Yep. I’ve tried several others and they’re not for me, but a lot of people are really happy with them.

I like SteamOS so much that I’m using HoloISO on mini PCs around the house to simulate consoles and stream couch games from my gaming rig upstairs. But my experience isn’t everyone’s so get your hands on it and try it out.

Yeah, Infinity hates it. I’ve still got a Firefox browser app pinned that works fine though.

And there’s no dead torrents. I could have probably added that too

Depends on your view. Some see it as a way to preserve media that could otherwise be gone forever. Some see it as a reasonable price to pay instead of paying 15 different companies hundreds per month. Others don’t mind supporting the individuals and small groups who run the servers but don’t want to support large corporations.

Depending on your definition of laid back, maybe Dredge? You can run through it in probably 10ish hours if you’re just trying to complete it. But if you want to see everything, relax, and fish you can stretch that to 30 pretty easily (it’s claimed you can do it in 16-17 but I’ve spent 30 just hanging out and fishing and I don’t have it all yet because of the relaxed pace I set).

The stressful parts never really felt stressful to me. Very little is timed. At its core it is an inventory management fishing game with a couple of jump scares. Plays well on the deck.

Otherwise, Stardew Valley like others have suggested.

Given how many guitar tabs archives are online today it’s a shame what happened.

This is an anecdote because that site brought me back to another time. Feel free to skip it.

They have part of the OLGA archive there! Back in the day that was my go to. I had printed out multiple three ring binders full of tabs from there. When I would start working with new musicians I would put together a fakebook of 40-50 songs of the right style and just sit around and practice them.

That’s how I went from being a terrible guitarist full of passion to a mediocre guitarist who could badly fake anything well enough that it’s almost recognizable. It was such a great time.

I wouldn’t call the second half of August “a long time”. However, I can say Chimera is pretty good and prior to August the last big release of HoloISO was last year so I do get your point and agree with you steering others to distros that may better meet their needs.

Yeah, that’s how Big Picture works. The suspend on it is the same garbage Windows suspend. I don’t use it on my Deck, but it is on my main rig.

Not a dumb question. That setup would probably work great for a lot of folks! There are some reasons it doesn’t fit my particular use case.

First, I keep a few games installed locally (stuff with low requirements and emulator stuff). I like being able to do that because I don’t keep those on my rig. Maybe that’s possible with the Apple TV? I don’t know. That leads right into my second reason…

I’m not part of the Apple ecosystem. I do own a MacBook (and a Mac mini from like 2008, but I don’t think we’ll count that) but it only ever gets used for music stuff. I have an Apple ID but don’t even remember what email address I used to sign up. Apple anything never really crosses my mind. I would assume the interface is pretty good because Apple does tend to make a nice UI, but I have no idea.

Speaking of the interface, I wanted something as close to the deck as possible because, honestly, it’s easy. That’s the reason I didn’t leave Windows on there. I could have had it boot directly into big picture mode but suspend doesn’t work that great in Windows. Suspend works great and for my use it’s no different than the deck. I think I mentioned earlier I had to make a Bluetooth change in desktop mode but that’s been it.

Finally, I liked the idea of it. I have an extra input. I have the money for a cheap mini PC. I had the attention span for a short project. Setting it up made me so happy that I’m considering doing it to the living room TV as well. But I’m afraid it’s diminishing returns so I’ll work on something else next then maybe revisit it. Or maybe I’ll put a console out there. Or maybe I’ll do nothing and learn to paint. With the Adderall shortage I’m out here raw dogging reality so I’m quickly hopping from project to project. I need to keep them both doable and engaging or I’m going to have a bunch more half finished projects by this time next year.

On the other hand, for someone who has an Apple TV it might be a great solution. No hate from me however you want to set it up as long as it does what you want and makes you happy.

The other comment answered your power question so I’ll skip it.

Steam link works. It wasn’t great over wireless for me but others have had success. I’ve got my house wired in every room.

Sure! It’s the Beelink with the 5500u. I am using steam link and everything is wired. No resolution problems, but I do have about one stuttering issue a week for a second or two. At 4k I had alignment problems that didn’t make sense (everything was shifted 3 inches to the left) but my eyes aren’t great so 1080p fine for me. Moonlight would probably fix it but I’m lazy.

HoloISO has been great. I had a Bluetooth issue where it wouldn’t come back from sleep, but there was a setting I added in desktop mode that took about 3 minutes that fixed it right up. I use Xbox clone controllers or my old stadia controllers that I’ve set up for Bluetooth depending on what’s closest (did I mention I’m lazy?).

Ask questions and I’ll answer. I like talking about my setup.

I don’t doubt you. I haven’t personally had any of those problems except fixing the resolution. I use Xbox clone controllers.

I don’t use the official dock, just one of the dozen random USB-C docks running around my house. My Deck is mostly stock, except for an SSD upgrade. I used to dock it about a third of the time I played it but now I’ve got a mini PC running HoloISO connected to the TV to play games remotely from my rig if I want to play on the big screen (I’m too lazy to walk over and dock it and someone who will remain nameless borrows the deck from time to time). HoloISO hasn’t shown any of the problems either.

Luck of the draw, I guess.

Edit: removed the line about it being dead stock because I wasn’t thinking about my SSD upgrade when I wrote it. I addressed it elsewhere anyway.

I have a Tailscale subnet router set up locally and added the remote IPs to my router. Tailscale on every device was a crapshoot as to whether it would route locally or through the VPN.

I asked support and they said it should be on every device. Could be something else on my network forcing it to act like that but I don’t have enough give-a-shit in me to troubleshoot it.