I’m using a personal music library, built up and maintained over the years.

I host it using Jellyfin and access it using Symfonium on my phone. Performance is excellent.

That said, YT music seems to perform just as well, and is the only streaming service I’ve used on and off.

Those get taken down on a regular basis. Not to mention the atrocious bitrates that is all they can manage.

Meanwhile, a high quality BluRay rip on my drive ain’t going anywhere.

You can’t seed properly.

“Why store anything? Just re-download it from someone who’s still storing it!”

You see the catch 22 here?

There should be a library type called “Home videos and photos” for that.

Huh? Like just sitting there?

Or is it running a heavy background task like trickplay generation? You can disable trickplay (scrobbling previews) if your system isn’t beefy enough to keep up with them.

I run video game servers on my system, and while stream transcodes used to interfere with them, even that was fixed my assigning JF and the games to run on separate CPU cores.

Download mode is definitely not a thing yet.

One of the things that’s a bother with the deck is having to leave it on and probably on the charger, if you want to install a couple hundred gigs of games.

Once that’s done, updates don’t take long on my connection so they haven’t been a problem.

But even better if they can pull off a mode where it can do updates while near-sleeping.

Yes, it should be safe to force a shutdown, and then re-doing the re-image.

Apparently windows doesn’t like it, but it can be done using Rufus or WinToUSB.

Should be. A USB drive is a storage device like any other. Shouldn’t matter that it isn’t connected via SATA or NVME.

Wine can’t properly access USB devices, so even if you got iTunes installed, it wouldn’t work.

I’m sceptical that a VM is out of the question, one should run on almost anything, though not necessarily perform well. I would give it an attempt, if you didn’t already.

Still, it might be simplest to set up a windows install with itunes on a usb, or second partition, and boot into windows only when you need to.

Again. I know.

That’s why I’m hoping steam would make their own thing that’ll just always be there for linux users.

In desktop mode, on the desktop client, outside big picture mode?

I want this on my desktop, and not just in big picture mode. I already know it can be done on the deck.

I wish I could have protondb badges inside the desktop steam client.

Would be nice if this worked with linux in general.

Are you being deliberately obtuse?

The device isn’t going to cease to exist, just because it was only for sale for two months.

Even if it had only been for sale for two months, I’d have gotten to enjoy using it for at least three years by now.

Yes, exactly. Getting it repaired (both within and outside of warranty) and spare parts availability.

What do you mean, “exactly”? The vast majority of owners will not need to repair theirs, and the vast majority of units will outlive their owners interest in using them. You’re assuming you’ll be one of the exceptions, which is always a possibility, but you can’t factor it in as if it’s a 100% chance.

Software eventually too, but usually that takes a while longer.

What do you mean? It’s an x86 PC. The same way I can grab a 15-year-old laptop and slap a linux distro on it, the same thing is possible with the Deck.

Would you have bought a Steam Deck if Valve would stop producing them after 3 years? I wouldn’t.

I would and I did. In fact every person who has bought one before today, technically did. That’s a million points of contest against the argument you’re trying to make with this. Are you seeing the catch 22 you’re asking your tech to adhere to?

I’d have bought a Deck even if it only lasted a few months, because I got one two months after launch on pre-reservation.

And why not? It’s a great device that is worth the price of admission, as-is. It runs games right now that I will still want to play years from now, and is durable enough to last that long. I do not need valve to make several million more, and to keep doing so for several years, for my unit to somehow become worth owning. It is worth that all on its own.

I get wanting companies to do hardware better, but the level of the standard you are claiming you want here, is absurd. The Decks potential for longevity is above and beyond almost any other hardware product in the tech industry right now, with the exception of the framework laptops.

My one unit has given me three years and hundreds of hours of gaming away from home, and will likely give several hundred more before it stops working. When it does, there are a variety of possibilities to get it back to working.

If it had stopped working within warranty, I’d either have gotten a new unit, or my money back. There is no gamble there.

Again, what do you mean “continued”?

The only impact the discontinuation of those devices had on the people who bought them, is that they can’t buy another. Aside from that, they still work. You’re talking as if the end of sale has some kind of significant impact that makes owning the product less worth it, or like the device ceases to exist on that day. But you clearly know otherwise.

If the Deck stops being sold tomorrow, that has zero impact on the one I already have, save for the possible decline in spare parts available.

There are lots of reasons to wait to buy something, but “they might stop selling them” seems more like a reason to get something you want to have sooner, rather than later. So that when sales stop, you have one you can keep.

Fair enough. But that only further confuses me on how you came to the conclusion you did.

Surely it’s enough for a given product to either be worth the price one pays at the time of purchase, or not be. Judge a product for what it is, not what it will be. And in Valves case they’ve shown they won’t arbitrarily take that away at some later date. Your only complaint then seems to be that they don’t always add value with time.

We almost certainly are getting a second controller, but that will in no way take away, nor improve, the value that people who bought and still use the first one got and get out of it.

I can’t really agree with that assesment of Valves past hardware.

Steam Machines were DOA, and anyone that actually bought one from one of the manufacturers likely got one that came with windows installed, because valve delayed the controller and software for so long the manufacturers pivoted to putting windows on them to be able to start selling the inventory. That meant very few that actually run SteamOS made it into the wild, most of them getting sold as just console-sized windows PCs.

And if you still have one, it’s just a PC. You can slap Bazzite or Windows on it and it’ll work just fine even today.

Both steam controller and link continue to get software support, and also function to this day. Valve stopped manufacturing and selling them, but support has not stopped.

No matter how you look at it, buying valve hardware has meant that even as it ages, they make sure it doesn’t turn into a brick, or even have its usefulness compromised.

Same goes for the Deck, Valve couldn’t brick the thing if they tried. When you buy one, you will still have what came in the box ten years from now.