smoothbrain coldtakes

You betcha. Depending on what the next iteration of the Deck is like, I might just pick up an OLED when they go on sale.

A full install of Windows runs games fine. It doesn’t last long though. Bazzite was not working well when I tried it a few weeks ago. There are a few things that don’t work properly including no control over RGB settings.

I put the stripped down IoT version of Windows on mine. It doesn’t have anything preinstalled. No store, no teams, no xbox, no nothing out of the box. Combine that with a basic telemetry disabling script and you can have better performance. The Armory Crate app handles all of the firmware and drivers. I’m able to stretch the battery almost an hour longer.

Windows actually can run kind of alright when you get rid of all of the bullshit. It’s not going to be as efficient as Linux, and it’s sure as hell not going to be as efficient as a Linux built around a specific set of hardware. It remains to be seen what kind of optimizations MS may introduce when they build a handheld.

You can check the md5 hash checksum provided by Microsoft to verify the authenticity. Massgrave gets it from Microsoft, it’s a legit ISO just rehosted.

As an alternative you can try using the streaming service through any Chromium browser.

Whenever I’ve used Linux to stream, it’s always been through the browser, and it’s generally worked fine for me.

Yeah I tried it last night just to fuck around and so much stuff doesn’t work properly.

When you flip into desktop mode it just immediately crashes.

How long ago did you try this?

I’ve been keeping up with Bazzite and Chimera, and it looks like they’ve made some progress.

The ROG Ally is listed at gold level compatibility, denoting it requires a few workarounds and has some caveats. I would not be able to get over having no control over the LEDs, so I’ll keep an eye out for a bit later as well.

Yes.

I’ve heard great things, and I’ve been watching the original run of the X-Men animated series in preparation for watching '97.

Animation tends to get me more hyped than anything else. They always do crazy shit in cartoons that they never really try to do in live action. I’ve been a big fan of all the DC animated stuff since forever, and Marvel is getting back into the game with a really strong entry with '97.

Going after the one person still interested in Marvel content? Bold move, Disney; we’ll see how it pans out.

You can enable REBAR on older machines with a UEFI hack.

It’s been part of the PCI spec for ages but Nvidia and AMD only started using it recently.

You can check out the tool here.

Why not just use SoulSeek?

VLC isn’t equivalent to Jellyfin or Plex in streaming capabilities, and it’s just running on SMB which could be configured with general folder permissions and sharing, allowing access for any media player and not just VLC.

SMB is a share protocol that’s pretty standard across ecosystems. I am not sure of your use case and why you are wanting to get rid of Jellyfin but VLC doesn’t sound like the tool to do it.

You can configure the folder permissions with a guide here or by searching “Ubuntu smb sharing” or something similar.

Season of Discovery launched and I was so upset this morning when I couldn’t log in. I had to install everything through Steam, even though on this machine I’ve been using Lutris.

Last.fm was around before Trakt - I would assume you can still scrobble and rate and receive suggestions.

Did you even read my comment at all?

ROG Ally runs Windows.

With the SD card you can have it exFAT but if you want to use it for Xbox launcher games it has to be NTFS.

Xbox Launcher/Gamepass games only install on NTFS. They don’t work on EXT4 or BRTFS.

The Deck is incredible, and if I didn’t get the ROG two weeks before the OLED was announced, I would have probably gotten the OLED and eaten the loss of my Game Pass games.

Personally I like my ROG Ally because with NTFS file system I can run all of my games, including the ones on my Xbox game pass, which is not something I can currently do with Linux-based handhelds.

That being said, I spent literally like three hours decluttering the OS because it ships with a stock Windows 11 which is full of bloat and bullshit. Spent a while with Win10privacy disabling/uninstalling all the useless crap. Why does my game console have Teams? Why does my enterprise computer have the Xbox app? Stupidity all around.

If Chimaera had better support for the ROG I’d look into dual booting, and with the chip being AMD, I have full confidence that eventually I can probably put Linux on that handheld and it will run better and last longer than it does with Windows, because of all the optimizations written into SteamOS being forked for other projects. Right now, there are some things that don’t work with Chimaera on other handhelds. I think there’s some gimmicky hacks I need to implement for the ROG for baseline things like speaker audio and bluetooth support.

We will see how much support Microsoft provides for their handhelds long-term, in terms of optimizing the OS. So far, they’ve done fuck all though. SteamOS gets better performance patch after patch.

The lower bitrate is fine because I’m usually streaming off the local network, so keeping the file sizes down is pretty beneficial.

I am on a few private trackers but they don’t offer anything that the public trackers don’t already have covered for my use case, outside of porn.

I am more of a DDL pirate anyways. I have a seedbox for torrents but I tend to stick to mega links, even if there is a slight delay in getting the media. Typically what I find is that all the re-encoded high resolution h265 content comes later and is more abundant on the mega link forums than on trackers; most trackers will have h264 copies at 720/1080, but they’re often larger than the h265 high resolution re-encodes.