Yeah "Costs more than you think" no I think it costs about what I expected for a lossless player. DACs are a feature these days.

Launchers are a solution to DRM, not the solution. The way today's modern market is, it's understandable that some gamers have forgotten that there used to be games you bought directly from the publisher's website. DRM was done by asking you to sign into your account before launching the game, a lot of games still make you do this today. There's also the tried and true method of phoning home with a product key for DRM as well. There's no shortage of ways to be independent, very few companies are interested in doing so because Steam is convenient.

Yeah but like, launcher isn't a market. Game Store is the market they're in. I'll happily buy a game from a different store if thats the only place it's offered or even if it's just cheaper there. The annoyance is when they want to be Steam. I don't want to be forced to download another launcher to play a game. If you want what Steam has, create a launcher that offers better services than Steam.

But like, why does it have to be Google? (Or this extension specifically?)

If you're super attached to the google search results then try startpage. If you're willing to branch out a bit try Duckduckgo, it's based on Bing instead and lately seems like more folks prefer Bing's engine to Google's.

And as others have mentioned you could use any old useragent switcher to pretend to be Chrome

IIRC Isn't the Armv7 support limitation just for Revanced Manager? Just build the version you need on your computer using revanced-cli.

Love the concept, though it looks like Firefox ViolentMonkey comment collapsing doesn't work quite right. The comments end up stacked on top of each other like cards.

Technically speaking, Steam handles that part automatically. You wouldn't need to futz around with it in any distro so long as steam is up and running. That said my original idea that you could just launch steam from an Xserver login script is, well I've since learned that Steam Decks are running a less than simple setup behind the scenes. BUT from an end user experience, booting any old distro straight into steam big picture should be at least a passable Steam OS experience, barring any performance issues that would result from the difference in back end implementation.

It is in fact, a US vs Europe thing. Stateside "SMS" is ubiquitous. I put quotes because it's not really SMS anymore. It's either RCS between Android users or iMessage between iPhone users. The only time SMS actually gets used is between Androids and iPhones, because as other commenters in this thread mention. Apple refuses to implement RCS on their devices in a way that is compatible with non-Apple devices.

I had no idea they switched distros. Or ran Wayland for that matter! Truly it's the future. But that's a good point, being able to say on the "box" that is specifically runs SteamOS certainly brings about a level of consumer and investor assurance.

As far as the nvidia drivers go. Only advice I can offer is that I've never had any sort of auto install, package based install, or any sidestepping of the default installation of the driver work for me. It's always borked. The only reliable method I've found is the old school drop into the line terminal, shutdown all GUI, and running the nvidia provided install script (which sucks, I know).

Is there some specific feature that SteamOS brings to the table that people are looking for? So far as I know, a stripped down installation Debian or Ubuntu (Valve likes to base their packages off of Ubuntu) with an Xserver script that directly launches steam in big picture mode ought to create roundabout the same experience I would think.

I think part of the issue is probably that when making a platform jump, keeping the same name and branding is important to make sure members can find their way back. I don't know how federation handles the closing / renaming of magazines, but once everyone's established it could certainly be something to vote on.

It's a part of the history. The original PCMR started back when the mods of the original /r/gaming banned posts about PCs, saying "There's nothing inherently gaming about PC. You could just be using it as a tax machine for all we know". This understandably created friction between the 2 cliques of gaming, with the console clique calling the PC clique a "master race" as a form of insult. At some point, everyone got fed up with arguing about it. /r/pcmasterrace was made, and leaned fully into the "master race" out of spite, and was spurred on by PC hardware at the time being way more cost effective than consoles. Over the years things mellowed out and it became less and less about console peasants "individuals who at the time insisted that console was superior, not individuals who later could only afford console after PC hardware went up in price. Important difference" and more about becoming one of the master race "owning your first gaming centric rig".

If you wanted the tried and true down to earth gaming forum equivalent for PC, you're looking for the PCGaming magazine. PCMR will always be an enthusiast forum, that was based separating themselves from the console ecosystem.