I have both. I do not think the OLED version is twice as nice, though it is noticeably improved.

If the cost is an issue, but doable, consider getting the LCD deck and putting the extra cash toward a TV dock and Bluetooth controller. The deck is awesome on the go (just took mine on vacation - 10/10) but it’s also a fantastic console in its own right. I play a lot of PC games on my couch, even though my I have a decent desktop PC available.

Either one you purchase though, the Steam deck is the best gaming device I’ve ever owned. Access to the vast Steam library (even if not all titles are compatible yet), access to install whatever else TF I want - even competing stores, emulation nevermind.

It’s just… 🤯

Season 1 is wildly uneven. Some episodes are a TV-14 Seth McFarland raunchy comedy in space and others are Star Trek, but with real people. If you don’t enjoy the (admittedly purile) sense of humor, The Orville probably isn’t for you. The show never completely abandons that tone even as it explores more classic Trek style writing.

There are some episodes though, like S01E08 which are played almost totally straight and those are the ones that feel the most like a TNG revival to me.

Nice.

I’m on wifi end to end unfortunately. Because reasons my internet comes into the basement and my main diet is down there. My PC and the Deck are both on the main floor and have decent signal strength but the extra latency and occasional dropped frames make real time games… less fun for me.

Still, I can go play games on my PC when needed. It’s literally less than twenty feet distant…I just really like the Steam Deck. :)

I’ve streamed a few games but I’m on wifi and it’s… fine? Like it works better than it has any right to, but anything that requires fast inputs has been iffy.

Even BG3 I generally preferred playing on the actual hardware instead of streaming.

I do a surprisingly large amount of my gaming on the steam deck these days. My poor PC lies abandoned. Anyway… here are some great games that I’ve played recently on the deck. Some of them are Yellow - usually to use the keyboard for something minor.

• Dead Cells: Roguelite action platformer
• Tekken 8: best entry in years
• Beneath Oresa: wildly stylish roguelite deck-builder
• Roguebook: another roguelite deck builder - by Richard Garfield.
• Talos Principle 2: Puzzles and Philosophy
• Chants of Sennar: explore a mysterious tower and learn the languages - and lost history - of the inhabitants.
• Doom & Doom Eternal: you know these
• Tunic: Zelda Classic - but with deep puzzles
• Inscryption: deck-building horror puzzler… that is soooo much deeper than what it seems.

A final, hesitant recommendation for

• Dome Keeper: Roguelike Mr. Driller meets Paratrooper, with a tight one-more-run game play loop that is insanely satisfying.

But… the menus don’t work right for me in docked play - the A button is only randomly accepted. … but it works fine in handheld mode. (The controls work fine in-game as well, it’s only menus that have trouble.)

…Man, there would be a great web serial just following Not-Troi’s therapy sessions, in which she is yet again trying to convince an alien not to vaporize themselves/the ship/the crew/the Riker after Yet Another Traumatic Tuesday.

Scale is sometimes hard to tell in a photo.

…Which is why I thought Odo was on a novelty condom wrapper. Hell, the text still made sense.

I got the earwax but good. I usually abuse qtips too.

But.

If you want to really know what a clean ear canal is like, get a squeeze bulb. You fill it with hot water (hot like tap, not like boiled) and then hydroblast your ear holes until all the wax melts and runs out.

When you get rid of a real bad wax ball… Aww man, it’s amazing. It’s like you just removed earplugs. The world is suddenly so much louder.

Fuckin’ amazing.

…scuse me, I think Imma go find my squeeze bulb.

Ho-ly shit… You got me thinking and - if it weren’t so OP that it’d ruin the storytelling, the teleporters would make the federation the most terrifying army in the galaxy…

Transporters should be able to fix pretty much anything wrong with you. Lost a hand? Don’t worry, we’ll replicate it from your last transport. Feeling sick? Nope - we beamed the little beasties away. Just a little dirty? Uniform rumpled? That won’t do, we’ll just fix that for you. No need to stop what you’re doing, it’ll happen in the background, you won’t even notice it’s happening…

K’ovok, Klingon warrior, led his troop’s third assault on the federation outpost. They had been locked in combat with the Federation army for three days now. His troops were covered in blood, mud and unidentifiable filth after three days of glorious battle.

The Federation “dolls” didn’t even look sweaty. Their uniforms were clean, fit perfectly and they were still smiling - always smiling - with their white, perfect teeth.

K’ovok swung his bat’leth through the neck of a federation p’tagh and smiled with satisfaction as the body fell lifeless - and nearly headless - to the ground. He turned to find his next opponent…and heard the slightest hum. Whirling, K’ovok found himself facing the same man he had just beheaded shaking out his arms and smiling. Always smiling. Even his uniform was spotless.

“Nice swing” the Federation doll spoke, slowly adjusting his neck and jaw. “You sure can dish it out! Let’s see if you can take it, too.”

