Will Riker is. Thomas is the original.

Recycling tragic accidents is just good policy, and necessary to preserve the ecosystem on visited planets.

If we happen to get a few cloned bridge officers out of the bargain…that’s just good fortune.

There’s not an ounce of Cyan in Riker’s body, but this thing still refuses to materialize without a new cartridge!

Apparently he makes bank.

Epic!

Thanks!

I was going to push back on your point here, but then I couldn’t think of a game that makes a good counterpoint.

Before they enshitified all the sports games, I would have pushed back a bit and comparer running Windows for a specific game to emulating an Atari for nostalgia.

But actually, the last good version of many of those sports games probably runs in Wine now anyway.

One pushback - there’s still community on some of those very shitty games. I understand people not wanting to leave their gamer group behind.

Of course, my gamer group all moved to SteamDeck.

Ouch!

The good news is you’ll get invited to Cobol/AS400/Mainframe conventions if eventually you’re the only ones left on Windows.

Those folks have similar challenges, but are great to party with after a day of conference talks.

It’s a network issue.

It’s not always a network issue!

I’ve daily droven Linux for ~3 years and learned a lot

I don’t have any thoughts on certs that haven’t already been shared, but some thoughts for any interviews you may land:

• The person interviewing you has probably daily driver Linux for 20 years, and that’s okay. We all have to start somewhere.
• There aren’t going to be many others (if any) interviewing who have daily driven Linux for three years.

So be humble, but not too humble. Haha.

We’re a neat bubble here, but running Linux as a daily driver is still pretty rare, and puts you way ahead of the pack of other candidates, at least for entry/early Linux systems jobs.

Edit: And if you find an organization that uses AI spicy autocomplete to do entry level Linux admin work, run far away. There’s not enough money in the world to make it worth working with people that stupid (who choose to use hallucination for problems that demand reliability, haha).

Exactly. I know I’m not the ideal gamer they are designing for.

And I’m not to proud to drop to carebear difficultly, or put in a cheat code.

But some games just don’t give me anything, so I just rage quit and move on.

I can’t see these gaining more popularity over Steam, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo if they are only sticking to do retro.

Right. I don’t think they are particularly trying for those markets - although Sony dropping physical media of any kind is probably doing Evercade a favor anyway.

I carry my Hyper Mega Tech Pocket more often than my SteamDeck or Switch Lite, because it is so much smaller.

From my understanding, most indie companies want maximum reach for their games, especially for the amount of time and money they put into things.

Yes. Evercade’s gimick is multiple games per cart, rather than exclusives.

Some of my Indie game collection I got cheaper by buying it on Evercade. Some idie devs I have only discovered because they included a game on Evercade.

A few I have bought again on my SteamDeck, to add it to my family library.

Nothing explains Arch users, they’re a mystery.

I mean, I’ll agree 100% that docking a SteamDeck has been hit and miss, depending on the game. I have about the same annoyances docking a SteamDeck as docking a laptop. I’m not angry at Valve or Windows about that, but I am very impressed with Nintendo.

I haven’t had more wifi issues with SteamDeck than with my Switch or Switch Lite, or with a typical laptop.

I don’t use SteamDeck desktop mode, except to install my free copy of Luanti, so I cannot comment.

Now, when we dive into specific games - mutiplayer code varies wildly between games on PC, and SteamDeck is still much closer to a PC expeirence, in that regard. If that’s your point, I’m with you 100%.

A “Steam Remote Play Verified” badge would go a long way!

Edit: Decky is a mod right? I haven’t had anything on my SteamDeck break every few weeks.

Oh! We did have a long running bug where various network stuff never worked quite right after waking from hybernation, which I fixed by rebooting after any time I let the deck sit for awhile.

That was patched pretty recently. It never bothered me much (once I understood the solution was a reboot) because the boot time is like 20 seconds.

I admit, I am pretty technical, but guessing that it might need a reboot after hybernation is something I think I learned from gaming on a Windows laptop.

Still, to your point, a better experience for folks coming from PC gaming than coming directly from console gaming.

I rarely even try what I suspect to be the final boss battle.

Game devs without difficulty settings can fuck off and not take my money for the next chapter.

They figure I must have figured out all the mechanics by now, surely?

No motherfucker, I did not. I played this game in 7 minute bursts between real life kicking my ass.

I don’t know shit about what game techniques I was supposed to have learned back in chapter 2. Haha.

So when I get to the hard bit, I just turn the game off and never return to it. If I get there during the Steam refund window, I’ll ask for my money back, too.

Edit: Now a cozy game with a final cozy cinematic, I am fully down for.

They are worried the cost of bottles of vodka and oily rags will cut into their free spending money.

I guess we’d be stuck using old machines. Given how powerful current systems are, that may be enough for indie studios.

The Evercade is proactively selling cartridge first game systems and games.

The available hardware is more retro focused, in power level, but everything in the line runs on every available device (outside of some license bullshit by Capcom and Namco, which I think they cleared up).

It’s still a mess. Only ready for technical users. Not even in the same ballpark for Xbox.

Tell me don’t have a SteamDeck without telling me you don’t have a SteamDeck.

Unless you just mean building a PC, in general. Sure. Building a gaming PC isn’t for everyone.

But generally speaking, Linux isn’t user-friendly (though I’m not saying it isn’t at all) in the sense that everything is guaranteed to be compatible with it and work immediately, whether it be certain peripherals that require extra setup to work correctly or software that was never specifically made to work on Linux.

On the hardware side, you’re really just describing custom PC builds. Pre-built Linux gaming machines exist and do solve the hardware issues.

On the software side, outside of the big asshole publishers, it’s a solved problem. Five years ago I shopped super carefully for SteamDeck compatibility. Today, OS compatibility is rarely even a consideration for me. Games just work on the SteamDeck. SteamOS has replaced Windows as the gaming default OS.

Indie devs now use game development frameworks that work perfectly on Linux, in order to get SteamDeck verified.

Even most of my “Windows Only” games just pull the correct emulators and run perfectly, automatically, when launched from Steam.

Gaming on Linux is a very different world, today.

As much as I like Linux, it’s generally not a good alternative for console folks who just want to relax and play video games.

That’s why I buy Valve hardware.

True. But anyone installing on a bare metal build should seriously consider installing Linux, today. The set of games that actually run simpler on Windows is getting thinner every year.

There’s mostly fear driving the decision, and most people fear Linux more than they need to, and don’t fear Microsoft’s apathy toward their custom PC build outcomes as much as they should.

With all the license unlock bullshit, my last bare metal Windows install was a bigger pain in the ass than any of my recent bare metal Linux installs.