MudMan

It's just nostalgia. The vast majority of those were either entirely devoid of content or entirely unusable.

Also, mostly Flash, so disqualified for human consumption by default.

See, that's the type of justification that doesn't sit well with me and that the article is doing all over the place.

Is the Steam Deck a very successful handheld PC? Sure. Compared to the boutique stuff sold on Indiegogo by Chinese manufacturers it's probably an order of magnitude larger.

Except it's also not priced like one of those (or wasn't at launch, anyway), it's priced like a console, with the LCD model (while it lasted) priced right alongside the Switch OLED and a bit cheaper than the Switch 2.

And by that metric it's done poorly, with best estimates placing it right alongside the PSVita at the absolute best, lifetime. The bar for success on that scale isn't "selling millions", it's selling tens of millions, which the Deck has struggled to do.

So, all fanboyism aside: The Deck did well for a handheld PC, but kinda failed in the attempt to bridge the gap between those and handheld consoles. That, if you're keeping track, is "reporting, not an opinion piece".

This?

Valve’s Steam Deck has been a runaway success. While the beloved handheld has sold less than most major console handhelds, it’s become a valuable system for many to take their PC games on the go.

This is an opinion piece.

I'm confused, is that supposed to be good or bad? A lot or a little? That article seems to be making a heck of a lof of excuses. The hard pivot from "the Deck is an unmitigated success!" to immediately, quietly admitting it hasn't outsold any actual handheld console is... kinda weird.

I like the Deck, and its influence in the market is clearly outsized... but it's still a fairly niche product, and for the price I'm actually a bit surprised at how not-mainstream it remains.

It integrates better than Bazzite on it.

Which weirdly makes me annoyed at Valve's lack of interest in expanding SteamOS beyond first party hardware.

It does mostly work, though.

For the record, I'm not American and I live in a country that has non-democratic regimes well within living memory.

You don't come across to me as particularly savvy, or as some form of a realist compared to the cushy liberal democracy children. You come across as deeply confusing cynicism with political insight for online brownie points.

Do with that assessment what you will.

I guess it's a lot easier to "look at history" a certain way if you make up the history.

I have too much to do today to deliberate the specifics of your historical fan fiction, man. You do you.

It depends on what "crap" is involved specifically and your use case, I suppose.

I think it's worth calling out that Win11 does indeed look extremely different depending on what settings you pick. Even out of the box my Win11 does not look like the mess a lot of the online advocacy likes to show. I'm guessing a bunch of the settings are saved to the MS account (which is again something people insist on considering anathema but I've used since before it was cool to hate it for several unrelated reasons).

Win11 has some quirks (where is my vertical dock, MS, it's been years), some inexplicable technical flaws (how is your indexing so bad, MS, and why is the online search-enabled start menu so slow but the multisearch bar instant) and it is occassionally annoying to have to keep up with poorly communicated new features I don't care about (what's new screens, MS, they exist for a reason), but it's mostly just... you know, Windows.

I'll say this, if all my system partitions exploded today and I had to reinstall everything I'd definitely have an easier time getting back to where I was from scratch on my Windows devices/drives than on my Linux ones.

Semi-genuine question, had you heard of Venezuela before today?

Like, in your view, had the successive US leaders just decided to ignore Maduro (and Chávez before him) for the past 25 years out of... what? Not having noticed they had a ton of oil? Venezuela nationalized their oil in the 70s, pivoted to China in the 00s. They stole the election while Biden was still in office. Chávez changed the Constitution when Clinton was in office, FFS.

Apparently Trump's key differentiating attribute now is efficiency, because it seems in your broad strokes, the-rest-is-noise worldview the Dems were just about to throw a sack over Maduro's head, they had just been procrastinating about it for a decade or two.

This is, sincerely, a profoundly stupid conversation we're having. They really do let people just say things on the Internet.

No, that's not a remotely acceptable representation of what happened today, of the policies and strategies at play or the history of the situation. At all.

Does the US have a history of intervening in foreign regimes? Sure. For access to natural resources? Definitely. Except in Latin America the Monroe doctrine had been phased out since the Cold War, and whatever version of it got implemented as the "War on Terror" in the Middle East was patently a disaster and very much a contentious issue that was not widely bipartisan in the first place.

This is a "neocolonial legacy" spanning all political sides in the same way France suddenly deciding to invade Vietnam in 2026 would be a continuation of a colonial legacy. Which is to say only in the most superficial, entirely ahistorical reading possible.

Which is, incidentally, why Maduro was currently in power when he very likely had stolen the election, was actively disputed and actively hostile to every party in the US political spectrum. Not because the US was setting up a coup, but because they were... not doing that despite some pressure, internally and externally, to do so.

And in turn it's presumably why Trump is out there saying he has no intention to give the country over to Machado and nobody knows what the fuck is going on.

So no, the outcome wouldn't be the same, the process wouldn't be the same. The geopolitical view underpinning the situation wouldn't have been the same (in that this is bucking a trend that started in what? the 80s?) and it's not all part of the same, bipartisan approach to geopolitics. If you squint any harder to make it seem that way you may pop out an eyeball.

I had no particular desier to see Maduro remain in power indefinitely, but holy hell is the notion of looking at the Trump blitzkrieg play out and go "Harris would have been doing the same, just nicer" a massive, epoch-defining missing of the point. It'd be funny if it wasn't horrifying.

It's funny because a fascist regime just blitzkrieged South America.

I refuse to engage with any comments that have clearly not read the article I link above.

See, unlike people willing to retroactively support their preferred choices I am making zero assumptions about what's going to happen.

What Trump says is going to happen and what happens don't necessarily line up, and there is zero indication that under a different US regime the outcome would be anywhere close to Maduro being deposed. That ship seemed to have very thoroughly sailed at the time of the election.

And certainly, CERTAINLY not this way. Not by kidnapping Maduro by force and hoping that somehow the internal opposition groups are spooked enough to put forward zero resistance to an opposition government as a US puppet. Even if that is nominally implemented at any point, that's a whole bunch of new ships that need sailing.

So no, not at all the same, not at all an outcome you would have expected from a dem government and not at all something consistent with US geopolitical stances in the past what? thirty, forty years?

The one thing I've learned today is that cosplay online leftists will say pretty much anything and that I'm pretty sure any even vaguely left of center leader in the Americas is currently re-reading their emergency protocols. Including those in Canada. And certainly in Greenland.