When I was in sixth-form, a friend built a portable case containing a micro-ATX motherboard. No battery, but he could sit down at any of the school computers, plug into the wall, and use its peripherals with his PC. That was more than 25 years ago, I feel old now.
For the non-Brits, "sixth-form" means years 12 and 13 of school - equivalent to junior and senior years of high school in the US. The first and second yearsof sixth form are referred to as "lower sixth" and "upper sixth" respectively.
It's a hold-over term from when secondary education (ages 11 and up) started in "first form" and worked up.
Thanks for the explanation but it shattered the narrative by mind was building about an alien intelligence that slipped up and posted about its memories of its sixth physical form, the result of its fifth metamorphosis.
Interestingly enough, the French do it the other way around, and start counting from the final year (they also start at 0 so it's offset by one).
That's arguably a better system since you can keep adding earlier and earlier years (mandatory school starting age has drifted from 11 to 6 to 3 over the years) while keeping everything consistent.
Unfortunately they messed it up in 1959 by renaming 12th to 7th and giving matching names to the new 13th/14th.
Nothing compared to the order I went through in Germany: 1, 2, 3, 4 (elementary school until here), then VI (read in Latin, sexta), V (quinta), IV (quarta), lower III (tertia), upper III, lower II (secunda), 11, 1st semester, 2nd semester, 3rd semester, 4th semester.
Does anyone still use these Latin terms? When I went to school in the 90s and early 00s we just counted from 1st to 12 and university just was it's own thing and how many semesters you were in didn't matter that much because there was no class structure.
In Britain the first high school graduation happens after 11th grade; attending sixth form is optional and is primarily done by students intending to study at University.
In these years you specialise in a couple of subjects relevant to your intended course of study, and for university you apply and are accepted for and study exclusively one subject from day 1.
So arguably the US equalivalent is the freshman year of college.
Just to clarify this as well, while sixth form (17~18 years old) is optional in the UK, education is still compulsory until you're 18. you have the option to do this at an apprenticeship or skills based school but lots of people do just default to a levels.
> in the UK, education is still compulsory until you're 18
I've just looked it up because I hadn't heard this - it was only compulsory until 16 "in my day"! Turns out it still is, here in Wales, and also Scotland and NI. Only England changed it to 18. Our devolved governments love to make things confusing.
It's certainly a real term. The context is often student athletes that intentionally didn't play their sport for a season (called redshirting) to maintain their 4-year eligibility so that they can stay for a fifth year and compete in their sport.
I did this for a while in college ~20 years ago with the original Mac Mini, it worked pretty well. A little clunky given multiple things to plug in but it was nice to have your entire environment with you locally.
If you need to enter the BIOS: bring up the terminal, and write
`systemctl reboot --firmware-setup`
This reboots systemd-powered systems to the UEFI menu. May not work on other init systems, but SteamOS is based on Arch with systemd.
Shouldn't matter what you have as a bootloader, by my understanding it should be communicating with the UEFI directly to pull it off and going over any bootloader's head.
There are two types of technical blog post. One explains to you from a great towering height of immense knowledge how good it felt to use to use npm install and here's why that's exciting, and this is the other type. Written with many apologies for barely being able to do anything while doing everything better than I ever could.
Interestingly, Steam’s first hardware product was a Steam Box: a little computer brick that could boot Steam on linux and let you play all your games on your TV (with a Steam controller or game controller of your choice). The cycle is now complete.
The history is a bit more complicated than that. Valve themselves never released a “Steam Box” that could run games on Linux. They partnered with a few different companies (Alienware, Gigabyte, etc.), who released co-branded “Steam Machines” which were just those companies’s normal hardware design, but with a common set of specs ideal for running SteamOS. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_%28computer%29
You might instead be thinking of the Steam Link, which *was* produced by Valve, and *was* a tiny little brick that let you play games on your TV. But the Link wasn’t running the games itself, it was streaming them from a dedicated PC (which may itself have been a third-party Steam Machine) elsewhere in your home. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Link
> "which were just those companies’s normal hardware design"
For Alienware (not sure about the others, but AW was Valve's lead partner on it anyway) you're right in that it was a computer designed by Alienware not Valve, however it was a) very different to other Alienware PCs, and b) Valve were genuinely part of the development process, they didn't just say "hey make a small computer". They also shipped with the first gen of Steam controllers, which were created by Valve themselves. (Unfortunately, due to delays with SteamOS, the first version of the AW "Steam Machine" actually launched running Windows only, but with the Steam Controller, because Alienware weren't willing to delay their launch further and instead developed their own controller-based UI for Windows in a rush job...)
(Source: me, I was in the loop on those goings on at the time.)
To this day, I think the Alienware Alpha (as the Windows version got called) was one of the nicest machines Dell ever made and one of the best small PCs I've ever seen.
> first gen of Steam controllers, which were created by Valve themselves
The best goddamn controllers ever made, too, I still have one in a box somewhere around here and I won't use it because it's so awesome I don't want it to break. Pretty dumb eh? The two touchpads were the absolute best, I've never had control like that in an FPS and to this day I can't play any FPS with a stick because I was ruined on the Steam Controller.
It's the absolute worst controller I've ever used (Joy-Cons are a close second).
I didn't use it because I hated it so much, put it straight back in the box after a few days of trying to use it and eventually I sold it for as much as I paid, and I was glad to see the back of it.
The size/shape of the controller as a whole was fantastic but I just really hated only having touchpads instead of sticks, and that made it unusable.
I struggled with keeping my thumbs on the pads properly, probably needed sensitivity adjustment too but I just couldn't get myself to _want_ to try harder with it.
Sticks work really well for me in terms of controllers, I just wish we weren't being shafted by stick drift all the time when manufacturers could be using hall-effect sticks; I've got 2 PS5 controllers and 3 PAIRS of Joy-Cons with drift, while I also have my original 2 x PS1 controllers from my childhood, neither of which has drift.
100% agree. I still can't believe it didn't become a long running product that everyone uses.
I've never been a console/controller gamer, but I remember the first time I saw it - it was an early fake, that looked and felt very similar to the end product but inside it just had a metal weight and no actual electronics, and it seemed like such an exciting product, it was genuinely hard to keep that secret...
(And come to think of it, I think I misremembered when writing my last comment - I might be wrong, but I think the Alienware Alpha that launched with Windows actually shipped with an Xbox controller, and the steam controller was only available once the proper Steam Machine version was out. Not 100% sure, maybe we just needed the Xbox controllers for the press sessions before launch...)
Close in a lot of ways, better in a few ways, like haptics. Steam Controller haptics are not great, and the physical click is loud and echoes within the controller. Deck haptics are fantastic, but there's something about the large circular trackpads that feels better. Maybe it's just the larger touch area.
Perhaps I am unfairly lumping Alienware in with some of the other Steam Machines, which very much did look almost identical to their manufacturer’s other PCs at the time.
As someone who at the time was VERY into buying the “console-like” PC gaming experience that Valve was seemingly selling, I remember being pretty disappointed not just by the SteamOS delays, but also how much most of the Steam Machines still basically looked, to me as an uninformed buyer, at least, to basically just be a different SKU of their regular lines rather than the true “Steam experience” that I was hoping for (and which the Steam Deck eventually delivered).
I still use my steam link all the time. I have it fiber back hauled to the computer that it runs off of. I'm thinking of buying a couple more. Give one to my kid and one put on a projector so I don't have to keep moving it back and forth.
Also, I think the device you're looking for is a deck because you can plug that into a television and use a wireless remote with it.
The steam link is the best remote display device I've ever used. No frame drops or artifacting, even on scenes that make the 3090 chug. It forwards controllers to the PC.
Now, the software, "big picture mode" and otherwise using a controller for PC input aren't the greatest, but you gotta figure it's me and like 2 other people still using this.
BTW airscreen/miracaat/screen mirroring/"wireless display" all suck. If your TV has smart bullt in that supports miracast, that in my limited experience is the second lowest latency, then firetv devices, and then roku and everything else. Roku only usable for presentation or digital signage, unless first party built in.
I have used an old sony bravia tv to cast COD from an android phone. Every time I connected, latency varied from 100 - 200 ms to 10 seconds. I had to reconnect several times until the latency was satisfactory.
Conclusion: it has been technically possible to cast to a tv for some years.
yes, miracast/screencast whatever was a thing prior to the Steam Link being released in November of 2015 (9 years and some change ago). some of the current devices can actually do sub-100ms of input latency, but you can't be in the same room as the source device or you'll go crazy. The roku stand-alone have the worst network and input latency, they're unusable for anything other than presentations.
firestick was <100ms network and barely noticeable input latency (on the order of ~20ms so interframe lag at 60fps). steam link is link latency + some small constant - whatever the "frameserver" processing takes, call it 3ms but definitely <10ms - and that's both network and input.
when i said network i meant both the network and the actual refresh of the screen. watching a movie is one thing, but pushing "Y" and your character jumping should be "as instant as practicable" and steam link is the only one that is that that i've used, so far.
I guess Proton/Wine/Linux gaming wasn't mature enough back then. Also a handheld wasn't really an option because there weren't any powerful enough yet energy efficient and cheap x86 chips available either.
Proton didn't exist yet, IIRC. The Steam Boxen relied on devs/studios/publishers being able and willing to port their games to Linux natively. The result was a handful of AAA and indie games that put proper effort into ports that ran well, a modest but larger selection of AAA games sloppily ported (such that they often can't run on current distros without containerization or extensive library preloading shenanigans), and a deluge of indie shovelware / forever-in-early-access vaporware produced by clicking the "gib me Linux" button in Unity and calling it a day.
Unfortunately, while it was certainly a boom in the number of games Linux users could play (easily enough for me to ditch Windows entirely and game exclusively on Linux and consoles), it wasn't quite the critical mass needed for Steam Boxen to be a commercial success. Proton was the missing piece.
There were many years between the Steam Controller (2015) and the Deck(2022). I’m not sure how much of those learnings could still be applied, considering changing technology as well as staff changes.
Maybe Valve has such excellent staff retention that this would be a non-issue. At my previous employers, two years would have been enough to have to start over from 0.
I've disassembled LOTS of devices in my time, and never knew this was a feature that could be used after the initial purchase.
For some years now I've known certain devices like laptops won't power on when bought until first plugged in, but I didn't realise that it could be enabled intentionally after the fact.
Typically the first thing I do when I open a device is remove the battery, so accidental button presses (like i-fixit lists) as the reason for it are a non-issue.
This isn't all that different to how I use my gaming PC - it's off in another room, with a monitor that is plugged in but almost always off (I don't think Windows will boot without at least something plugged in?), Steam set to start on boot, and then I entirely use it via Steam Remote Play from my main PC.
I do use it occasionally - mostly when Windows has thrown up some issue stopping Steam from working properly.
eg. I need to dismiss a dialog that is invisible over remote play, or it won't finish logging in until I close a "finish setting up your windows install" screen.
Go to the gaming machine and upgrade it to > home or edu version if needed. Enable remote desktop with auth on your network for that machine. As long as Windows is booted and able to be logged in to on the gaming machine you can go on your other machine:
Win+R mstsc.exe and put in the gaming machine's name or IP and follow the instructions, checking all "remember this" boxes (there's 2, three if you count the certificate).
RDP won't let you play games but it is functionally identical to sitting at the machine itself.
I meant to come back and fix this but missed the window. I am unsure if the home/edu/N/P whatever versions of windows 7, 8, 10, and 11 support actually remote controlling the desktop as opposed to merely getting a "video feed" as it were. There's ways to upgrade to pro that are beyond my pay grade to discuss, but i think you can get a clean copy of windows that supports RDP for $130. If your alternative is "having a monitor plugged in 24/7" or "dummy cables but still have to plug a monitor in if something goes wrong with steam link {and it will. -ed.}" or other hacks/hardware, and you're already running windows at least the GPU/gaming side, RDP practically pays for itself even though it's $130 for that feature.
Someone else probably has alternatives (moonlight? bazzite? gopro and a soviet-era robotic arm (it only leaks a bit when it's hot outside.))
Can confirm, Sunshine + Moonlight are a killer combination.
I run a Windows VM on one of my servers for some gaming because I don't run Window's otherwise, and with Sunshine on the VM, I can play with moonlight from my TV, laptop, desktop, phone, ROG Ally (Bazzite), tablet, basically anything that can support Moonlight.
