The MiniPC Revolution

It’s an iterative process.

Valve launched Steam Machines with their own OS and started shipping a version of Steam on Linux with predictable library versions. At the same time, they started working with the Wine project and shipping things which is now called Proton but is actually the cumulative results of their own patches.

This paved the way for the success of the Steam Deck when adequate material became available.

I don’t think it makes sense to call the Steam Machine a misstep because there was no Proton. There would be no Proton nor Steam Deck without the ground work started with the Steam Machines.

That's a dream come true... provided they fix multi-accounts and game visibility/accessibility in the Steam UI.

I already have a Steam Deck that I can't let my kids touch, which is stupid. I can't hook something like this up in a shared space of any kind without improved parental controls, including ability to toggle visibility of game library entries, and (ideally, but not strictly necessary) the ability to say "do not show this user's entire library to anyone else on this machine, or on the network, nobody with a different login"

Wow that's cool, Gabe is an underrated CEO. Thanks for posting this since I do not follow anything gaming anymore.

I hope they'll fix their rumored team wars inside the company.

I just set up mine in one day, setting *arrs and Jellyfin and voila i got streaming service better than all payed streaming services combined and no ads.

I liked the idea of type-c GPUs but there are so many problems again that it's just useless. It also should be something better than just a GPU tho, have HDMI eARC etc.

PCs are different for a few reasons, for me.

One big part's the library. I can still play Steam games I bought when the Gamecube was current. My Gamecube games do not work on the Switch. My Dreamcast games certainly don't! The library for the PC is enormous and generally you don't have to re-buy old games to keep playing them, even after major hardware upgrades. Hell I got like a few hundred games on Itch.io years ago for so little money they may as well have been free, and sure they're mostly short "jank" games and art games and stuff, but that's still games and I like them! You can't get that kind of thing (with that kind of "OMG I may never even get through all these..." magnitude, I don't mean jank or art games, both exist on consoles, even if they're not well represented) on a console.

To do anything similar with consoles, you need, like... a dozen consoles, or more, with keeping that number down requiring putting a lot of money and time into careful curation and selection. A single PC does the trick, though.

Another's longevity & archiving (not unrelated to the library thing, but not exactly the same thing). The PC is my platform of last resort for console game archiving. Consoles don't really fill this role at all. Even a "hacked" console (if it's hackable) is on borrowed time. The hardware dies, and eventually the only ones left are in museums or crazy-expensive private collections. Meanwhile I play freeware PC games I downloaded in the 1990s, sometimes, like the exact same binary (to the degree it's "the same", which it isn't, but I just mean I didn't have to go download it again) that's been shuffled from one disk to another ever since. They're not gone. And thanks to PCs, neither are old console games (this is a state of affairs that's on life support, for newer consoles, but not quite dead yet)

Another's the controls. I don't really want a console at my desk (and there's gonna be a PC regardless, so that's nothing extra) because I definitely want one on my TV, and I don't want two of the same console. I don't really want to use a mouse & keyboard on my couch, I've done it, the best solutions I've found take up a bunch of space, look bad, and are still a worse experience than a desk. Some games that I love, I have no interest in playing them if it's not with a mouse and keyboard (and for plenty of others, a controller is better! I like tons of games that are best played with a controller, but for some, it's mouse & keyboard or I'll simply not play them).

Another factor's modding. I've gotten hundreds of extra hours out of games I've bought, thanks to mods. 50+% of my time in the Half Life and Source engines has been in total conversion mods. I'd probably only have put about a quarter as many hours into Morrowind or Skyrim as I have, without mods. I never touched the base game of Rome: Total War again after I discovered the Europa Barbarorum mod, which I sunk probably a hundred or more hours into. All for free, and you don't get that on consoles, the closest you get are things like level designers, sometimes, in LittleBigPlanet or what have you... and those all die when the game servers die.

FWIW I have... a lot of consoles, I don't hate them or anything, and these days most (90%?) of my gaming is on consoles. But they're not a gaming PC.

(Really, if gaming PCs were more-stable, less-janky, and didn't have such a hard time consistently pairing with and juggling multiple BlueTooth controllers [even the SteamDeck fails to live up to "real" consoles, on any of those fronts] I'd probably not bother with consoles at all, but that's such a crippling issue for PC hardware that instead I have a bunch of consoles, and have even re-bought games 3 or 4 times just for the convenience of being able to play them on one of the small set of real consoles currently connected to my TV)

While the 395 is very cool I do feel that the next generation will be an enormous step forward if AMD integrates FSR 4 in their APUs. Neutral network based upscaling makes a huge difference since you can get away with far lower (real) rendering resolutions and don't need any (expensive) anti-aliasing solutions anymore.

There's a bunch of demos on YouTube of people upscaling from as low as 360p and while not pretty, it's definitely serviceable. It might be worth the wait if you're budget constraint or patient!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/s92fk7/my_wife_is_...

A man can turn the means into the purpose.

