A few notes:

• First-party support for Steam Input’s deep configuration is a big selling point for a lot of people, myself included. It also means the lack of some of the extra buttons you mentioned present on other premium controllers doesn’t hurt so much, because there’s already so many options for layering in more inputs. Not wanting to mess with most of that doesn’t mean the controller is “not for you,” but it does mean it’s going to align less with what you value.

• I absolutely love the Deck’s touchpads. I consider them non-negotiable inclusions for any future PC handheld or controller I buy. I will agree though that they aren’t ideal if your main use case for them was typing any more than a couple words at a time.

• Citation needed on no one using grip-enabled gyro. It’s not something you need a game to support to make use of. Also, touch-enabled gyro was awesome on the original Steam Controller, and grip sensing on the Index controllers enabled some cool functionality.

• I don’t think lack of console support or color customization are going to register as negatives for most people in the market for this. I can’t even remember the last time I used a console.

• Valve has a pretty good track record with ergonomics, so I doubt accidentally activating the touchpads will be a common problem. Even if you find yourself in that spot though, you can have Steam Input disable a pad under certain conditions like when its thumb is on a stick.

• Symmetrical sticks being a downside is extremely subjective.

In case you haven’t already, preload your Steam Wallet and make sure to account for any tax. As someone who got my Steam Deck order in the first 15 minutes it dropped, payment processing was the biggest barrier then. They might have fixed it since, but they also might not have. Good luck!

Yeah, I definitely think how much you value this controller is directly proportional to how much of the full Steam Deck control scheme you use. As a heavy user of the Deck’s touchpads to the point I’ll never consider another handheld without them, this is still a day one purchase for me even at $99, but I’m not going to recommend it to anyone without huge caveats.

I definitely think graphical fidelity is “good enough” now, but there’s still quite a bit of advancement available in other areas still drawing on the CPU and GPU, VR and local AI being a couple. I’ve been all in on VR since the Vive, and while I reject corporate AI as much as most people here, I do run local models occasionally and would like to have NPCs using the tech.

Well, anachronism most literally means “misplaced in time.” You can go two directions with that, something being more at home in the future or more at home in the past. The former obviously doesn’t apply here, and I would consider my wording identical to the latter. A reduction in belonging implies a reduction in commonness.

I’m not worried about the tech going away so much as the market percentage dropping to make enthusiast hardware more niche. Among other things, it makes enshittification in the space harder to fight.

Except even among most current PC gamers, the threshold isn’t that high. 4K is still less than 5% of the market.

Also, I’d argue “anachronism” isn’t the same as “pointless.” It’s just claiming that something that was once more common will become less common.

I don’t think the greater power of larger devices is being questioned. There just happens to be a threshold where a technically inferior but more accessible solution becomes “good enough” for most people that they never consider moving up.

Just look at mobile devices. Of everyone who accesses the internet, 75% do so via smartphone only. As someone who doesn’t even like desktops losing ground to laptops, that statistic scares me.

If you have meat or dairy items in your fridge, those can become unsafe to eat after only 2 hours. Since the cold air is more dense, it spills out the bottom of the fridge and gets replaced by room temperature air rather quickly. I’ve definitely eaten my fair share of questionable foods going past this, but the calculus changes if you’re giving that food to other people.

As for the main point, agreed. I’m definitely not a luddite, but if I had kids who weren’t yet responsible enough to not leave a fridge open for hours, I think I’d just put child locks on the fridge and make sure they had access to something else.

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They’re not stock, but both GIMP and Krita have had generative AI plugins for a couple years now. I don’t know how well they match up to the Adobe stuff, but they seemed quite powerful and well-integrated the last time I looked.

I wish dynamic support for user preferences was more of a thing. I like really dense displays of information with small text. Basically, the more a UI resembles a spreadsheet the better. Mobile interfaces almost universally have far too much white space for my taste, so I’m one of those people that’s pretty much always going to want the PDF even on a phone screen. I recognize why that would suck for a lot of people though.

Short rant: Your first sentence touches on a microcosm of a much larger problem. Nuance and context are disappearing everywhere. As far as threats to society go, it’s in my number one spot, and we really need more people actively dismantling it like this, so thanks.

Yeah, there’s a fair bit of criticism about the tech being better for the higher-end cards that shouldn’t need it in the first place. Another way this shows up is in VRAM amounts.

To ELI5, how effective FG is at improving the base frame rate scales with available VRAM. (Think 60 improved to 80 versus 60 improved to 120.) Some modern games hit 12GB regularly now even in 1080p and before any fancy tech. (There’s a separate discussion on game optimization in there.) Since lower-end cards really skimp on provided VRAM (every tier should really be at least 4GB higher), there’s not much space there for FG to work with in the first place.

Maybe we have different expectations on roasting levels then. I’m particularly thinking of all the comments making fun of Linus doing a fresh install at a LAN event, picking PopOS again, setting himself up to fail changing all his devices at once to one distro constrained by handheld support, etc. For an honest followup advice video, I’d expect them to consult with someone like Wendell first, so I wouldn’t actually expect it to be a bad video.

That video wouldn’t be for us. Also, the videos as they are are getting roasted heavily already, so it’s not like that’s gonna stop them.

I don’t think LTT’s approach is bad exactly. I really just take issue with their argument that “there are thousands of ‘switching to Linux’ videos on YouTube, so we don’t need to cover that ground again.” It’s ignoring the fact that, for better or worse, they have the biggest audience and furthest reach in the space. There’s still room for “we’re approaching this like normies would,” but I really think they need to close it up with “if you want to do this, here’s how to do it right.”

I don’t think the positioning will feel too different from the Deck honestly. Your hands are going to be closer together holding the controller and thus rotated more inward. It looks like Valve rotated the grips and stick/button/trackpad triangles to match this angle, hence the lower sticks and tilted trackpads. The ergonomics on the Deck, original Steam Controller, Index controllers, and Index headset have all been great, so I trust them here.

Thanks for the reminder. I don’t think I encountered payment issues with the Deck (I used a credit card and was early enough to be in one of the April 2022 waves), but better safe than sorry.

Yeah, the price parity thing seems to be a big misconception here especially. The price parity guideline comes from Valve’s page for Steam keys. Valve gets a 0% cut when keys are sold on third-party sites, yet they still use Valve’s infrastructure, so it makes sense for Valve to not want you to price them to have all your key sales go third-party.

As far as I can tell, Valve has zero interest in how you sell copies of a game that don’t use Steam keys.

Also something I noticed per their guidelines:

It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.

As a frequent user of IsThereAnyDeal, I can tell you it’s more common than not for a game’s historical low price to not be on Steam, so Valve is definitely not strictly enforcing this. With this and the lack of legalese on the page and letting developers/publishers determine what “similar” and “comparable” are on their own terms, I’m not seeing anything Valve should be doing differently here.