I still don't understand why operating systems can't properly work without a screen.
I have a Linux "home server" and I haven't found a way to boot up a graphical session with everything working (there were bugs in some applications, like menus not showing up, you couldn't change resolution, etc.).
A dummy HDMI plug fixed it, but still. It's 2025, come on.
You can run Windows server headless too, and run individual applications over the RDP protocol, exactly like using an X server on a machine with a screen to run Xeyes on a headless machine.
Anyone have a good tutorial or reference for doing that on a modern windows system? It would be very useful alternative to VM seamless style and allow Linux X11 system as the hypervisor with windows VM.
Well, i buried the lede. you need windows server to do it easily; once you have windows server set up, you need terminal services to be enabled and installed for that server. Then you can set up "single application mode" application. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-serve...
I didn't really need a guide, it's pretty straightforward; we ran firefox on a windows server VM in AWS and watched youtube videos, in 2009, just to prove it could be done. We offered thin client conversions to companies. never had any clients, too early, i guess, and everything went to cellphones instead. When i say we watched youtube videos, i mean on our test computer in front of us there was a firefox icon on the windows desktop local, and double clicking it, after a few seconds, would launch a firefox window, but instead of the firefox icon it would be the mstsc.exe icon, and you were not looking at an executable's output on your screen, you were looking at the output of the executable in the cloud.
anyhow the windows server software takes care of bundling/packaging/deploying of the the little "scripts" that let you have a desktop icon and everything else. I think there's a wizard.
edit: i buried another lede. The video quality of youtube over terminal services in 2009 with our crappy dsl was... "talking head" - or as i like to call it "peak apple quicktime video circa 1996" - approx. 15fps
When I looked into doing it once on a modern system and stopped when window server entered the story. I’ve been hoping there might be a simple solution but that had me stumble upon Parallels RAS which I’ve been considering doing an evaluation of.
My primary battlestation system (not gaming but for business) is 8X4k monitors on a custom Linux system driven by 2 high end GPUs. What I’d ideally like to have is many Win11 pro application windows managed by my X11 windows manager.
so it looks like, in addition to the method i mentioned, you can also virtualize the applications within "App-V" which is like hyper-v for apps (is anyone catching all of this? is this thing on?).
Microsoft made a firecracker or whatever for windows apps and no one told me?
edit: i'm shocked there's not a kitsch-y name for this like "Windowless Office Suite" for on-prem office that's virtualized for app-v... Someone at microsoft should pay me if they use this.
Quick skim seems to suggest the client to that system is Windows only.
I’m hoping for a Linux client which apparently the commercial Parallels RAS provides.
I think MacOS is even more hopeless than Windows for a per window or seamless remote GUI application solution. For Linux I use Xpra which honestly with GPU server and client acceleration can feel like magic. The dream for me would be a Linux based system for display using an X11 window manager to manage remote GUI application windows from all 3 platforms from multiple systems, all GPU accelerated on both ends.
Apple seems to have a particular hatred for the idea of anyone using their OS remotely for whatever reason, though Parsec works quite well for me, though I’ve heard there is a sunshine+moonlight approach that does even better than Parsec …
rdesktop has a "-A" flag for seamless mode which looks like it does what you want. I'm telling you we had that working 16 years ago via AWS - the AWS side was running windows but there wasn't any reason we had to be [running windows] on the client side. I merely mentioned that microsoft apparently didn't rest on their laurels with msts, they now support even more thin client mechanisms.
Windows will boot without a monitor, or at least, it used to, not sure about Windows 11. But Steam Link mirrors your display, and so doesn’t work without one.
I built a NUC running Windows 11 into a tiny portable server for a project I was building and can confirm it boots and functions just fine without being plugged into a monitor.
I just plug it into a power source and it does what I need it to do, but I can plug a monitor and keyboard (and sometimes a mouse because keyboard-only navigation seems to be getting less and less supported/intuitive...) if I need to perform troubleshooting.
The issue is usually with the graphics card itself in my experience.
This is easily "fixed" on a DVI port by plugging a resistor of the correct value into two of the tiny pin sockets. The diagram is very easy to find online and you don't have to open the computer. That's become a thing of the past as far as I know.
This always seemed to be a very deliberate design choice by them to avoid you being able to use their consumer cards headless versus paying them a large amount on the Quadro or DG cards, since the big problem we saw at $OLDJOB was always that you couldn't use CUDA on them headless.
At said $OLDJOB, we ended up soldering dummy VGA plugs that had resistors across the right pins when we wanted to experiment with building a low-power cluster of NVIDIA Ion boards and seeing how it competed with big cards. Ah, memories.
Would bet that this is exactly why. I run Tesla GPUs in my server rack which don't even have display ports, but they run any OS just fine with the vGPU drivers, which Nvidia make an absolute pain to obtain.
The _very_ first gen of Tesla cards did have those headers on them, IIRC, and then successive ones had the headers on the board but not connected for another generation or so, IIRC.
You also used to be able to edit the PCI IDs for the drivers to get the Tesla ones to attach to consumer GPUs, but that stopped working at some point.
Can confirm that. Using both to connect to the same windows box and sunshine+moonlight is better latency wise for fast paced games. And for games bought from GoG unless you want to configure Steam to launch them :)
Steam streaming is more convenient if the game is on steam and it's turn based or something like that. Also if the (mac) box you're streaming to has multiple monitors, Steam will continue to show the game if you cmd-tab out of it, while moonlight will minimize from the start.
Okay this all sounds great, what specs do I need on the machine connected to the TV? Will a Raspberry Pi 3 work? Pine64? Atomic Pi? (That's x86_64, intel Celeron)
Anything more than that and the value proposition goes way down. For every 50 grams lighter I am willing to lose 1fps. For every fan removed I will drop an entire resolution (4k -> 2k -> FHD...) Change "lighter" to heavier if it makes sense. My comfort and aesthetic matters more than competition quality, pixel perfect yadda
I keep starring these remote display projects but none have convinced me to provision a client machine for the purpose yet.
It doesn't take too much compute, the networking is the key.
I've run Moonlight on a bunch of things from my TV, crappy old Android TV box, phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, ROG Ally; don't recall if I ever tried a Pi, but I might give it a go.
My advice is, whatever you use, make sure it has wired ethernet for a consistent experience. That said, a more powerful device on the receiving end (Moonlight) with good high-speed wifi should also work fine, but almost always try to keep the PC end (Sunshine) hard-wired.
thanks, i have fiber and copper at the TVs. not in a pretty, or impressive way, i just have a switch next to the sets is all. fiber is impervious to most lightning strikes.
I got some hardware, someone else mentioned h264/265 hard requirements, but there were codecs before that for FHD that even a pi model B could handle (among them x264 i imagine). My main viewscreen is 720p60, DLP, it's real sensitive to artifacts in the visual output being literally glaring. doesn't take much horsepower to move 720p60 relative to fhd or 4k, imo; but here i am, hands out, begging for solutions!
I imagine it's related to what Sunshine/Moonlight is compatible with.
In terms of codecs, Pi4 is the best option (out of the Pi family) for hardware video decoders, Pi5 removed some hardware decoders which is unfortunate.
the gaming machine can handle all that, as i currently use it with a steam link (mentioned elsewhere) which means it's scaled from 4k/2k to 1080p or 720p depending on what TV i'm on. I'm sure i can run 4k (with a dummy hdmi dongle as i don't have a 4k plugged in to this pc anymore) with moonlight/sunlight/etc because i can do it with remote desktop!
At a minimum anything with h264 hardware decoding. H265, and VC1 hardware decoding supported but optional. It depends on what your output is.
Networking wise, cabled is the best latency and bandwidth wise but wireless also works but can be unpredictable depending on usage and environment.
This is one of many reasons why I just don't let Windows touch bare metal. My old gaming rig was a Linux machine that would boot a Windows VM with GPU passthrough, and the control I had over the virtual hardware that Windows thought it was attached to was really helpful for working around a lot of Windows bullshit. Won't boot without a screen? Virtually attach a fake one. Recognizes a device and tries to auto-install the garbage manufacturer-provided driver? Run the better Linux driver (if one exists) and have qemu present Windows with a generic version of the device. Want to debug some issue that requires disconnecting a piece of hardware? Just take it out of the qemu command instead of needing to go physically disconnect it. Want some remote peripheral attached that Windows has no idea how to talk to? Proxy it over the network in Linux and just present it to the Windows VM as a USB device. Having full control over the world that Windows lives in makes it much more manageable.
Same. I only stopped because managing storage became a problem - three huge games came out that I wanted to play.
Were I to do this again I wouldn't do ryzen I'd do at minimum a threadripper, so that the guest can get a USB pcie card and a GPU, so literally every device windows sees and talks to is virtualized. Usb keyboard, mouse, soundcard, etc.
I think LTT did an epyc build where 1 epyc ran 3 full "Desktops" with GPUs, nvme, for each virtual machine dedicated. I just need the one!
Ditto I grabbed a few clearance steamlinks and have all the TVs remote play to my single high power desktop and use a normal browser for media.
I had it running on ASTER at one point, a multiseat windows software so I can be on main computer and others can use steamlink on alternate windows profile and few issues.
Performance was rarely issue, especially even on wireless, and it's nice to have everything happening in 1 box.
This is cool. But now I want a power bank with hot swappable batteries/modules. Or better yet a connector that you can attach multiple power banks to and it gives power if at least one non-empty powerbank is connected.
> But now I want a power bank with hot swappable batteries/modules
I think it’s possible to build one. Get a bunch of 18650 cells from a reputable brand (or just an old laptop battery, if you’re brave enough), then look for a 18650 powerbank kit on AliExpress – some of these would be with slots you can just plug the cells into, without welding/soldering.
I'll elaborate. You'd think that by putting N powerbanks daisy chained together (except i imagine at either end) you get ~N times the mAh or runtime but i think you get probably .25N or less. the "last" powerbank in the chain, the one you'd charge to charge them all, would run out of power first, and about 15% of seconds more afterward, the second one, then the next, with the "first" powerbank, the one you're using for its USB ports to power a load lasting about 2x as long, no matter how many powerbanks you put in a row.
this is a supposition, but i don't think the numbers are very far off. Most powerbanks are 18650 or 26650 inside - flatter or "better" ones are lifepo or lipoly or whatever, instead of cylindrical Li-Ion. anyhow those are 4.2V nominal and USB wants 5V so all single cell or parallel'd 18650/26650 power banks are going to use a boost converter to get the voltage to 5.1V nominal at the USB terminal (assuming a dumb power bank, a power bank with power delivery will boost that even higher but also probably has multiple batteries in series, but that doesn't matter, it makes efficiency worse for our daisy chain regardless!). So these boost circuits "charge" something and store it until there's the correct number of electrons to equal whatever charge/joules is required to run the load. There is >15% wasted as heat either in the capacitor or the inductor (depending on the style of boost converter). There's another ~15% or so lost in the charging circuit, as it has to take 5.0VDC in and run a charging circuit (similar to mppt) on the battery at different voltages and/or amperages which again waste is generated as heat. Cable losses in the daisy chain probably account for a percent or two each, the indicator lights across all the power banks, plus all the microprocessors/etc inside of them probably waste another couple percent.
You'd lose a lot in efficiency. A power bank designed for this would have 2 cables and 1 or 2 wires, power transfer cables and sense/control wires. My engineering brain says "don't do this it's stupid and I think OP was making a joke I don't get"
There are a good amount of lower power ones (e.g. with an N100 CPU) that draw ~15W usually and not that much more at full bore, and some of them are starting to come with USB-PD power inputs (even if they come with a DC power adapter some will accept USB-PD on another port).
i have a passively cooled Quieter 4C [1] with N100 and a 4TB [dram-less] nvme [2] and it draws 4.5W total at idle running EndeavourOS w/ KDE Plasma. at full load (Handbrake 1440p transcode) it draws ~10W.
i left it at stock bios settings and did not put it into higher TDP mode though, since i use it as an htpc and it mostly idles, i'd rather it stay at more comfortable operating temps.
the nvme cost me more than the pc, which for $207 includes 16GB ram, 512GB nvme, and a Win11 Pro license. insane.
i'm mostly converting 4k from a phone to 1440p and cutting [backup] storage by 6x. most of these vids are < 3min, and i can do quite a few in a batch job overnight. im in no rush. it does about 4fps with the 1080p30 HQ preset with the only additional change to up the res to 1440p. i would not use it for batching feature length films, but you can do one in a pinch :D
I've wanted this for ages, Laptop ergonomics are horrible. When traveling I use a portable monitor, keyboard, mouse. Yes it's annoying to travel with all that but worth it not to end my work days with neck pain and a migraine.
