deliriousdreams

https://vger.to/lemmy.zip/c/linuxquestions

It might help you to know there’s a possibly better community for tech support questions about Linux. Someone there may have the answer you’re looking for.

I’m a Linux noob so I’m sorry I can’t help more.

Sigh. This article is all over the place.

The headline suggests that payment processors/AI companies/retailers are fighting about the collection of shopper data.

AI obviously doesn’t collect the kind of data that would be useful to the retailers or even the payment processors. So it does stand to reason that the retailers would be a little miffed about “agentic AI” insinuating itself as the middle man between them and shoppers, effectively cutting them off from that data flow.

But that’s not actually what’s happening. It seems like (potentially), the AI companies want to sell “agentic AI shopping” to the retailers and possibly payment processors? But these entities want information about the shoppers that the AI doesn’t collect and the quibble is over whether the AI can be made to collect that data?

On the other hand I own 3 different raspberry pi’s. One for Home Assistant, one for Pihole, one for booting the server computer when I’m not home if I want to stream a movie from my library.

I was able to overclock it to a crazy level. Played all kinds of games on it between me and my roommate. It was finiky using big picture mode (I ended up buying a dedicated mouse and keyboard for it to use on a lapboard at the time), but BPM gave me trouble with controllers, refusing to quit to desktop, and hanging on launching games occasionally.

A lot of Dell’s BS software went the way of the dodo bird as soon as I could get rid of it for similar reasons. The update to windows 10 I also seem to remember giving me trouble. MS didn’t consider it supported hardware. But it all worked out and now that thing is my media center PC. It’s still running after all this time, which is crazy.

As someone who owned the Alienware one with windows 8 (and upgraded it to windows 10, and a 2TB SSD), I’m glad to find anyone else who actually bought one, especially the steam OS variant, and has expertise with it, rather than regurgitating what articles say.

Hell yeah!

Here’s the thing. Since November 2022 Valve’s Steam OS has carved out almost a 5% share of the market for Linux (if we include Linux users who don’t use Steam OS). Windows has something like a 25-30 year head start on steam in this respect.

Something like 35% of PC gamers are still using Windows 10 after the EOL BS MS pulled in October. There is something to be said for those users being more willing to jump ship to steam than there is for them to buy exhorbitantly priced hardware to stay on windows when their hardware inevitably begins to show its age.

I think it’s fairly likely that Steam OS will continue to take chunks of user base out of MS for the foreseeable future.

It may not be the year of the Linux desktop, but it’s not nothing either. Valve’s devices are more hamstrung (as someone else in one of these threads said) by where you can source their hardware than they are by the MS dominated market share.

It can’t hurt to support this, despite the popular games it /may/ not be compatible with over time, because users are also becoming increasingly disillusioned with MS in general.

Lots of things remain to be seen but nobody (MS included) was expecting Steam to be successful as a platform for game sales, nor were they expecting them to be successful with physical hardware and yet here we are. Is that success limited? Sure. But it has become less limited over time.

Hawt!

No, but seriously. I’d buy this. Take my money.

I was just talking to a friend of mine last night over beers about how he’d pay to not have all these companies foist AI on him, and my response then was what it is now. Don’t give them any ideas.

I’m actually hoping to buy one and then see if dbrand or similar sells a companion cube set of vinyl appliques for it. Although I do think the 3D printed faceplates would be much better quality.

They never really release a steam machine the first time. They were all windows PC’s that had decent specs for the footprint that the things were, and ran steam in big picture mode. The experience wasn’t bad but it didn’t give you anything a “non-steam machine” gaming PC that you could build yourself didn’t give you at the time, and building a PC yourself was both affordable and very much could provide a better product/experience.

I think it’s unfair to say they flopped the first time when it came down to PC vendors not really shipping them with steam OS because at the time it was not ready yet. It’s fairer to say steam OS flopped back then and the hardware didn’t sell as well as it could have as a result of them being sold almost entirely as windows PC’s.

At the time I fully remember (because I bought an Alienware Alpha for like $350) that there was supposed to be an option to buy a steam OS variant that never really materialized. Never saw it anywhere but in press articles and reviews.

I had the windows variant. There were some drawbacks: had to provide my own keyboard and mouse), the controller that came with mine was one of the old school XBOX 360 controllers, windows 8, and big picture mode sometimes not allowing me to leave it to return to the desktop. But all in all my experience with it was pretty good. Certainly comparable to the gaming PC I had built and owned before it (in that it ran the games I wanted to play, which were games of that time period at a decent frame rate and quality).

I love that every single time I see someone mention the older “steam machines” from way back when they lable them as horrible. I own one. It was amazing. I had to download custom software to overclock it because the software limited me more than the hardware. And it wasn’t even an i7. For the form factor and the price I paid for it, it was total worth it and not crappy at all.

I’m looking forward to seeing what steams actual hardware will do.

Seems like it could be fun to mess around with.

There was a point where tires were expensive but they lasted a long time because so few people had cars and they didn’t drive them often. So two brothers who owned a tire company were trying to figure out how to sell more tires to the few people who owned cars.

The answer was to get them to wear their tires out faster by providing a list of places they could visit that would warrant the expense of wearing down their tires.

So the stat rating was more of a "this place is worth a visit/road trip system. And they published this list and it caught on and then restaurants wanted to get Michelin stars for the notariety and the essentially free press.