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.

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.

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

I definitely advocate for some key tweaks to Windows 11, for sure. Just one specifically as a manual registry edit, two perhaps, but absolutely.

Still, depending on your setup, your hardware and your use case you may or may not need to mess with some configs beyond what you'd do on Windows. Back when I moved into Bazzite I was more annoyed by this argument because I had all the setup tweaks fresher in my mind. These days I'm more part of the problem because I tweaked the tweaks and I genuinely forget all the things that needed tweaking, so in my head it was more straightforward than it was.

I'll say that I do regret somewhat going with KDE Plasma, which is a bad fit for Bazzite, but that I haven't reinstalled with Gnome because, man, do I not want to go through that process again. So that's probably a good gauge of whether that sounds like too much or not.

After today, of all days, I will be taking no memes/strips about this from anybody that doesn't keep blood-soaked ties, scalped hair inserts and shattered cufflinks as serial killer trophies.

Or is running for office, at the absolute least. But bloody ties are better.

Any normal install of W11 can be cleaned up a fair bit just by manually refusing permissions and disabling unwanted features. For all the memes, very few of the features people complain about are forced on.

After that the biggest fixes I'd recommend are editing the registry to remove online search in the Start Menu, which makes it very workable (although there is a redesign incoming, not sure how that'll interact) and installing PowerToys to get a universal search shortcut and a bunch of really nice QoL features.

W11 is actually perfectly usable after some customization, honestly.

Sounds about right. Console install counts start being "relevant" after 20-ish million unit sales. The Deck itself isn't close to that, and the overall Linux install base on Steam is maybe what, a third of that?

But I'd argue you need more for Steam, because a lot of those Linux users also have Windows available as it is, given that about 20% of them are on a Steam Deck and many of those likely have a Windows PC on the side rather than only using Steam on the Deck.

Having daily driven Bazzite for ages now...

...nah, you still will tinker.

Linux advocates just don't parse what "tinkering" means for most users, and frequent distro hoppers tend to think anything that doesn't break in the install process is "tinker-free". Neither is even remotely accurate.

Bazzite is alright, but it defaults to autoupdates, so you may want to understand how rolling back on a Fedora atomic distro works if you don't want to be confused later when something fixes itself/breaks randomly for no reason.

There's only one mention of the word "slop" attributed to Nadella in the entire piece. It's this:

"We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication," Nadella laments, emphasizing hopes that society will become more accepting of AI, or what Nadella describes as "cognitive amplifier tools." "...and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our “theory of the mind” that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other."

Now, that's entirely meaningless corpospeak, but it's also very clearly not "Nadella wants you to stop saying slop".

But the article needed bait and nobody reads past the clickbait headline anymore. The intellectual laziness fuelling the slop isn't exclusive of AI usage.

We suck at this.

I propose an oath, ok? You commit to not using GenAI in 2026... and also to not EVER comment on an article or social media post you haven't read in full.

Deal?