I need a somewhat powerful GPU for work, so I'm seriously considering buying one of the more powerful handhelds with removable controllers and just taking them off. The screen would be superfluous but it's probably the most powerful travel PC, at least for the price, that's available right now.
I don't even need the battery that much. But all the options I've seen for SFF PCs that would fit in a backpack look fragile and I wouldn't feel confident carrying them around often. Plus, they're either expensive (because it's a tiny market) or geared towards office work.
On the other hand, the Mac Mini exists and is exactly what I'd want in terms of hardware. Why don't us Linux/Windows folks have this option?
Plenty of NUC hardware is pretty beefy, most more tough than most of those gaming handhelds. I've dropped a couple of Intel NUCs down concrete stairs and they only got a few scratches. They've also had really good Linux support for ages, and had Intel's Iris Pro GPUs for a while. Unsure they'd really fit your needs though. AMD sells a number of APU boards though, they've got modern GPUs. Still not breaking any benchmarks though.
Also, those gaming handhelds are pretty power and temperature limited. They're often a good bit less powerful than a halfway decent gaming laptop, just a more convenient form factor for portable gaming.
What you'd want is a NUC with AMD. With an iGPU of 780M or higher, you'd equal or beat a Legion Go. You'll find plenty of NUCs like this from Beelink, Minisforum, etc. Usually at $400-800. Depending on sales.
Intel's Lunar Lake is another option. The iGPU on that line will match or exceed a Legion Go too. Right now, it's mostly in laptops but some NUC models have been announced.
> I've wanted this for ages, Laptop ergonomics are horrible. When traveling I use a portable monitor, keyboard, mouse. Yes it's annoying to travel with all that but worth it not to end my work days with neck pain and a migraine.
Have you considered dropping the portable monitor for an angled laptop stand that will elevate the screen to eye level? I've got one that collapses down small enough to fit in a reasonably deep pocket.
I do actually use the laptop as a second screen in this way most of the time. However, it's amazing how many hotels lack any table deep enough to place a 15" laptop on a stand with a keyboard in front of it.
Fwiw, with my 15", unfolding flat and standing vertical, with keyboard etc in front, gave a plausible screen position. So I just kludged vertical-ish stands (and fretted over an eventual tip and crash). I considered hanging a portable monitor off the side (brick of a thinkpad, accustomed to gaff taped extensions), but didn't get to it.
I have one and my main gripe with it is how large the power brick is. It's practically like carrying a second mini pc; I didn't take this into account when I got it, lesson learned.
considering https://streacom.com/products/nano160-fanless-psu/ stuff like microPSU, miniPSU, and nanoPSU exist, this is unacceptable. I've used these mini PSUs - which are a barrel power jack, a hdd molex power cable, and the N pin ATX plug on a breadboard the rough size of the N pin ATX connector from large PSU - in remote inaccessible locations to do "in box UPS" for vm hypervisors on intel atoms/celerons and the like. Plug this in to the board, wire in a 12v stamped aluminum PSU that takes a battery as backup (used to be like $22 on amazon) and a SLA battery, toss that in one of those "mini desktop" cases - not the elitedesk - like the ones you saw in every office 10 years ago.
anyhow you can get a 12V PSU that does whatever amps (12? 15?) in a pretty small formfactor, and the "additional" stuff the motherboard needs is, as shown above, insignificant. The PSU can be pretty dirty, as in in the US do literal 10:1 winding to get 12V out (i know it'd be slightly different winding amount to account for losses in rectification and lines and whatnot but 10:1 looks nice to the math) and rectify it straight into one of those nanoPSUs. believe me i've seen me do it.
also don't ask to see my laptop DC-DC supply for running straight off a solar panel... it's larger than most NUCs, too. oh wait, you still need a laptop brick, plus the DC-DC. So you gotta DC-DC -> DC-DC -> laptop which -> DC-DC and probably DC-DC again (1.2v/3v3 rail probably clocked off 5v rail, that's what i'd do naively)
those "dashes" in "DC-DC" are doing a lot of heavy lifting
Yeah they look good. Unfortunately from what I've seen they have limited availability outside of the US and EU. I could probably get hold of one but not sure if they'd cover the warranty outside of their sales area.
"not very power efficient" -- definitely some of the most power efficient x86 machines you can find today. Until the latest generation, Ryzen APUs provide better performance with lower power consumption than Intel ones. And you can lower CPU frequency if you want -- even at base frequency, they run fast enough for everyday tasks with fan almost completely quiet. Of course this is oversimplifying things a bit.
There is a bunch of AMD-based tiny boxes for under $1k, and fancier boxes from HP or Zotac with discrete NVidia GPUs for $3-4k. They are somehow larger than a Mac Mini, but still very much the form factor of a small box to push into a backpack.
For their CES coverage they said they used MacBooks. They just also brought a Mac mini along that they hooked up to fast internet in a nearby e-sports venue that they used as a backup option to remote into and edit videos from.
They don't, but they do idle as low a 4W for the whole system[1] so running one off a large portable battery would be possible (if not exactly elegant).
You'd need a battery with UPS-like functionality (and doesn't beep when it's taken off power), otherwise every time you plug and unplug it your mac would restart.
Which is surprisingly hard to find for a portable (usb-C) battery.
I assume they meant why is the power interrupted if it switches from charging to not, and I believe the answer is "it's cutting from just vampire tapping the incoming power to feed outgoing, and it would need either chunky capacitors or to be constantly wearing on the battery to not do that".
For gaming, I'd also rather have the Steam Brick, I think. You have a large company with strong interest in the drivers for built-in hardware and external controllers all working smoothly. We also know video over USB will just work. And USB-C power so I don't need a barrel connector to travel, not sure where NUCs are at on that one.
I could accept Pi, with case, storage and battery in single enclosure. That is singular unit with relevant ports open to use and it being usable while charging.
It's hard to tell with a lot of NUC style devices whether they support USB PD as the device being charged but I would much rather have one or two USB power banks as my battery/UPS for the NUC, phone and laptops than anything more specific or inverted up to mains, etc.
There was this "SpaceTop" startup making a laptop with no screen [https://www.pcworld.com/article/1919392/spacetop-is-the-firs...], just a built in case for XR glasses like this (except the case was built into the body). They gave up and pivoted into AI...
I was thinking I'd want to make my own. How hard could it be? Just a phone, keyboard, and usb hub fitted into some framing. I tried 3-4 demos of XReal glasses though and (when I found a pair that wasn't broken, cable damage?) the FOV was much smaller than they seemed to be claiming. I think the bridge of my nose sticks out so the glasses are significantly farther away.
I would love that. Happy for it to be a thin client type of thing too. Imagine a plane where you have room for a keyboard but that is it.
Makes me think: with this your phone is fine. You can run a Linux on your Android then have a thin client. Lots of options!
The laptop form factor makes a laptop fragile. To the point where a 2 yr old XPS has been serviced 20 times (pro tip: get all the top level service options for 3 yrs it was about 30% added to the cost). And I have a probably 12 year old Dell desktop with no issues at all.
I'm on my third xps across 8+ years. 2 cases of services, the first one was a faulty keyboard on delivery and the second was a 1 meter drop into concrete that busted the screen.
Still looking for alternatives for my next one and thinking the System76. Gotta say though, I'm really happy with the xps model so far.
I was spinning a ThinkPad diagonal corners between my palms, fumbled it, my catch attempt put more energy in to it, landed on front right corner on the kitchen floor, bounced.
Nothing wrong with it, nothing broke, everything worked.
This was back when IBM still ran the brand.
I wouldn’t encourage anyone to try that with my HP x360.
Amazing. Someone ran similar setup with a thinkpad workstation with deadscreen in studio, they fucked up screen replacement but ended up just using bottom chasis hooked up to a externaml monitor for the rest of school.
There were some people doing something similar with the Vision Pro and detaching the monitor from a MacBook Air[0]. It looks really slick, but how well it actually works, especially given the drawbacks of the Vision Pro, is… up for interpretation.
I've thought about building something like this as a laptop replacement (small compute for xreal style display) and making sure there's a new thunderbolt port etc for a GPU dock, but I think the simpler option (with some latency / network requirements) is to use an xreal display with the cell phone you already carry in your pocket and sunshine / moonlight enabled with your desktop setup at home.
Depends on how you do your coding, and your expectations.
The glasses claim a 1080p screen, but realistically with text, you gotta scale it up to be more like a 720p screen.
If 1280x720 is good enough to code on for you, then you're fine, and it's certainly fine for some (e.g. I think some of my co-workers have vision problems so they set the font to be mega large, but code just fine).
Long answer: Vision Pro (if you are comfortable with the weight/price). Immersed Visor and Play for Dream Mr headsets are likely the first available coding VR headsets at reasonable prices but this will all be commodities very soon.
Your best bet is to resist being at the cutting edge for this year and pick up the winner after the next 11 months
Immersed and PFD are smaller companies releasing their first hardware; yes they've missed their initial estimated ship dates but they have actual working prototypes that have been tried by users (e.g. PFD had a booth at CES). The only question is if they can ramp up manufacturing. I expect them to have shipped their preorders by March and then we'll find out if they can scale.
HOWEVER my timeline suggests that you wait until the end of the year. The 4K per eye panel is now a commodity [1] and I expect a lot of VR glasses to show up in the next few months. Don't be tempted by the first few unless you have the budget for the cutting edge. Immersed is pushing their subscription software and requires a companion app on the host device. PFD is offering an Android Vision Pro clone. There are a couple PCVR (gaming) headsets coming. For coding though, the ideal is probably a simple headset with plug-and-play video input (i.e. like a high-res Slamglass [2] or GOOVIS art [3]). It's worth waiting in my opinion to see if anyone uses the panel for that.
I code a lot on these. They're amazing on planes and trains as advertised, but I also spend a lot more time coding outside because they don't have the glare issues of a laptop screen.
Fonts render at whatever size you tell them to. That doesn't change.
I have the Viture not the Xreals, but anyways... my experience:
I do find that there's significant optical aberration that makes text more blurry towards the edges. I also have astigmatism; not a deal-breaker but it means the built-in myopia adjustment only partially corrects my vision. I basically got contacts again just so I can use these a bit better. But it still feels less clear than a regular screen with glasses or contacts. Doable but not great for text.
I don't know about Viture, but the XReals come with a prescription lens attachment clip. I've got a set. It would be unusable without it, but even then the screen is only really great towards the middle of the field.
In theory the hardware has a motion tracker that lets you freeze the screen in space and pan around it by moving your head, which would be a huge win, but the current iteration needs an external dongle to do that which I don't have.
I'm going to upgrade to the next version purely because that's going to be built in (along with some other niceties).
This Steam Brick is right up my alley, although I'm wondering if you could do something just as slick with Framework guts. I haven't fired up Steam in a while.
If your head is on the smaller to medium size. And avoid v1 of xreal, even if you find a good deal. Their hinges are super weak. They said they fixed it in subsequent models.
I've got coding to work, but you do need to change how you manage your windows. They've got the resolution but the virtual screen is too far away, so you need to magnify the text and keep what you're working on centred.
I think they're quite good. Great for movies / games, I could use them for text but I'd probably zoom the editor a bit - a full work day in them would probably be Too Much. Really convenient for being able to plug into headless machines, or when traveling.
I wish valve would do a steam laptop that's just steamdeck in a laptop. I'm surprised how good the steamdeck is. I'm considering replacing my pc with steamdeck + dock + external hard disc.
