Sure, but we’re talking about a handheld. Yes, performance is improving generation over generation, but in the handheld space power usage and heat dissipation are equally important. If you’ve been keeping up with recent innovations, you’ll see that generally we are making more powerful parts, but they’re getting much more power hungry for every little percent of improvement they bring in raw horsepower. So far it doesn’t look like you could even get Xbox series S performance in a handheld yet. At least not at a reasonably portable size, cost, or battery life. You could get a little better than PS4 pro performance in a handheld at present, based on what I’ve seen. Which is not a full generational leap over what’s out there.

If they released one NOW they’d probably be shooting themselves in the foot. At best they’d get mid-generational performance improvements whereas likely in the next year or two Valve is probably going to drop a true SteamDeck 2 with significant improvements. All speculation at this point, but if you’re a bean counter at Microsoft, speculation is like 90% of your job. Unless they abandon the standard console release cycle and shoot for faster iteration, they’ll want to come out absolutely swinging to compete.

Just tracking trended data in general would be sufficient to defeat a LARGE number of common cheats. One of the very few use cases “AI” might actually work for in a positive way. But that puts the burden on the developers and server hosters, and it’s much easier to just burden the players directly instead.

Remnant 2. Gotta finish Cyberpunk 2077 (again) first though. The damn DLC adding extra achievements has thrown everything off!

Adding repos can just be done inside a Toolbox, or even as Overlays. Grub can also be edited and changes applied to immutable OS’s like Bazzite/Kinoite. I’d definitely say give it a shot on a non-daily driver machine and see how you like it. Having the option to mess with the underpinnings can be nice- but not having to has a lot of value as well.

I know, right? It’s so hard to “really” mess something up and Toolboxes are very cool for things not served by Flatpaks or Overlays.

Regarding your not wanting to go with an immutable distro: what configs are you thinking you’ll need to mess with that makes an immutable distro a bad idea exactly? I was previously on the fence about it as well but Bazzite has absolutely served my needs and requires way less fiddling than my previous Nobara install did after major updates. I have yet to find any day to day configurations that I haven’t been able to overcome with OSTree overlaying. Aside from being immutable, Bazzite literally checks every other box you’ve got listed.

Isn’t this almost the inverse argument to the android vs iPhone thing? Like the iPhone being (traditionally) more expensive for the “same technology from 5 years ago”? I don’t really have a horse in this race, I’m a firm believer in use what you like and is easiest/best for you. But I do feel compelled to call this one out a bit.

Atomic OS’s (especially Fedora based) with Nvidia are going to be a bit of a pain. Did you follow all the instructions found Here ? I personally gave up on silverblue/kinoite after I tried Bazzite. Similar bases, but the Bazzite devs paid special attention to GPU and accessory drivers/implementations that are otherwise much more painful in Fedora Atomics. You can always do a clean rebase then re-run the steps above (only the OSTree section).

Xbox controllers (Xbox One and newer) have been absolutely solid for me with the xone driver + xpadneo, regardless of distro. Bazzite has everything I need baked in, so it was completely plug and play. Not a very interesting answer, I know. But it still blows me away that it “just works.”

Proton experimental and (at least as of yesterday) I had to opt into bleeding edge beta as well or I’d just get black screen at launch.

No stuttering for me on Linux… Runs as good as it ever has but the visuals are even that much better due to the engine upgrades. Not a fan of the new UI, but the old UI was clunky too, so I can’t really say it’s even a step backwards.

My friends and I all LOVED the pick-up nature of SG1. We’re all adults with busy lives, so hopping into a ~5 minute casual match was just so easy. And the casual nature made it feel like we could have success without “grinding” the game. I guess that is explicitly not the intent of SG2.

The shift from “we’re making a fun and relatively casual arena shooter with a neat gimmick and extremely rewarding fundamentals” to “we’re making a generic e sport shooter” was swift and, frankly, uncalled for.