I have struggled a little to collect my thoughts around the Steam Deck. The Linux geek in me is astonished that I sat on an aeroplane and played Halo on an Arch powered gaming system. Given that people in my life are not necessarily that same type of geek, I am going to break this review into three sections: Is this a fun gaming device? Is it an excellent portable Linux system? I am not a tinkering gamer; should I buy one? ...
Is there a more prominent sign of being a geek than wanting to have your special OSS tooling at hand 24x7? I started writing this post as a review of the PinePhone and ended up taking a trip down memory lane. I guess that is something that happens when you are getting to be an older geek. Below is less review though that is at the end and more thinking through how we got to this place in the history of Linux on mobile devices. ...
Introduction In both of our homes I have a Unix server for a variety of uses, but something that has been on interest for awhile was Steam in Home Streaming. In essence it takes the frame buffer of the video card and remotely displays it on any other machine running Steam. The benefit, for me at least, is two-fold. It is cheaper and easier to drop a GPU into the server than it is to upgrade the laptop and it allows for me to have a remote OpenCL machine that I use in my security research. ...