- A custom CPU with integrated GPU that's somewhere between an AMD 6600U and 6800U, underclocked for battery life and thermals
- 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM (6400 MT/s)
- 50 Wh battery
So, to make your own Steam Deck-like laptop, you should buy a USB or wireless controller and install the Holo ISO distro (for a UI like the Steam Deck) on a laptop with the following specs:
- 50+ Wh battery
- 16+ GB of RAM (preferably LPDDR5 for thermals)
- A sufficiently powerful CPU+GPU (most new 15W ones will do, especially if you set it to underclock when on battery power)
- A USB-C port with USB 3 Gen 2 speeds and DisplayPort support
- A sufficiently nice screen, speaker, trackpad, cooling fan
You have to bend to face the Deck's screen or hold it at eye height, neither of which are ergonomically ideal. AR glasses allow you to use it in any posture you like, including sitting fully upright or lying down.
You should try gaming on the XReal glasses - or any of the recent XR glasses for that matter (the Viture XR Pro being my favourite). In terms of both ergonomics and experience, it's next level.
> Why remove the screen? It wouldn’t have made the build larger!
> Keeping the screen would have significantly complicated the build, as you’d need something to keep in in place. More importantly – the brick was built to be tossed in a bag as-is. No case, no screen protector, just throw it in a backpack or suitcase and don’t worry about it!
I love it, but not 100% sure you can keep it in your bag, as ventilation would restrict cooling.
So, if you have to pull everything out of the bag to play and wire it up, is this form factor practical for travel?
PS: I spend lots of time in Hotels, these would be cool to play in the room, even use Desktop mode on the go. But the plane/coffeeshop scenario feels a bit far fetched.
I love it. Respect to “brick” your actual steam deck OLED no less. I think I would have gone and ordered a broken one from eBay (don’t know prices availability etc since it seems to be repairable).
I've always been curious to buy a headset display when traveling, but was never sure what I would actually use it for. This is pretty cool and might inspire some use case's I hadn't considered.
They have a pair of tiny screens that sit right in front of your eyes and act like a very portable monitor. (Both screens show the same picture - no 3d effects.)
I assume they get power and video both over USB-C, so they can be connected to the Steam Deck's one USB port.
Over the type-C port they receive video, receive audio, receive power (<5W), transmit sensor data (accelerometers, orientation, etc), and receive commands such as switching to a 3-D display mode.
They're pretty great and I think the market segment will grow over the next few years.
One correction, the screens are actually located in the temple part of the glasses facing downwards, but they are reflected so they appear as if they are in front of your eyes.
They can do split-screen 3d, albeit at a lower refresh rate. When you put them into that mode they appear to the computer as one screen of double width.
I'm having trouble understanding the difference between this tech and the leading-edge AR tech like Meta's Orion glasses, which supposedly cost $10,000 to make
Why are these $500 and high-res enough to play games on? What's so much harder and costlier about the other AR glasses?
Well, AR glasses have cameras. Other than that I'm not really sure. I didn't even realize these had a 3D mode or other sensors, I thought they were just a pair of mirrored screens
Are these always-opaque where the "screens" are and only transparent (or not transparent?) elsewhere? If so, I bet it's the intermingling of transparency + overlaid pixels that's hard about the other ones
It sounds like the OP's ones have a button that switches between transparent, semi-transparent mode, and opaque.
I know a pair I've seen in the past was mostly transparent, but then it had an extra piece you could snap on that was just solid black plastic, kind of like a camera lens cover, and it would block out everything but the screens.
> TL;DR Well, the Steam Deck didn’t fit in my backpack…
I'm not sure if this is meant to be taken literally, but I would have just bought a bigger backpack. In some ways, I think this makes me respect the author more.
No plans like that at the moment, the opposite is true though: “The Nintendo Switch 2 is an upcoming hybrid video game console developed by Nintendo. (…) The unit maintains a similar form factor as the Switch“[1]
I have never had trouble carrying my Steam Deck in my relatively small and cheap travel backpack, but I usually also check a bag. If I was trying to carry EVERYTHING on then I probably would find that more difficult.
I'm not saying i's a problem but compare SteamDeck+case with a GameBoy Advance - especially as the latter is protected enough by any tight fitting cloth bag, it's nearly indestructible.
I used to fly with a 13" MacBook and a frankly excessive amount of random stuff in my backpack, and it still fit under the seat without too much trouble.
If you're trying to keep your daily carry bag super slim on principle, I guess it mgith be harder.
Really should have just bought a slim case for the Steam Deck. The stock case is like twice as thick as it needs to be and does really take up a ton of space in a backpack.
The irony though is that this box + glasses + controller combo for sure takes more space than the original Steam Deck even in the oversized stock case…
It's larger than the switch! And the case for the Steamdeck is notably thicker than the Steamdeck, while the case for the switch is not. I think this is because the switch is almost flat, whereas the joysticks on the front of the Steamdeck and the handholds on the back stick out a lot farther, and the Steamdeck case doesn't conform to the Steamdeck; it's just as large as the largest dimension in any direction.
My experience is that chucking the Steamdeck in my backpack for a flight is doable if I don't put it in the case, but if I put it in the case it takes up enough space that it's annoying to fit my laptop / other stuff too.
I normally deal with this by either not using the case or just taking my switch instead. But I respect the author's choice here a whole lot :)
Okay then I guess I must've gotten that one wrong too, since I always imagined Switch is slightly larger than GameBoy Advance or PSP.
(They really need to start adding bananas for scale for to ads for those devices. Or I need to watch more ads; the few photos I saw gave me the mental picture of a PSP-sized handheld.)
This is brilliant.
When I was in sixth-form, a friend built a portable case containing a micro-ATX motherboard. No battery, but he could sit down at any of the school computers, plug into the wall, and use its peripherals with his PC. That was more than 25 years ago, I feel old now.
For the non-Brits, "sixth-form" means years 12 and 13 of school - equivalent to junior and senior years of high school in the US. The first and second yearsof sixth form are referred to as "lower sixth" and "upper sixth" respectively.
It's a hold-over term from when secondary education (ages 11 and up) started in "first form" and worked up.
Thanks for the explanation but it shattered the narrative by mind was building about an alien intelligence that slipped up and posted about its memories of its sixth physical form, the result of its fifth metamorphosis.
I was thinking the poster was a JRPG boss
Op is a Pak Protector
Is that like a pocket protector or a trapper keeper?
This is pretty much exactly what was going through my mind as well. I was excited the aliens had started reading HN. Now I'm just sad.
Interestingly enough, the French do it the other way around, and start counting from the final year (they also start at 0 so it's offset by one).
That's arguably a better system since you can keep adding earlier and earlier years (mandatory school starting age has drifted from 11 to 6 to 3 over the years) while keeping everything consistent.
Unfortunately they messed it up in 1959 by renaming 12th to 7th and giving matching names to the new 13th/14th.
Actually, it's more complex than this in France. There is 5 systems:
- depending of the Ministry of Eduction :
then depending of Ministry of Research : University or Post BAC schoolsHowever, I think that in some other french-talking countries (Belgium, Swissland) they did it simpler
Maternelle years also have names: PSM, MSM, GSM.
GSM, PS, CE1, CE2, CM1, CM2 used to be called 12th to 7th, as I said.
Your primary classification is incorrect -- maternelle is part of primary. Non-maternelle primary is called elementary.
That's for classic education (General, when you want to make longer studies), there are also professional or technical Lycée)
The P in CP doesn't stand for "primary" but for "preparatory"
Nothing compared to the order I went through in Germany: 1, 2, 3, 4 (elementary school until here), then VI (read in Latin, sexta), V (quinta), IV (quarta), lower III (tertia), upper III, lower II (secunda), 11, 1st semester, 2nd semester, 3rd semester, 4th semester.
Does anyone still use these Latin terms? When I went to school in the 90s and early 00s we just counted from 1st to 12 and university just was it's own thing and how many semesters you were in didn't matter that much because there was no class structure.
French and Brits do a lot of things the other way around, like imperial system, ATON/NATO, driving on the other side of the road.
Just mentioned the age bracket. Kids who are younger or older are outliers.
The French for NATO is completely reversed: OTAN
What do you mean "hold-over"? In NI we still say "first year" through "fifth year". Is that not done in Britain?
Typically no. In secondary school its just said as "Year 7", "Year 8" etc to 11, then Sixth Form.
I'm also from NI, our school officially used year 8 to year 14, but everyone knew both ways around and just switched between them.
Edit: I should clarify I'm currently in uni so this was fairly recent.
In the US, for schools that use this form of grading, it means your senior year; 3rd form is freshman year and so on.
We tend not to have a 13th grade, and when that does exist, a PG (post grad) is generally there because they excel at a particular sport.
In Britain the first high school graduation happens after 11th grade; attending sixth form is optional and is primarily done by students intending to study at University. In these years you specialise in a couple of subjects relevant to your intended course of study, and for university you apply and are accepted for and study exclusively one subject from day 1.
So arguably the US equalivalent is the freshman year of college.
Just to clarify this as well, while sixth form (17~18 years old) is optional in the UK, education is still compulsory until you're 18. you have the option to do this at an apprenticeship or skills based school but lots of people do just default to a levels.
> in the UK, education is still compulsory until you're 18
I've just looked it up because I hadn't heard this - it was only compulsory until 16 "in my day"! Turns out it still is, here in Wales, and also Scotland and NI. Only England changed it to 18. Our devolved governments love to make things confusing.
https://www.gov.uk/know-when-you-can-leave-school https://wcpp.org.uk/publication/raising-the-age-of-participa...
I guess some people in the US call someone beyond their 12th grade in high school, or fourth year in an undergraduate program a "super senior."
I've literally never heard or read that. So I would say no.
I'm American and I have heard "super senior" and seen it used in print. Go figure.
It's certainly a real term. The context is often student athletes that intentionally didn't play their sport for a season (called redshirting) to maintain their 4-year eligibility so that they can stay for a fifth year and compete in their sport.
I'm a college prof in the US and know that term.
Sixth form is hardly the oddest name for a year, though. Shell, remove, fifth, 6b, 6a at my school, and quite a few others.
And should be noted that 25 years ago, was still optional.
Form of what?
Am educational form, an antiquated word for a bench.
I did this for a while in college ~20 years ago with the original Mac Mini, it worked pretty well. A little clunky given multiple things to plug in but it was nice to have your entire environment with you locally.
If you need to enter the BIOS: bring up the terminal, and write `systemctl reboot --firmware-setup` This reboots systemd-powered systems to the UEFI menu. May not work on other init systems, but SteamOS is based on Arch with systemd.
You can do the same on Windows with the command `shutdown /r /t 0 /fw`.
Systemd systems can still have grub as a boot loader.
In that case, you can usually set the boot order with bootctl and reboot.
Shouldn't matter what you have as a bootloader, by my understanding it should be communicating with the UEFI directly to pull it off and going over any bootloader's head.
There are two types of technical blog post. One explains to you from a great towering height of immense knowledge how good it felt to use to use npm install and here's why that's exciting, and this is the other type. Written with many apologies for barely being able to do anything while doing everything better than I ever could.
Interestingly, Steam’s first hardware product was a Steam Box: a little computer brick that could boot Steam on linux and let you play all your games on your TV (with a Steam controller or game controller of your choice). The cycle is now complete.
The history is a bit more complicated than that. Valve themselves never released a “Steam Box” that could run games on Linux. They partnered with a few different companies (Alienware, Gigabyte, etc.), who released co-branded “Steam Machines” which were just those companies’s normal hardware design, but with a common set of specs ideal for running SteamOS. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_%28computer%29
You might instead be thinking of the Steam Link, which *was* produced by Valve, and *was* a tiny little brick that let you play games on your TV. But the Link wasn’t running the games itself, it was streaming them from a dedicated PC (which may itself have been a third-party Steam Machine) elsewhere in your home. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Link
> "which were just those companies’s normal hardware design"
For Alienware (not sure about the others, but AW was Valve's lead partner on it anyway) you're right in that it was a computer designed by Alienware not Valve, however it was a) very different to other Alienware PCs, and b) Valve were genuinely part of the development process, they didn't just say "hey make a small computer". They also shipped with the first gen of Steam controllers, which were created by Valve themselves. (Unfortunately, due to delays with SteamOS, the first version of the AW "Steam Machine" actually launched running Windows only, but with the Steam Controller, because Alienware weren't willing to delay their launch further and instead developed their own controller-based UI for Windows in a rush job...)
(Source: me, I was in the loop on those goings on at the time.)
To this day, I think the Alienware Alpha (as the Windows version got called) was one of the nicest machines Dell ever made and one of the best small PCs I've ever seen.
