There’s an axiom that every single news headline on the internet that ends in a question to the reader can be accurately answered with “no”.

Not enough to cause a shortage. As I said. No business will pay more than a couple hundred for a PC. If they need more juice, then the steam machine won’t be it. It is more like an enthusiast or a content creator midlevel machine.

That just wouldn’t happen unless the steam machine costs less than $300. That’s usually the top a corporation is willing to pay for bulk mini nucs, which is all that they want for clerk desks. Information workers get laptops with dell or HP embossed in the lid. Workstations for top design or video editing require way more juice than the Steam Machine can deliver, those are bought on order to professional boutiques, or they just buy Apple. Also, no administrator will sit on the steam shop page to buy one at a time, they like their bulk purchases and Valve can simple refuse anyone buying hundreds of machines. Then, corporations don’t just want the PC, they want tech support, advanced guarantee schemes, etc. This usually come with a subscription per seat. All things Valve simply won’t provide. It won’t even register as an option for businesses.

This is an unfounded concern.

Let me show the math:

The base M4 model is 16GB ram and 256 GB of storare and it costs $600, “cheapest minipc ever with such performance”.

The 512GB storage model costs $800.

May I point out that 256GB of ssd storage does not cost $200.

The 24 GB model costs exactly $1000.

No matter how much ram prices are ramping up right now, 8GB of sodimm ram does not cost $200…yet.

Anything else above those specs throws the Mac mini into $1k+ territory. It can go all the way up to $2600.

Now, Apple rarely publishes manufacturing numbers to the public. But historically this has always been their strategy. A base product that seems too good to be true (because it is) that leaves buyers wanting a bit more. For which they get skinned alive, price wise. Of course, I can’t be 100% certain that the base Mac mini is sold at a loss. But evidence suggests the $600 mark is priced exactly to act as a loss leader.

They are so neatly seated though. Perfect columns.

Apple mini is a hard comparison to make because the cheapest mini is a loss leader. Add a bit of extra ram or extra storage, which you have to do since the base model is very limited and the only way to get it is through Apple because everything is soldered together, then it is suddenly more than a $1k PC. They make the profits up with those upgrades which are practically mandatory and grossly overpriced.

I guess they are including the screen, the keyboard and the trackpad with the Windows license in those $200 estimates.

Again, who cares? A sale for Valve is money into Linux gaming support. Still not a bad thing. I don’t care what corporations use in their daily work. It is me who wants to use Linux for gaming.

But I doubt it will happen, if a ton of companies want to buy hundreds of computers at a time, they won’t buy from Valve. They have their own vendors who sell in bulk at lower prizes. Corporations today acquire mostly laptops for day to day office work and mini PCs for service stations. High power workstations usually exceed the steam machine by a whole order of magnitude in required specs, and it is way too powerful just to shift spreadsheets around. The mid range independent creator space and mid range studios might see some use for it if it’s cheap. But I don’t see them causing scarcity of the machine itself. There are other just as cheap options purpose made for office work.

It’s Fedora based. If you want to develop on it, it supports containerized workflows. There’s a DX version explicitly designed for developers.

That wouldn’t be a bad thing. A lot of the trailer footage was dedicated to showing video editing and 3d modeling software (it’s just a PC, was one of the marketing lines). They want people to buy this machine. Who cares if they aren’t gamers. Valve also sells digital creative software on Steam.

And if farts were rocket fuel I could fly. We all have dreams.

No, they wouldn’t care. It’s a mild annoyance at worst. Nothing critical was lost. Maybe stop putting money into digital goods that have no tangible value and zero guarantee of property.

Yes, and that is why I’m hopeful for more RISC-V development. One day, maybe, there will be first party manufacturers making open devices that work easily with any software of choice instead of proprietary vendor lock-in.

Which contradicts his position that cheating is a massive huge front to wage an endless war on. 13 people is a ban list, not a cry for rootkits on all clients. It stands to reason that if Linux was 0.01% and even if they were all cheating, it is not a massive problem. Is it tiny or is it massive? It can’t be both at the same time.

Complement with the alternative view offered by the developer of ΔV: Rings of Saturn. Also, there’s a lot of erased responses and contradicting tweets he made.

It isn’t. Cheating is a game culture problem, not a technical problem. Just to counter example. Rust is filled with cheaters precisely because they haven’t done everything they can to fix cheating. They are culturally fixated in a single lane thinking. As a result, they’re flooded with cheaters (plenty on Windows) who exploit their inflexible strategies. This is top Flanders “we haven’t done anything and we are all out of ideas”. Linux is not the source of cheating on Rust either, but he’s arguing as if it is. He is lazy. That’s not bad on itself, but he is also disingenuous and is arguing in bad faith.

Make server side anti cheat and suddenly what OS the player is running becomes irrelevant.

Edit: another contradiction in their argument. Linux was less than 0.1% of the Rust user base. But, Linux was also the biggest source of cheating? How? It is just a disingenuous and dumb argument made to spite Linux out of hatred. It has no basis in reality.

That guy was roasted on Twitter for that comment, and rightfully so. Most bug reports came from Linux users because Linux users actually know how to file them. Windows users are learned helplessness little rats, they see software as black boxes and developers as evil wizards who don’t talk to anyone. Complaining about software to them is speaking to the Eldrich gods and risks burning their retinas and throwing them into madness by their answer.

Linux user knows that software is just something people do, and if you ask nicely and comcompetently, then a human being will try their best to assist you. Above all, Foss users are drilled that if something doesn’t work, report it so it might get fixed in the future. It’s part of the collaborative effort into software openness, bug reports are free QA. Unlike proprietary culture that sees bug reports as customer support requests.

It was a most poignant situation because, as reported by another developer who blogged about Linux support positively, all of the bug reports filed by Linux gamers are about bugs that affect everyone playing the game and not Linux specific support requests. Since Linux users know how to file bug reports and have done so before, they are usually of higher quality than Windows users bug reports who don’t know how to extract information out of their system or might not even have the tools to do so.

Exactly, if you’re a hardware designer, no amount of money will turn you into a software developer within a month. A dollar of software development is not equal to a dollar of product design. That’s the mindset of shareholders. “Give me $12.99 engineering, and give it now”

They have said in interviews that the main reason they made it was to respond to the fact that the majority of steam deck owners keep it docked to a TV most of the time. It is meant to be a living room appliance with all the sound and heat dissipation issues related.

It’s smaller than an Xbox and barely larger than a GameCube. According to the reviewers that saw it, it is also much quieter and smaller than the smallest ITX case, while also being six times more powerful than the deck. It’s targeting a very specific audience that just wants a plug and play gaming experience and don’t want the hassle of PC building.

That’s not how engineering works.