This thing is tiny and coupled with XReal or Viture glasses it makes for a very portable, very powerful (Ryzen 7 7840U with eight Zen 4 cores and an RDNA 3 Radeon 780M, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD) game system that is much faster than many handheld systems without the weight and neck strain. In contrast, with the Steamdeck I found myself preferring a kb/mouse or pairing another controller and it was hard to find a comfortable position to play from without hooking it to a monitor.
Debian Xfce testing (Trixie) works really well though I had to install some packages such as joystick and blueman and a few steps to install Steam, the effort was well worth it. I did not want a SteamOS distro because I'd prefer Debian's package management and I like the support and versatility this distro has.
Weak points of using the XReal is that the edges are a little out of focus and one might need prescription inserts (I do not). Otherwise, they are very lightweight and I can be comfortable anywhere. They are also great for watching movies plugging into a phone that has display port capable usb-c (though I recommend a dongle that allows charging the phone while viewing). The glasses also have 3DOF that can be used to move your view (as a mouse or joystick would) while gaming but that requires a driver . Coupled with SideBySide 3D mode on the glasses and in Minetest it's very immersive!
Setup:
Packed bag vs Steam Deck case:
Bag Contents:
I remember the "old days". That was when dialup internet was still popular and running a server usually meant it was on your 10Mb LAN. When we got DSL it was better and you could serve outside your LAN. This was also the time when games had dark red code booklets, required having a physical CD inserted or weirdly formatted floppies (sometimes a combination of these). You could get around these things and many groups of people worked hard at providing these workarounds. Today, many of these games are only playable and only still exist because of the thankless work these groups did. As it was and as it is has not changed. Many groups of people are still keeping games playable despite the "war" that corporations wage on them (and by proxy on us). Ironically, now that there is such a thing as "classic games" and people are nostalgic for what brought them joy in the past, business has leapt at this as a marketing opportunity. What makes that ironic? These business are re-selling the versions of games with the circumvention patches that the community made to make their games playable so long ago. The patches that publishers had such a big problem with and sought to eradicate. This is because the original code no longer exists and the un-patched games will not run at all on modern hardware and the copy-protections will not tolerate a virtual machine. Nothing has changed.
We can even go back as far as when people first started making books or maps that had deliberate errors so that they could track when their work was redistributed. Do the people referencing these books or maps benefit from these errors?
Why do some of us feel compelled to limit knowledge even at the cost of corrupting that knowledge for those we intend it for (and for those long after who wish to learn from historical knowledge)?