> first gen of Steam controllers, which were created by Valve themselves
The best goddamn controllers ever made, too, I still have one in a box somewhere around here and I won't use it because it's so awesome I don't want it to break. Pretty dumb eh? The two touchpads were the absolute best, I've never had control like that in an FPS and to this day I can't play any FPS with a stick because I was ruined on the Steam Controller.
Funny how people differ in that regard.
It's the absolute worst controller I've ever used (Joy-Cons are a close second).
I didn't use it because I hated it so much, put it straight back in the box after a few days of trying to use it and eventually I sold it for as much as I paid, and I was glad to see the back of it.
The size/shape of the controller as a whole was fantastic but I just really hated only having touchpads instead of sticks, and that made it unusable.
You had to get used to it, it was weird but once you figured it out it was great!
I struggled with keeping my thumbs on the pads properly, probably needed sensitivity adjustment too but I just couldn't get myself to _want_ to try harder with it.
Sticks work really well for me in terms of controllers, I just wish we weren't being shafted by stick drift all the time when manufacturers could be using hall-effect sticks; I've got 2 PS5 controllers and 3 PAIRS of Joy-Cons with drift, while I also have my original 2 x PS1 controllers from my childhood, neither of which has drift.
100% agree. I still can't believe it didn't become a long running product that everyone uses.
I've never been a console/controller gamer, but I remember the first time I saw it - it was an early fake, that looked and felt very similar to the end product but inside it just had a metal weight and no actual electronics, and it seemed like such an exciting product, it was genuinely hard to keep that secret...
(And come to think of it, I think I misremembered when writing my last comment - I might be wrong, but I think the Alienware Alpha that launched with Windows actually shipped with an Xbox controller, and the steam controller was only available once the proper Steam Machine version was out. Not 100% sure, maybe we just needed the Xbox controllers for the press sessions before launch...)
Do the steam deck pads achieve the same thing?
Close in a lot of ways, better in a few ways, like haptics. Steam Controller haptics are not great, and the physical click is loud and echoes within the controller. Deck haptics are fantastic, but there's something about the large circular trackpads that feels better. Maybe it's just the larger touch area.
Perhaps I am unfairly lumping Alienware in with some of the other Steam Machines, which very much did look almost identical to their manufacturer’s other PCs at the time.
As someone who at the time was VERY into buying the “console-like” PC gaming experience that Valve was seemingly selling, I remember being pretty disappointed not just by the SteamOS delays, but also how much most of the Steam Machines still basically looked, to me as an uninformed buyer, at least, to basically just be a different SKU of their regular lines rather than the true “Steam experience” that I was hoping for (and which the Steam Deck eventually delivered).
I suppose the missing part of the story is why they held back on pursuing this market.
At the time, the console market was wide open, with little innovation in terms of hardware, until Nintendo released the Switch.
Even now, I'd be quite happy to own a Valve branded, small form PC that plugs into a TV.
The Steam Link was a kop out to me.
I still use my steam link all the time. I have it fiber back hauled to the computer that it runs off of. I'm thinking of buying a couple more. Give one to my kid and one put on a projector so I don't have to keep moving it back and forth.
Also, I think the device you're looking for is a deck because you can plug that into a television and use a wireless remote with it.
The steam link is the best remote display device I've ever used. No frame drops or artifacting, even on scenes that make the 3090 chug. It forwards controllers to the PC.
Now, the software, "big picture mode" and otherwise using a controller for PC input aren't the greatest, but you gotta figure it's me and like 2 other people still using this.
BTW airscreen/miracaat/screen mirroring/"wireless display" all suck. If your TV has smart bullt in that supports miracast, that in my limited experience is the second lowest latency, then firetv devices, and then roku and everything else. Roku only usable for presentation or digital signage, unless first party built in.
No idea why.
I have used an old sony bravia tv to cast COD from an android phone. Every time I connected, latency varied from 100 - 200 ms to 10 seconds. I had to reconnect several times until the latency was satisfactory.
Conclusion: it has been technically possible to cast to a tv for some years.
yes, miracast/screencast whatever was a thing prior to the Steam Link being released in November of 2015 (9 years and some change ago). some of the current devices can actually do sub-100ms of input latency, but you can't be in the same room as the source device or you'll go crazy. The roku stand-alone have the worst network and input latency, they're unusable for anything other than presentations.
firestick was <100ms network and barely noticeable input latency (on the order of ~20ms so interframe lag at 60fps). steam link is link latency + some small constant - whatever the "frameserver" processing takes, call it 3ms but definitely <10ms - and that's both network and input.
when i said network i meant both the network and the actual refresh of the screen. watching a movie is one thing, but pushing "Y" and your character jumping should be "as instant as practicable" and steam link is the only one that is that that i've used, so far.
I guess Proton/Wine/Linux gaming wasn't mature enough back then. Also a handheld wasn't really an option because there weren't any powerful enough yet energy efficient and cheap x86 chips available either.
Proton didn't exist yet, IIRC. The Steam Boxen relied on devs/studios/publishers being able and willing to port their games to Linux natively. The result was a handful of AAA and indie games that put proper effort into ports that ran well, a modest but larger selection of AAA games sloppily ported (such that they often can't run on current distros without containerization or extensive library preloading shenanigans), and a deluge of indie shovelware / forever-in-early-access vaporware produced by clicking the "gib me Linux" button in Unity and calling it a day.
Unfortunately, while it was certainly a boom in the number of games Linux users could play (easily enough for me to ditch Windows entirely and game exclusively on Linux and consoles), it wasn't quite the critical mass needed for Steam Boxen to be a commercial success. Proton was the missing piece.
I’m using the controller I got with my Steam link for the Steam deck.
Had to find a friend with a Windows box to run a firmware update to make it entirely Bluetooth compatible. But it works.
They really did a good job slowly experimenting with hardware working their way up to the Deck.
First the steam box then the controller, I’m sure they learned a lot from both of those before they released the deck.
There were many years between the Steam Controller (2015) and the Deck(2022). I’m not sure how much of those learnings could still be applied, considering changing technology as well as staff changes.
Maybe Valve has such excellent staff retention that this would be a non-issue. At my previous employers, two years would have been enough to have to start over from 0.
Before performing a mod like this (or generally opening up your device) put your device in battery safe mode [1]
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Enable+Steam+Deck+Batter...
I've disassembled LOTS of devices in my time, and never knew this was a feature that could be used after the initial purchase.
For some years now I've known certain devices like laptops won't power on when bought until first plugged in, but I didn't realise that it could be enabled intentionally after the fact.
Typically the first thing I do when I open a device is remove the battery, so accidental button presses (like i-fixit lists) as the reason for it are a non-issue.
Nintendo's Joycons also have this feature https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZxwVnLc83o
This isn't all that different to how I use my gaming PC - it's off in another room, with a monitor that is plugged in but almost always off (I don't think Windows will boot without at least something plugged in?), Steam set to start on boot, and then I entirely use it via Steam Remote Play from my main PC.
You could get a dummy HDMI plug for $3 on Amazon and free up that monitor if you need it. [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/BKFK-HDMI-Dummy-Plug-3840x2160/dp/B0C...
I do use it occasionally - mostly when Windows has thrown up some issue stopping Steam from working properly.
eg. I need to dismiss a dialog that is invisible over remote play, or it won't finish logging in until I close a "finish setting up your windows install" screen.
Go to the gaming machine and upgrade it to > home or edu version if needed. Enable remote desktop with auth on your network for that machine. As long as Windows is booted and able to be logged in to on the gaming machine you can go on your other machine:
Win+R mstsc.exe and put in the gaming machine's name or IP and follow the instructions, checking all "remember this" boxes (there's 2, three if you count the certificate).
RDP won't let you play games but it is functionally identical to sitting at the machine itself.
I meant to come back and fix this but missed the window. I am unsure if the home/edu/N/P whatever versions of windows 7, 8, 10, and 11 support actually remote controlling the desktop as opposed to merely getting a "video feed" as it were. There's ways to upgrade to pro that are beyond my pay grade to discuss, but i think you can get a clean copy of windows that supports RDP for $130. If your alternative is "having a monitor plugged in 24/7" or "dummy cables but still have to plug a monitor in if something goes wrong with steam link {and it will. -ed.}" or other hacks/hardware, and you're already running windows at least the GPU/gaming side, RDP practically pays for itself even though it's $130 for that feature.
Someone else probably has alternatives (moonlight? bazzite? gopro and a soviet-era robotic arm (it only leaks a bit when it's hot outside.))
consider a different remote access option i.e. sunshine + moonlight instead of using steam remote play
Can confirm, Sunshine + Moonlight are a killer combination.
I run a Windows VM on one of my servers for some gaming because I don't run Window's otherwise, and with Sunshine on the VM, I can play with moonlight from my TV, laptop, desktop, phone, ROG Ally (Bazzite), tablet, basically anything that can support Moonlight.
I still don't understand why operating systems can't properly work without a screen.
I have a Linux "home server" and I haven't found a way to boot up a graphical session with everything working (there were bugs in some applications, like menus not showing up, you couldn't change resolution, etc.).
A dummy HDMI plug fixed it, but still. It's 2025, come on.
You can definitely run graphical environments without a screen in a virtual environment, e.g. https://github.com/selkies-project/docker-nvidia-egl-desktop which is even GPU accelerated
Parsec has a driver which adds virtual monitors so you should be able to use that instead of a dummy HDMI plug.
Another issue is not having a mouse plugged in will mean you have no mouse cursor when remoting in.
> not having a mouse plugged in will mean you have no mouse cursor when remoting in.
Parsec has a setting to fix that too. Look in the host options.
Back in days (around twenty years ago) I used NoMachine on Debian/SPARC to do exactly this: run GNOME remotely.
Waypipe nowadays allows the same, but I don't think it has resuming support.
Headless X11 machines were a thing then it was all abandoned.
You can run Windows server headless too, and run individual applications over the RDP protocol, exactly like using an X server on a machine with a screen to run Xeyes on a headless machine.
Anyone have a good tutorial or reference for doing that on a modern windows system? It would be very useful alternative to VM seamless style and allow Linux X11 system as the hypervisor with windows VM.
Well, i buried the lede. you need windows server to do it easily; once you have windows server set up, you need terminal services to be enabled and installed for that server. Then you can set up "single application mode" application. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-serve...
I didn't really need a guide, it's pretty straightforward; we ran firefox on a windows server VM in AWS and watched youtube videos, in 2009, just to prove it could be done. We offered thin client conversions to companies. never had any clients, too early, i guess, and everything went to cellphones instead. When i say we watched youtube videos, i mean on our test computer in front of us there was a firefox icon on the windows desktop local, and double clicking it, after a few seconds, would launch a firefox window, but instead of the firefox icon it would be the mstsc.exe icon, and you were not looking at an executable's output on your screen, you were looking at the output of the executable in the cloud.
anyhow the windows server software takes care of bundling/packaging/deploying of the the little "scripts" that let you have a desktop icon and everything else. I think there's a wizard.
edit: i buried another lede. The video quality of youtube over terminal services in 2009 with our crappy dsl was... "talking head" - or as i like to call it "peak apple quicktime video circa 1996" - approx. 15fps
Thank you for these details.
When I looked into doing it once on a modern system and stopped when window server entered the story. I’ve been hoping there might be a simple solution but that had me stumble upon Parallels RAS which I’ve been considering doing an evaluation of.
https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/remote-application-se...
My primary battlestation system (not gaming but for business) is 8X4k monitors on a custom Linux system driven by 2 high end GPUs. What I’d ideally like to have is many Win11 pro application windows managed by my X11 windows manager.
looks like microsoft has jumped into this area since i last looked (eesh, 16 years ago is what i was basing my info on!): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/... https://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/technet/download...
so it looks like, in addition to the method i mentioned, you can also virtualize the applications within "App-V" which is like hyper-v for apps (is anyone catching all of this? is this thing on?).
Microsoft made a firecracker or whatever for windows apps and no one told me?
edit: i'm shocked there's not a kitsch-y name for this like "Windowless Office Suite" for on-prem office that's virtualized for app-v... Someone at microsoft should pay me if they use this.
Quick skim seems to suggest the client to that system is Windows only.
I’m hoping for a Linux client which apparently the commercial Parallels RAS provides.
