation while doing it.

Or so I’ve heard. I never break any laws, myself.

Cool chart.

It really makes the point to me that the PS1 and PS2, when adjusted for inflation, and for relative compute power, were just such a fantastic deal.

I was recovering from some serious console-purchase fatigue, when I bought my PS1 to replace my garage sale purchased Super NES. It was a big deal to me.

I’ve paid PS5 prices (inflation adjusted) for a game system a few times (my first Switch and SteamDeck), but they’ve been a lot more mind blowing than what appears to be on offer today.

Disclaimer: My favorite game is 8-bit, anyway.

They’re basically Steam Machines tailored more towards retro enthusiasts.

Styled to look like a Sega DreamCast

Priced from around £300.00 to £500.00

It’s fantastic, especially for non-gamers.

There’s a huge library of cozy games, and arcade games, and retro games, and adventure RPGs, exploration games, puzzle games that all run terrific on a SteamDeck.

The average randomly selected game from my Steam Library has run fine for me, on my SteamDeck.

If they ever make a smaller model with a clam shell to protect the screen, it’ll be the perfect game system.

Uhhh…well. that’s…um. sure. Someone could do that.

Yeah!

Wow. That’s going to make my SteamDeck way more fun.

Ironically, I had this issue a lot more often with my official licensed SteamDock than with a random USB C to HDMI adapter I dug out of storage.

will tell you if a game supports the controller you currently have plugged in

Today I learned that. It never came up for me since I do most of my game shopping on my phone. That could be really helpful later.

Thank you!