[acdbddh]

As much as I love hacking with various things, there are reasons why I buy "closed products" for myself and for my family. I like to do hacking when I want it (with ESP32, rpi etc). I don't want to be forced to serve as a free IT support guy anytime someone presses a wrong button.

When it comes to gaming consoles, I want them to serve reliably to my family. The game console must be fun, optimized for best experience and should not break. Will that be possible with an open platform where anyone can install anything?

[hnlmorg]

Unfortunately buying closed systems hasn’t stopped me from being IT support:

- “why can’t I play online with EA Sports?”

- “I can’t log into Roblox!”

- “why can’t I see my sisters world in Minecraft?”

- “I’ve lost my Fortnight skins!”

- “why does Roblox keep disconnecting me on my phone [when Roblox servers go down]?”

- “Why can’t I play this game [without updating it]?”

- “this game update takes too long to download!”

If there’s one constant in life: it’s that doctors get nagged by friends for free diagnosis, mechanics, electricians, carpenters for free repairs, and software engineers for free IT support.

[jojomodding]

The constant in life is that there are some people for whom you do things without expecting financial gain.

[hnlmorg]

Cost want my point. It’s that if you have skills then people will call upon them.

I’m also not making a point about whether that’s a good or a bad thing, before you make that assumption too

[mhitza]

> The game console must be fun, optimized for best experience and should not break. Will that be possible with an open platform where anyone can install anything?

Yes, SteamOS is just that. A system that is easy to rollback if you mess things up. And you have to go deep under the covers to mess things up (switch to desktop mode, disable readonly system partition, modify wrong files).

Valve should really focus on improving the polish of the steam store, as that abomination of a (react ?) frontend breaks often in very surprising ways.

SteamOS as a console system is close to a 9/10. As far as polish of steam app/store and the ux, a fair 7/10.

[endymion-light]

That would be great - but the last gaming console that I've experienced that with has been the switch.

I recently turned on my old xbox one - literally impossible to play any game without a massive patch, debugging os software issues etc. If the steam machine just works out of the box, it'll already be miles ahead of most of the current state of consoles.

[rkangel]

If you buy a Steam Deck and just use it as a handheld console and never select "reboot to desktop mode" it will act just like a closed console. The exceptions compared to something like a Switch:

- For some games (usually those oriented around keyboard and mouse) you need to go and select one of the community control configurations, and maybe tweak it a bit. For example, I needed to do this with FTL to make it easily playable

- Occasionally (and I've basically had to do this once, in my 2+ years with a Steam Deck) you need to go and select a different Proton version to make it work. ProtonDB tells you what to do

This is all rare though. The vast majority of games have a control setup for using a controller, and they definitely do if they've ever been released on console. And they will Just Work.

[baq]

and then you have to download a 100GB patch each time you turn the thing on anyway, by the time it ends installing my time slot is gone

[acdbddh]

Agree. By "best experience" I also mean "don't force me to wait". But my console doesn't do that. Some online games may require patches before playing for better (anticheat) or worse reasons but thats a fault of the game supplier - not the console supplier.

[squigz]

> I don't want to be forced to serve as a free IT support guy anytime someone presses a wrong button.

In my experience this doesn't really end whether it's a closed product or not. If you're wiling to give free IT support, people will take it, as it's likely way faster/better than calling whatever support may or may not be offered by the company.

> Will that be possible with an open platform where anyone can install anything?

I can't see why these have anything to do with each other? If your brother goes out of his way to install a bunch of stuff and breaks everything, how can you possibly blame the system and not your brother?

[acdbddh]

I want a console that is brother-proof. He should not be able to break it by just pressing buttons

[tianreyma]

My nephew changed the DNS settings on his PS5, some things stopped working, and took me quite a while to figure out what he had done.

[squigz]

Lock it down some more. Why would a user need to change their DNS ever anyway?

[Codazoa]

Custom DNS server? In my experience you can't really lock down the network settings on consoles because anyone playing might need to reconnect to wifi