I think MacOS is even more hopeless than Windows for a per window or seamless remote GUI application solution. For Linux I use Xpra which honestly with GPU server and client acceleration can feel like magic. The dream for me would be a Linux based system for display using an X11 window manager to manage remote GUI application windows from all 3 platforms from multiple systems, all GPU accelerated on both ends.
Apple seems to have a particular hatred for the idea of anyone using their OS remotely for whatever reason, though Parsec works quite well for me, though I’ve heard there is a sunshine+moonlight approach that does even better than Parsec …
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-using-seamless-rd...
rdesktop has a "-A" flag for seamless mode which looks like it does what you want. I'm telling you we had that working 16 years ago via AWS - the AWS side was running windows but there wasn't any reason we had to be [running windows] on the client side. I merely mentioned that microsoft apparently didn't rest on their laurels with msts, they now support even more thin client mechanisms.
Wayland. Solving the problems of yesterday, tomorrow.
macOS has no issues with no monitor fwiw
There is also this: https://github.com/VirtualDisplay/Virtual-Display-Driver
Never used it, but I heard great things!
Ran into problems, but that's probably because of the proxmox pcie passthrough nvidia gpu torture chamber I went through, and not the driver.
Windows will boot without a monitor, or at least, it used to, not sure about Windows 11. But Steam Link mirrors your display, and so doesn’t work without one.
I built a NUC running Windows 11 into a tiny portable server for a project I was building and can confirm it boots and functions just fine without being plugged into a monitor.
I just plug it into a power source and it does what I need it to do, but I can plug a monitor and keyboard (and sometimes a mouse because keyboard-only navigation seems to be getting less and less supported/intuitive...) if I need to perform troubleshooting.
The issue is usually with the graphics card itself in my experience.
This is easily "fixed" on a DVI port by plugging a resistor of the correct value into two of the tiny pin sockets. The diagram is very easy to find online and you don't have to open the computer. That's become a thing of the past as far as I know.
NVIDIA GPUs still require "dummy" HDMI plugs. They won't be fully usable without something plugged in; it's not clear why.
This always seemed to be a very deliberate design choice by them to avoid you being able to use their consumer cards headless versus paying them a large amount on the Quadro or DG cards, since the big problem we saw at $OLDJOB was always that you couldn't use CUDA on them headless.
At said $OLDJOB, we ended up soldering dummy VGA plugs that had resistors across the right pins when we wanted to experiment with building a low-power cluster of NVIDIA Ion boards and seeing how it competed with big cards. Ah, memories.
Would bet that this is exactly why. I run Tesla GPUs in my server rack which don't even have display ports, but they run any OS just fine with the vGPU drivers, which Nvidia make an absolute pain to obtain.
The _very_ first gen of Tesla cards did have those headers on them, IIRC, and then successive ones had the headers on the board but not connected for another generation or so, IIRC.
You also used to be able to edit the PCI IDs for the drivers to get the Tesla ones to attach to consumer GPUs, but that stopped working at some point.
https://github.com/timminator/Enhanced-GPU-PV
https://github.com/timminator/Enhanced-GPU-PV or https://github.com/ClassicOldSong/Apollo (sunshine fork with auto virtual display)
note that RDP works without plugs/virtual displays.
Can confirm. I boot Windows 11 without screen, then connect via RDP without issue
Have you tried sunshine + moonlight? I've heard it has lower latency and better streaming quality.
Can confirm that. Using both to connect to the same windows box and sunshine+moonlight is better latency wise for fast paced games. And for games bought from GoG unless you want to configure Steam to launch them :)
Steam streaming is more convenient if the game is on steam and it's turn based or something like that. Also if the (mac) box you're streaming to has multiple monitors, Steam will continue to show the game if you cmd-tab out of it, while moonlight will minimize from the start.
Yep, I found that combination to be better when it comes to lag, stability and quality as well.
Especially now that they added a 4:4:4 chroma subsampling option which fixes things like text edges in some cases.
A then you can use lossless scaling on moonlight for a real amazing distrubed gaming experience.
Okay this all sounds great, what specs do I need on the machine connected to the TV? Will a Raspberry Pi 3 work? Pine64? Atomic Pi? (That's x86_64, intel Celeron)
Anything more than that and the value proposition goes way down. For every 50 grams lighter I am willing to lose 1fps. For every fan removed I will drop an entire resolution (4k -> 2k -> FHD...) Change "lighter" to heavier if it makes sense. My comfort and aesthetic matters more than competition quality, pixel perfect yadda
I keep starring these remote display projects but none have convinced me to provision a client machine for the purpose yet.
It doesn't take too much compute, the networking is the key.
I've run Moonlight on a bunch of things from my TV, crappy old Android TV box, phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, ROG Ally; don't recall if I ever tried a Pi, but I might give it a go.
My advice is, whatever you use, make sure it has wired ethernet for a consistent experience. That said, a more powerful device on the receiving end (Moonlight) with good high-speed wifi should also work fine, but almost always try to keep the PC end (Sunshine) hard-wired.
thanks, i have fiber and copper at the TVs. not in a pretty, or impressive way, i just have a switch next to the sets is all. fiber is impervious to most lightning strikes.
I got some hardware, someone else mentioned h264/265 hard requirements, but there were codecs before that for FHD that even a pi model B could handle (among them x264 i imagine). My main viewscreen is 720p60, DLP, it's real sensitive to artifacts in the visual output being literally glaring. doesn't take much horsepower to move 720p60 relative to fhd or 4k, imo; but here i am, hands out, begging for solutions!
I imagine it's related to what Sunshine/Moonlight is compatible with.
In terms of codecs, Pi4 is the best option (out of the Pi family) for hardware video decoders, Pi5 removed some hardware decoders which is unfortunate.
Lossless scaling requires some horsepower though
the gaming machine can handle all that, as i currently use it with a steam link (mentioned elsewhere) which means it's scaled from 4k/2k to 1080p or 720p depending on what TV i'm on. I'm sure i can run 4k (with a dummy hdmi dongle as i don't have a 4k plugged in to this pc anymore) with moonlight/sunlight/etc because i can do it with remote desktop!
At a minimum anything with h264 hardware decoding. H265, and VC1 hardware decoding supported but optional. It depends on what your output is. Networking wise, cabled is the best latency and bandwidth wise but wireless also works but can be unpredictable depending on usage and environment.
I prefer indoor lighting myself.
This is one of many reasons why I just don't let Windows touch bare metal. My old gaming rig was a Linux machine that would boot a Windows VM with GPU passthrough, and the control I had over the virtual hardware that Windows thought it was attached to was really helpful for working around a lot of Windows bullshit. Won't boot without a screen? Virtually attach a fake one. Recognizes a device and tries to auto-install the garbage manufacturer-provided driver? Run the better Linux driver (if one exists) and have qemu present Windows with a generic version of the device. Want to debug some issue that requires disconnecting a piece of hardware? Just take it out of the qemu command instead of needing to go physically disconnect it. Want some remote peripheral attached that Windows has no idea how to talk to? Proxy it over the network in Linux and just present it to the Windows VM as a USB device. Having full control over the world that Windows lives in makes it much more manageable.
Same. I only stopped because managing storage became a problem - three huge games came out that I wanted to play.
Were I to do this again I wouldn't do ryzen I'd do at minimum a threadripper, so that the guest can get a USB pcie card and a GPU, so literally every device windows sees and talks to is virtualized. Usb keyboard, mouse, soundcard, etc.
I think LTT did an epyc build where 1 epyc ran 3 full "Desktops" with GPUs, nvme, for each virtual machine dedicated. I just need the one!
Since a few years, I just play on Linux
Almost anything works with proton - unless you're playing competitive online games with anti cheats software
Same. My Steam Deck has completely replaced my old gaming VM.
Ditto I grabbed a few clearance steamlinks and have all the TVs remote play to my single high power desktop and use a normal browser for media.
I had it running on ASTER at one point, a multiseat windows software so I can be on main computer and others can use steamlink on alternate windows profile and few issues.
Performance was rarely issue, especially even on wireless, and it's nice to have everything happening in 1 box.
I find it rather funny some people are completely fine playing remotely while others are obsessing over milliseconds of input or output lag.
I did that for while, but recently switched to Bazzite. It's a much smoother experience.
Are NUCs with batteries unserved market? Just thinking of them as concept. How popular would they be?
A NUC with USB-PD input could be powered from a USB-PD power bank.
I’d much rather do that than purchase a NUC with a built-in battery. Keeping the two pieces separate makes them easier to repurpose later.
Regardless, the market for such a device is relatively small.
This is cool. But now I want a power bank with hot swappable batteries/modules. Or better yet a connector that you can attach multiple power banks to and it gives power if at least one non-empty powerbank is connected.
> But now I want a power bank with hot swappable batteries/modules
I think it’s possible to build one. Get a bunch of 18650 cells from a reputable brand (or just an old laptop battery, if you’re brave enough), then look for a 18650 powerbank kit on AliExpress – some of these would be with slots you can just plug the cells into, without welding/soldering.
Can you already do this just by daisy chaining them?
I'll elaborate. You'd think that by putting N powerbanks daisy chained together (except i imagine at either end) you get ~N times the mAh or runtime but i think you get probably .25N or less. the "last" powerbank in the chain, the one you'd charge to charge them all, would run out of power first, and about 15% of seconds more afterward, the second one, then the next, with the "first" powerbank, the one you're using for its USB ports to power a load lasting about 2x as long, no matter how many powerbanks you put in a row.
this is a supposition, but i don't think the numbers are very far off. Most powerbanks are 18650 or 26650 inside - flatter or "better" ones are lifepo or lipoly or whatever, instead of cylindrical Li-Ion. anyhow those are 4.2V nominal and USB wants 5V so all single cell or parallel'd 18650/26650 power banks are going to use a boost converter to get the voltage to 5.1V nominal at the USB terminal (assuming a dumb power bank, a power bank with power delivery will boost that even higher but also probably has multiple batteries in series, but that doesn't matter, it makes efficiency worse for our daisy chain regardless!). So these boost circuits "charge" something and store it until there's the correct number of electrons to equal whatever charge/joules is required to run the load. There is >15% wasted as heat either in the capacitor or the inductor (depending on the style of boost converter). There's another ~15% or so lost in the charging circuit, as it has to take 5.0VDC in and run a charging circuit (similar to mppt) on the battery at different voltages and/or amperages which again waste is generated as heat. Cable losses in the daisy chain probably account for a percent or two each, the indicator lights across all the power banks, plus all the microprocessors/etc inside of them probably waste another couple percent.
I'm intrigued now, I'll have to dry this on my testbench and report back with some figures. Expect to hear from me in about six years.
just plug one into itself and time how long it takes to run flat...
You'd lose a lot in efficiency. A power bank designed for this would have 2 cables and 1 or 2 wires, power transfer cables and sense/control wires. My engineering brain says "don't do this it's stupid and I think OP was making a joke I don't get"
Can they be? I'm not sure they make NUCs designed for mobile power draw without the battery.
There are a good amount of lower power ones (e.g. with an N100 CPU) that draw ~15W usually and not that much more at full bore, and some of them are starting to come with USB-PD power inputs (even if they come with a DC power adapter some will accept USB-PD on another port).
Look for "PD in" on this sheet for some examples (columns BW-BY): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SWqLJ6tGmYHzqGaa4RZs...
i have a passively cooled Quieter 4C [1] with N100 and a 4TB [dram-less] nvme [2] and it draws 4.5W total at idle running EndeavourOS w/ KDE Plasma. at full load (Handbrake 1440p transcode) it draws ~10W.
i left it at stock bios settings and did not put it into higher TDP mode though, since i use it as an htpc and it mostly idles, i'd rather it stay at more comfortable operating temps.
the nvme cost me more than the pc, which for $207 includes 16GB ram, 512GB nvme, and a Win11 Pro license. insane.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/MeLE-Mini-Quieter-4C-Astrophotography...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLDJCBPG/
N100 is ok for video transcoding?
i'm mostly converting 4k from a phone to 1440p and cutting [backup] storage by 6x. most of these vids are < 3min, and i can do quite a few in a batch job overnight. im in no rush. it does about 4fps with the 1080p30 HQ preset with the only additional change to up the res to 1440p. i would not use it for batching feature length films, but you can do one in a pinch :D
I run a N97 based MiniPC off a power bank when I'm travelling, works fine along with my mobile hotspot.