Initially I needed a lab to practice deploying & upgrading & disrupting on-prem talos linux for k8s, and design benchmarks around it. So 4 machines does that. The zimaboard in front with pfsense (which is a PITA by itself) and nginx is a good way to make it pick-up-and move (ie. internal networking config). For <£2k the set up is very cheap for what is being tested. It meant I didn't have to go and sit on the other side of a security checkpoint for most of the work. It was cool to keep around as its trivial to make the lab guests unable to see my home network and vice-versa.

Now I often have the 4 k8s hosts off. But use them maybe once a month.

It's not a PITA at all. I followed a few youtube videos and had Proxmox up and running and was a little shocked that the inter node/server settings were largely point and click.

Worth noting the AMD APUs dont have ram soldered on a board cannot be replaced even with soldering. The ram is inside the chip and is shared between the cpu/gpu.

Yep, I can't knock the benefits of the small form factor.

Exactly this. I don't even have a nice multi-drive enclosure, just a small swarm of toaster-style dual-drive holders. They're absurdly cheap. (Alas one of the recent purchases was maybe too cheap: wont let me adjust the various drive spin down/power savings settings. But this is a first for me, and they've all been very cheap).

Unfortunately a lot of the mini-PCs skimp on USB ports. AMD's FL1 form-factor mobile "socket" has 4x 10Gbps + 1x 40Gbps USB-C ports on the SoC, but many of the designs often only have ~2x usb3 class ports and rarely the USB4 port at all. I'd really appreciate these mini-PC's exposing more of the chip's usb! Definitely something to shop for.

With USB4, there's also the added benefit of having host-to-host interfaces: it's short range but 40Gbps host-to-host is real nice to have (in practice it's often half or less this speed alas).

Upgradability is over-rated, when costs are low. A Minisforum 795S7 can be had for $400, and has dual ("only" PCIe 4.0) SSD slots and a 16-core 7945HX Zen4. It's mobile-on-desktop (MoDT): I can't ever replace the CPU, but I suspect this crazy cheap system is going to have a long long life before I feel the need to upgrade it. Replacing it whole when the time comes seems not a concern. RAM and SSD are separate and can be moved out if desired.

There's some with both hard drive bays and fairly powerful CPUs. Aoostar and Ugreen make varying sizes.

I tend to want to keep storage (NAS) separate from compute and databases, in the form of I never want to touch or think about this so I can spend my time on other things.

Having a couple of pre-built nas' from QNAP or Synology can go a long way to getting one's feet wet to learn what they offer that we sometimes learn the hard way about.

In fairness, note that in some countries (like mine) there are tighter regulations for electrical circuitry in rooms with baths and showers, which require work in that sort of area (problems with the pull switch, a joint box, or the ceiling rose, for example) to be done or at least overseen by a qualified electrician. They're known as "Part P" in the United Kingdom.

* https://gov.uk/government/publications/electrical-safety-app...

That said, bringing in a mains-powered non-IP-rated portable floor standing lamp because the ceiling mounted one is broken is definitely not the intended outcome of such safety standards.

>What does a "dead light" mean in this context?

I'm in the UK that has more reliance on ring circuits i.e. electrically its a chain of devices. So depending on details one fault can take out all the lights in a room

>Your landlord isn't changing your bulbs?

They're just taking their time.

Normally I'd just replace bulbs myself but this is a bit more complicated cause its hooked into other devices as well and i can't even tell what is broken

Not OP, but I'm in a similar situation: I have a two-way switched pair of lights on my stairwell, one light at the base, one at the top. The one at the top does not work. We've tried replacing the bulb, we've tried fiddling with the cable for it (it's a suspended lamp). It hasn't worked since we moved in. We've told the landlord twice, he said he'd call his guy, his guy hasn't shown up.

I would like to have a light in my stairs. It's hard to see at night in the winter. My solutions is going to be to spin up home assistant, a zigbee base, and some fairy lights on a 'smart' switch.

I could learn the skills to troubleshoot why the electrical connection is (apparently) bad to the lamp, but given that said connection is in the walls, my DIY skills are trash, and I'm scared of electricity, I'm gonna do the project that's more fun and lines up with some stuff I wanted to do anyway.

I have no idea why the lamp doesn't work, especially because the fixture at the base of the stairs does, but the landlord insists it worked before we moved in.

It likely means the OP has poor handyman skills and wisely has chosen not to learn by him/her self due to safety hazard. After all, these circuits are usually ~110 volts and there is almost always an unintended ground nearby (a water or gas pipe, a wet bathtub, etc.).

it's the landlord's responsibility, you're a sucker if you pay a dime to fix what they own... especially considering the unfamiliarity with previous work and safety risks involved

I had one NUC fail due to CPU failure. Intel RMA'd it without any issues.

Only one of my rpis ever broke, the 1st one I ever bought.

As an alternative experience report: I have two beelink mini s12s, and administer another one that lives under my mom's tv. All work fine (though I wouldn't be bothered by your issue as much — I reboot maybe once every few months?).