No plague, nor illness, nor infirmity ever touched the humans. As soon as they passed through one of their transporters, which was often, any deviance from perfect health was simply cleansed. From overeating to plagues to simple sloth, there was nothing the transporters could not repair, replace or remove.

Aboard a starship the systems were even more aggressive. So long as you wore your combadge, your vitals were measured for any abnormalities. A slight tingle on your skin as bacteria or just honest dirt was transported away, added to the biomass the replicators drew from. Occasionally, you might lose a few seconds of time in the case of a really bad mess. More than one officer could relate a story about dying of a heart attack of moment and then waking back up still in the command chair.

Of course, the transporter system had required generating an intensely thorough understanding of human biology to perform these feats. Most other species refused to make use of human transporters, for that very reason. The information required to configure them for “best effect” was simply too dangerous to hand to another species, however “benevolent” they may be. The Vulcans had famously accepted the “gift”. And in fairness, the transporters did work as advertised. Disease, infirmities, even many indignities of aging simply went away from Vulcan, cured by the transporter.

But some still wondered, at what cost? The humans were allies, but they now had the data to engineer highly specific germs, plagues that could spread unseen through the galaxy, yet kill only Vulcans.

There was no evidence such pressures were being applied, but it was notable how quickly the aloof Vulcan empire had become fast friends with humanity. Subservient, even, to their so-called Federation of Planets.

Some whispered that it was yet more insidious - to function as they did, the transporters needed to understand your biology perfectly, from the beat of your heart, to the thoughts in your head. What if the transporters scanned for “unhealthy” thoughts and simply “cleansed” those too?

And yet The Federation came on, and ever on. Spotless and smiling.

Fwiw, there was a “remastered” version of TOS, which updated many of the special effects. It’s a lot less egregious vs Lucas’ Star Wars remasters, but it’s still a definite change. Some liked it, some didn’t. But if the old effects and visual artifacts are putting you off, it may be worth a try.

I bought this back before the official dock was released and I’m still using it. It’s worked perfectly for me. I have it connected up to HDMI out for my tv and I used to have two Steam Controller USB dongles, but I switched to using Bluetooth-enabled XBone controllers.

Anyway, +1 for the JSAUX dock.

Torn between going straight up Von-Neumann-brain, or functional immortality (e.g. Bullets are still a problem, but aging won’t be.)

Pain… Pain keeps you alive.

People who lack pain receptors don’t last very long in this world.

If something is broken and giving chronic pain, yeah, fix that with the creator. But honest, healthy pain is vital.

Yup. His movie motivation was dumbed down. The whole resources thing is stupid for exactly this reason.

In the comics, Thanos became infatuated with the Marvel Universe incarnation of Death. …And naturally he figured that if he killed half the universe at once, he’d get her attention. (cause girls love it when a boy makes a huge amount of work for them…)

Anyway, his plan was still moronic, but “manchild does stupid thing to impress girl” is a classic for a reason.

Eh, looks like a (sorta) fun project. But you can turn pretty much any Linux machine into a home server, so this isn’t really that surprising - and as plenty have pointed out here, there are better hardware choices.

I have a file/dns server in my basement that is built of my desktop upgrade leftovers. Every so often I swap out the mobo/cpu and reinstall a Debian flavor of some sort. Run my setup scripts, start up my docker services and hey, presto! My server abides.

Journey

Ico / Shadow of the Colossus / The Last Guardian

No Man’s Sky

I fiddled with it a fair bit, and ultimately decided to just stick with the “Medium” default. With that, it’s pretty stable, with a few dips, but given the turn-based combat etc, it doesn’t really bother me.

(But that said, I’m an old-school PC gamer. I played DooM on an 8 MHz 386 at sub-10 FPS. I had to “lead” my shots to play. So my personal standards for game performance may be a little low.)

I’m playing it on Steam Deck right now and though I’m still only a few hours in, I’ve only had some very minor issues. The game plays fine!

Issue 1: The graphics settings don’t seem be persisted. I have to manually activate anti-aliasing every time, or deal with jaggies.

Issue 2: On Proton Experimental, my controller didn’t work at the start. I was able to fix it by launching the on-screen KB (Steam button+X), hitting “Enter”, and then switching back to controller mode. Sounds like it’s time to switch to Proton Hotfix.

Otherwise, it’s been great! I left the graphics settings (other than AA) at their defaults and I’ve seen no noticeable lag or stuttering during play.

Yeah, multiplayer games with kernel-level anti-cheat are gonna be real hard to support on Linux. I don’t know that we’ll ever have a good solution to that.

I’m curious: what feature(s) of SteamOS are keeping you from trying/switching to Linux?

If it’s Proton, you get that for free with any Steam install on Linux. I’ve been using it for the last couple years. (And it’s awesome)