I've wanted this for ages, Laptop ergonomics are horrible. When traveling I use a portable monitor, keyboard, mouse. Yes it's annoying to travel with all that but worth it not to end my work days with neck pain and a migraine.
I need a somewhat powerful GPU for work, so I'm seriously considering buying one of the more powerful handhelds with removable controllers and just taking them off. The screen would be superfluous but it's probably the most powerful travel PC, at least for the price, that's available right now.
I don't even need the battery that much. But all the options I've seen for SFF PCs that would fit in a backpack look fragile and I wouldn't feel confident carrying them around often. Plus, they're either expensive (because it's a tiny market) or geared towards office work.
On the other hand, the Mac Mini exists and is exactly what I'd want in terms of hardware. Why don't us Linux/Windows folks have this option?
Plenty of NUC hardware is pretty beefy, most more tough than most of those gaming handhelds. I've dropped a couple of Intel NUCs down concrete stairs and they only got a few scratches. They've also had really good Linux support for ages, and had Intel's Iris Pro GPUs for a while. Unsure they'd really fit your needs though. AMD sells a number of APU boards though, they've got modern GPUs. Still not breaking any benchmarks though.
Also, those gaming handhelds are pretty power and temperature limited. They're often a good bit less powerful than a halfway decent gaming laptop, just a more convenient form factor for portable gaming.
NUCs are basically office machines though, I don't think any of them have the kind of graphics capabilities of a Legion Go, for example.
There are SFF PCs a little bigger than NUCs that do have strong graphics but they're crazy expensive.
What you'd want is a NUC with AMD. With an iGPU of 780M or higher, you'd equal or beat a Legion Go. You'll find plenty of NUCs like this from Beelink, Minisforum, etc. Usually at $400-800. Depending on sales.
Intel's Lunar Lake is another option. The iGPU on that line will match or exceed a Legion Go too. Right now, it's mostly in laptops but some NUC models have been announced.
> I've wanted this for ages, Laptop ergonomics are horrible. When traveling I use a portable monitor, keyboard, mouse. Yes it's annoying to travel with all that but worth it not to end my work days with neck pain and a migraine.
Have you considered dropping the portable monitor for an angled laptop stand that will elevate the screen to eye level? I've got one that collapses down small enough to fit in a reasonably deep pocket.
I do actually use the laptop as a second screen in this way most of the time. However, it's amazing how many hotels lack any table deep enough to place a 15" laptop on a stand with a keyboard in front of it.
Wow, that's obnoxious. You may be able to call down and ask for a folding table of some kind. But yeah, you shouldn't have to.
Fwiw, with my 15", unfolding flat and standing vertical, with keyboard etc in front, gave a plausible screen position. So I just kludged vertical-ish stands (and fretted over an eventual tip and crash). I considered hanging a portable monitor off the side (brick of a thinkpad, accustomed to gaff taped extensions), but didn't get to it.
Minisforum machines are excellent in that regard. Sturdy little bricks with price and performance.
I have one and my main gripe with it is how large the power brick is. It's practically like carrying a second mini pc; I didn't take this into account when I got it, lesson learned.
I've seen some newer models pop-up recently with inbuilt power supplies.
considering https://streacom.com/products/nano160-fanless-psu/ stuff like microPSU, miniPSU, and nanoPSU exist, this is unacceptable. I've used these mini PSUs - which are a barrel power jack, a hdd molex power cable, and the N pin ATX plug on a breadboard the rough size of the N pin ATX connector from large PSU - in remote inaccessible locations to do "in box UPS" for vm hypervisors on intel atoms/celerons and the like. Plug this in to the board, wire in a 12v stamped aluminum PSU that takes a battery as backup (used to be like $22 on amazon) and a SLA battery, toss that in one of those "mini desktop" cases - not the elitedesk - like the ones you saw in every office 10 years ago.
anyhow you can get a 12V PSU that does whatever amps (12? 15?) in a pretty small formfactor, and the "additional" stuff the motherboard needs is, as shown above, insignificant. The PSU can be pretty dirty, as in in the US do literal 10:1 winding to get 12V out (i know it'd be slightly different winding amount to account for losses in rectification and lines and whatnot but 10:1 looks nice to the math) and rectify it straight into one of those nanoPSUs. believe me i've seen me do it.
also don't ask to see my laptop DC-DC supply for running straight off a solar panel... it's larger than most NUCs, too. oh wait, you still need a laptop brick, plus the DC-DC. So you gotta DC-DC -> DC-DC -> laptop which -> DC-DC and probably DC-DC again (1.2v/3v3 rail probably clocked off 5v rail, that's what i'd do naively)
those "dashes" in "DC-DC" are doing a lot of heavy lifting
Yeah they look good. Unfortunately from what I've seen they have limited availability outside of the US and EU. I could probably get hold of one but not sure if they'd cover the warranty outside of their sales area.
Not very power efficient, and warranty is meh.
Had to do a repaste to get proper cooling.
"not very power efficient" -- definitely some of the most power efficient x86 machines you can find today. Until the latest generation, Ryzen APUs provide better performance with lower power consumption than Intel ones. And you can lower CPU frequency if you want -- even at base frequency, they run fast enough for everyday tasks with fan almost completely quiet. Of course this is oversimplifying things a bit.
i9 power efficient, OK lol. If you want power efficient, get a Kontron. Below 3W idle we can talk. My MS-01 does 16W idle.
There is a bunch of AMD-based tiny boxes for under $1k, and fancier boxes from HP or Zotac with discrete NVidia GPUs for $3-4k. They are somehow larger than a Mac Mini, but still very much the form factor of a small box to push into a backpack.
> Zotac with discrete NVidia GPUs for $3-4k
Crazy expensive.
A 32 GB Mac Mini with substantial SSD is also around $1k.
Less highly specced AMD-based NUC-lookalikes are like $600, comparable to low-specced mac minis.
Linus Tech Tips editors spoke briefly on how they’re bringing Mac minis with them to events to edit on the go.
You can probably bring Mac Minis onto a business class airplane seat, plug it in to the HDMI port and edit while you fly.
What's the advantage over a MacBook? Supports more external displays or something?
For their CES coverage they said they used MacBooks. They just also brought a Mac mini along that they hooked up to fast internet in a nearby e-sports venue that they used as a backup option to remote into and edit videos from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYXh0AdBw-I
I didn't know Mac Minis had good batteries in them. How many hours do they last on full load?
They don't, but they do idle as low a 4W for the whole system[1] so running one off a large portable battery would be possible (if not exactly elegant).
1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/103253
You'd need a battery with UPS-like functionality (and doesn't beep when it's taken off power), otherwise every time you plug and unplug it your mac would restart.
Which is surprisingly hard to find for a portable (usb-C) battery.
Does it do that? Why?
Do you mean why a UPS beeps when it's disconnected from power? I imagine so the user knows it's disconnected.
Annoying during a power outage though.
I assume they meant why is the power interrupted if it switches from charging to not, and I believe the answer is "it's cutting from just vampire tapping the incoming power to feed outgoing, and it would need either chunky capacitors or to be constantly wearing on the battery to not do that".
You might be able to hush the beep by holding down the UPS ON button.
Works on all APC UPSes that I've tried, at least.
For gaming, I'd also rather have the Steam Brick, I think. You have a large company with strong interest in the drivers for built-in hardware and external controllers all working smoothly. We also know video over USB will just work. And USB-C power so I don't need a barrel connector to travel, not sure where NUCs are at on that one.
Not terribly; as for many use cases buying a whole laptop is cheaper.
Depending on your exact requirements, Raspberry Pi 5 + case + battery is a configuration that already exists.
I could accept Pi, with case, storage and battery in single enclosure. That is singular unit with relevant ports open to use and it being usable while charging.
It's hard to tell with a lot of NUC style devices whether they support USB PD as the device being charged but I would much rather have one or two USB power banks as my battery/UPS for the NUC, phone and laptops than anything more specific or inverted up to mains, etc.
Sort of niche but some Vision Pro folks are carrying SSDs w travel routers setting them as an SMB and powering the setup with a travel battery.
It provides streaming access to from large libraries of HDR content on the go.
SimulaVR will do this (NUC+battery), but on a VR headset.
These glasses are super interesting - if laptops didn't have displays, their form factors could change considerably.
I'm imagining a rectangular shape with the track pad right aligned to the keyboard, rather than underneath.
There was this "SpaceTop" startup making a laptop with no screen [https://www.pcworld.com/article/1919392/spacetop-is-the-firs...], just a built in case for XR glasses like this (except the case was built into the body). They gave up and pivoted into AI...
I was thinking I'd want to make my own. How hard could it be? Just a phone, keyboard, and usb hub fitted into some framing. I tried 3-4 demos of XReal glasses though and (when I found a pair that wasn't broken, cable damage?) the FOV was much smaller than they seemed to be claiming. I think the bridge of my nose sticks out so the glasses are significantly farther away.
I still like the idea.
I would love that. Happy for it to be a thin client type of thing too. Imagine a plane where you have room for a keyboard but that is it.
Makes me think: with this your phone is fine. You can run a Linux on your Android then have a thin client. Lots of options!
The laptop form factor makes a laptop fragile. To the point where a 2 yr old XPS has been serviced 20 times (pro tip: get all the top level service options for 3 yrs it was about 30% added to the cost). And I have a probably 12 year old Dell desktop with no issues at all.
I'm on my third xps across 8+ years. 2 cases of services, the first one was a faulty keyboard on delivery and the second was a 1 meter drop into concrete that busted the screen.
Still looking for alternatives for my next one and thinking the System76. Gotta say though, I'm really happy with the xps model so far.
I was spinning a ThinkPad diagonal corners between my palms, fumbled it, my catch attempt put more energy in to it, landed on front right corner on the kitchen floor, bounced.
Nothing wrong with it, nothing broke, everything worked.
This was back when IBM still ran the brand.
I wouldn’t encourage anyone to try that with my HP x360.
There a a number of people removing their screens from Mac Airs and others, some of them using these glasses too.
I think I saw in here. In the meantime
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Screenless-MacBooks-masqueradi...
Actually tempted to buy one with a broken screen and ply around.
Amazing. Someone ran similar setup with a thinkpad workstation with deadscreen in studio, they fucked up screen replacement but ended up just using bottom chasis hooked up to a externaml monitor for the rest of school.
In my family, we always called those 'half-tops'.
There were some people doing something similar with the Vision Pro and detaching the monitor from a MacBook Air[0]. It looks really slick, but how well it actually works, especially given the drawbacks of the Vision Pro, is… up for interpretation.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUa_pPUbpGQ
I've thought about building something like this as a laptop replacement (small compute for xreal style display) and making sure there's a new thunderbolt port etc for a GPU dock, but I think the simpler option (with some latency / network requirements) is to use an xreal display with the cell phone you already carry in your pocket and sunshine / moonlight enabled with your desktop setup at home.
Side question: are those glasses any good? I almost got myself a pair
They’re good enough for gaming, don’t expect to do much coding.
They are very good for your neck, though.
Depends on how you do your coding, and your expectations.
The glasses claim a 1080p screen, but realistically with text, you gotta scale it up to be more like a 720p screen.
If 1280x720 is good enough to code on for you, then you're fine, and it's certainly fine for some (e.g. I think some of my co-workers have vision problems so they set the font to be mega large, but code just fine).
Are there any glasses/headsets out there that are good for coding yet? The idea of working on the go with VR glasses is very appealing to me.
Short answer: no
Long answer: Vision Pro (if you are comfortable with the weight/price). Immersed Visor and Play for Dream Mr headsets are likely the first available coding VR headsets at reasonable prices but this will all be commodities very soon.
Your best bet is to resist being at the cutting edge for this year and pick up the winner after the next 11 months
> Immersed Visor and Play for Dream Mr
Googled both and consensus is both are vaporware? I’m in the market for something like this but your timeline sounds optimistic unfortunately :/
Immersed and PFD are smaller companies releasing their first hardware; yes they've missed their initial estimated ship dates but they have actual working prototypes that have been tried by users (e.g. PFD had a booth at CES). The only question is if they can ramp up manufacturing. I expect them to have shipped their preorders by March and then we'll find out if they can scale.
HOWEVER my timeline suggests that you wait until the end of the year. The 4K per eye panel is now a commodity [1] and I expect a lot of VR glasses to show up in the next few months. Don't be tempted by the first few unless you have the budget for the cutting edge. Immersed is pushing their subscription software and requires a companion app on the host device. PFD is offering an Android Vision Pro clone. There are a couple PCVR (gaming) headsets coming. For coding though, the ideal is probably a simple headset with plug-and-play video input (i.e. like a high-res Slamglass [2] or GOOVIS art [3]). It's worth waiting in my opinion to see if anyone uses the panel for that.
[1] https://youtu.be/OpVI6JeH2uA?si=UsScC1yPTRptcFAM&t=795
[2] https://en.slamglass.com/list_22/
[3] https://goovis.net/products/a1black
Setting a reminder for Jan’26 then, thanks!
I code a lot on these. They're amazing on planes and trains as advertised, but I also spend a lot more time coding outside because they don't have the glare issues of a laptop screen.
> don’t expect to do much coding.
Is it because of the way they render small font?
Fonts render at whatever size you tell them to. That doesn't change.
I have the Viture not the Xreals, but anyways... my experience:
I do find that there's significant optical aberration that makes text more blurry towards the edges. I also have astigmatism; not a deal-breaker but it means the built-in myopia adjustment only partially corrects my vision. I basically got contacts again just so I can use these a bit better. But it still feels less clear than a regular screen with glasses or contacts. Doable but not great for text.
I don't know about Viture, but the XReals come with a prescription lens attachment clip. I've got a set. It would be unusable without it, but even then the screen is only really great towards the middle of the field.
In theory the hardware has a motion tracker that lets you freeze the screen in space and pan around it by moving your head, which would be a huge win, but the current iteration needs an external dongle to do that which I don't have.
I'm going to upgrade to the next version purely because that's going to be built in (along with some other niceties).
This Steam Brick is right up my alley, although I'm wondering if you could do something just as slick with Framework guts. I haven't fired up Steam in a while.
Frame.work has a cooler master case:
https://frame.work/products/cooler-master-mainboard-case
I have my old mainboard chugging along in one of those, works alright. Wish the fan was less whiney though.
It’s basically like working on a projector. Everything is just a bit too hard to read.
If your head is on the smaller to medium size. And avoid v1 of xreal, even if you find a good deal. Their hinges are super weak. They said they fixed it in subsequent models.
I got a big ol noggin, any other AR goggles for bigger headed folks?
I watch movies on planes with them and it’s perfect for that. Coding I haven’t made work, and MarioKart is too full-on for me in them.
I've got coding to work, but you do need to change how you manage your windows. They've got the resolution but the virtual screen is too far away, so you need to magnify the text and keep what you're working on centred.
I think they're quite good. Great for movies / games, I could use them for text but I'd probably zoom the editor a bit - a full work day in them would probably be Too Much. Really convenient for being able to plug into headless machines, or when traveling.
I wish valve would do a steam laptop that's just steamdeck in a laptop. I'm surprised how good the steamdeck is. I'm considering replacing my pc with steamdeck + dock + external hard disc.
Thankfully, we can now do this ourselves.
The Steam Deck hardware to compete with is:
- A custom CPU with integrated GPU that's somewhere between an AMD 6600U and 6800U, underclocked for battery life and thermals
- 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM (6400 MT/s)
- 50 Wh battery
So, to make your own Steam Deck-like laptop, you should buy a USB or wireless controller and install the Holo ISO distro (for a UI like the Steam Deck) on a laptop with the following specs:
- 50+ Wh battery
- 16+ GB of RAM (preferably LPDDR5 for thermals)
- A sufficiently powerful CPU+GPU (most new 15W ones will do, especially if you set it to underclock when on battery power)
- A USB-C port with USB 3 Gen 2 speeds and DisplayPort support
- A sufficiently nice screen, speaker, trackpad, cooling fan
Ha! Nice :)
Bazzite is a good distro alternative to Holo ISO, that might be better suited for a laptop or desktop.
Hells freaking yes.
XReal should totally make these, in partnership with Valve. It just makes so much sense.
I am so confused why you’d trade the OLED screen for the XReal glasses which seem like an extra complication for no upside.
You have to bend to face the Deck's screen or hold it at eye height, neither of which are ergonomically ideal. AR glasses allow you to use it in any posture you like, including sitting fully upright or lying down.
You should try gaming on the XReal glasses - or any of the recent XR glasses for that matter (the Viture XR Pro being my favourite). In terms of both ergonomics and experience, it's next level.
What makes the Viture XR Pros better (to you) than XReal glasses? I'm open to trying a pair for my steam deck.
from the faq at the end:
> Why remove the screen? It wouldn’t have made the build larger!
> Keeping the screen would have significantly complicated the build, as you’d need something to keep in in place. More importantly – the brick was built to be tossed in a bag as-is. No case, no screen protector, just throw it in a backpack or suitcase and don’t worry about it!
The virtual screen can be huge. Do you prefer playing on a 7" screen, or a 100" one?
"This project was not approved or endorsed in any way by Valve and is generally a very bad idea. "
why are you confused when from the first words on the page, it is acknowledged this is nothing more than "hold my beer" project.
the confusion is how you would pose a question as if this were a serious project
> generally a very bad idea
I have to disagree with the author on that one. I'm not going to do it myself, but it's a great idea :).
Handheld fatigue.
I was hoping Nintendo would make a Switch without a screen at one point.. but then it wouldn't be a switch anymore I guess
Why not just buy a minisforum and install popos and steam?
He had that already, why buy more stuff?
Also, buyers buy, hackers hack.
I love it, but not 100% sure you can keep it in your bag, as ventilation would restrict cooling.
So, if you have to pull everything out of the bag to play and wire it up, is this form factor practical for travel?
PS: I spend lots of time in Hotels, these would be cool to play in the room, even use Desktop mode on the go. But the plane/coffeeshop scenario feels a bit far fetched.
A lot of monitors deliver 60 watt over usb-c. I wonder if a no battery build is possible that only relies on 60w.
Seems like it should be possible, the steam deck draws less than 45W and it can run with a disconnected battery: https://youtu.be/L5ma_d9cGpo
> Why did you do this again?
> Because I was so preoccupied with whether or not I could that I didn’t stop to think if I should.
A+. A great hack.
How do you game without a controller? I must be missing something since nobody else asked..
Controller seems wireless and usb port used for glasses.
This compared to the deck which has a screen and controller integrated.
If he has to carry a controller as well, I don't see the benefit. Together with the controller the setup will be bigger than the steam deck.
Looks like more ergonomic setup, and maybe convenient - you can chuck controller into bag, but fuss around with carrying case with steamdeck.
Smaller, lighter, arguably "tougher" - but the author starts by saying this is a bad idea too! It mostly seemed to be a passtime.
I love it. Respect to “brick” your actual steam deck OLED no less. I think I would have gone and ordered a broken one from eBay (don’t know prices availability etc since it seems to be repairable).
I've always been curious to buy a headset display when traveling, but was never sure what I would actually use it for. This is pretty cool and might inspire some use case's I hadn't considered.
I expected the author to cut the motherboard, not leave it as is (like in many console "trimmings"). It's even better!
Wtf are those glasses
They have a pair of tiny screens that sit right in front of your eyes and act like a very portable monitor. (Both screens show the same picture - no 3d effects.)
I assume they get power and video both over USB-C, so they can be connected to the Steam Deck's one USB port.
Not my thing, but some people really love them.
Over the type-C port they receive video, receive audio, receive power (<5W), transmit sensor data (accelerometers, orientation, etc), and receive commands such as switching to a 3-D display mode.
They're pretty great and I think the market segment will grow over the next few years.
One correction, the screens are actually located in the temple part of the glasses facing downwards, but they are reflected so they appear as if they are in front of your eyes.
They can do split-screen 3d, albeit at a lower refresh rate. When you put them into that mode they appear to the computer as one screen of double width.
I'm having trouble understanding the difference between this tech and the leading-edge AR tech like Meta's Orion glasses, which supposedly cost $10,000 to make
Why are these $500 and high-res enough to play games on? What's so much harder and costlier about the other AR glasses?
Well, AR glasses have cameras. Other than that I'm not really sure. I didn't even realize these had a 3D mode or other sensors, I thought they were just a pair of mirrored screens
Are these always-opaque where the "screens" are and only transparent (or not transparent?) elsewhere? If so, I bet it's the intermingling of transparency + overlaid pixels that's hard about the other ones
It sounds like the OP's ones have a button that switches between transparent, semi-transparent mode, and opaque.
I know a pair I've seen in the past was mostly transparent, but then it had an extra piece you could snap on that was just solid black plastic, kind of like a camera lens cover, and it would block out everything but the screens.
I'm surprised Valve didn't do exactly this, it makes too much sense. Just make a case for the motherboard.
They essentially did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer)
Great project! Off-topic question: What is the controller in the final image?
Edit: Found it, it's the 8bitdo Pro 2
This is a great mod by a non-technical (programming wise, the machining skills are on point) user.
I so want Valve to make this
According to leaks they will soon
Nice one, cool project wow.
> Because I was so preoccupied with whether or not I could that I didn’t stop to think if I should.
Thanks, Malcolm!
> TL;DR Well, the Steam Deck didn’t fit in my backpack…
I'm not sure if this is meant to be taken literally, but I would have just bought a bigger backpack. In some ways, I think this makes me respect the author more.
Well, if you’re travelling by air, space is a premium. And to a small degree, I will also, attempt to be hyper efficient with space.
RIP GameBoy, I hope Nintendo releases an ultra small switch.
> I hope Nintendo releases an ultra small switch.
No plans like that at the moment, the opposite is true though: “The Nintendo Switch 2 is an upcoming hybrid video game console developed by Nintendo. (…) The unit maintains a similar form factor as the Switch“[1]
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_2
I have never had trouble carrying my Steam Deck in my relatively small and cheap travel backpack, but I usually also check a bag. If I was trying to carry EVERYTHING on then I probably would find that more difficult.
I'm not saying i's a problem but compare SteamDeck+case with a GameBoy Advance - especially as the latter is protected enough by any tight fitting cloth bag, it's nearly indestructible.
I used to fly with a 13" MacBook and a frankly excessive amount of random stuff in my backpack, and it still fit under the seat without too much trouble.
If you're trying to keep your daily carry bag super slim on principle, I guess it mgith be harder.
Really should have just bought a slim case for the Steam Deck. The stock case is like twice as thick as it needs to be and does really take up a ton of space in a backpack.
The irony though is that this box + glasses + controller combo for sure takes more space than the original Steam Deck even in the oversized stock case…
Yeah, I got confused by that too. Steam Deck is a handheld, right? It should fit in your pocket, right?
It is more like Switch. With grips like your average controller. So it is not a small device as such.
It's larger than the switch! And the case for the Steamdeck is notably thicker than the Steamdeck, while the case for the switch is not. I think this is because the switch is almost flat, whereas the joysticks on the front of the Steamdeck and the handholds on the back stick out a lot farther, and the Steamdeck case doesn't conform to the Steamdeck; it's just as large as the largest dimension in any direction.
My experience is that chucking the Steamdeck in my backpack for a flight is doable if I don't put it in the case, but if I put it in the case it takes up enough space that it's annoying to fit my laptop / other stuff too.
I normally deal with this by either not using the case or just taking my switch instead. But I respect the author's choice here a whole lot :)
Okay then I guess I must've gotten that one wrong too, since I always imagined Switch is slightly larger than GameBoy Advance or PSP.
(They really need to start adding bananas for scale for to ads for those devices. Or I need to watch more ads; the few photos I saw gave me the mental picture of a PSP-sized handheld.)
It's about as wide as my 14" MBP
that's horrible! I love it.
Awesome mod
> Why did you do this again? > Because I was so preoccupied with whether or not I could that I didn’t stop to think if I should.
Great quote there :)
> Because I was so preoccupied with whether or not I could that I didn’t stop to think if I should.
You did it. The crazy son of a bitch. You did it.
> Because I was so preoccupied with whether or not I could that I didn’t stop to think if I should.
Ha. I appreciate you OP. https://x.com/boomskats/status/1860300923773296693
I think you mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oNgyUAEv0Q
Yes, it's the same reference.
Yo this is sick