This may sound like heresy, but I think some games are better on handheld consoles and some are better on the PC. Really depends on the vibe you’re wanting.
StarCraft for example. Definitely better on PC, almost impossible to play on console.
Mario Kart or Zelda or many of the Nintendo games. I just either want to play them with friends or just chill on my bed and play them. Sure you could make some kind of PC setup to work the same way, but consoles are very user friendly.
Steam deck. I’ve been floored by how great it is, and with a dock it’s easy to set up with multiple controllers or a mouse and keyboard. Literally all the benefits of a (handheld) console, and all the benefits of a PC, including the ability to play a huge backlog of old console games.
I switched to playing subnautica on steam deck because the full PC setup was too much for my phobias. Now I can actually enjoy the game instead of spiking my panic. But like Factorio, what a mess on controller imo it’s so much better with kb/m and the ability to quickly switch windows to look stuff up. I used to be team PC 100% but since I got the deck I’ve been branching out and even some PC games are just better on it
I played through the entirety of Hollow Knight on my Switch on the commuter train.
Now the Steam Deck exists and I could do the “PC” equivalent of this. But honestly the Switch is a bit lighter so given a game that runs fine on both I’d probably still pick the Switch.
Also I have played Mario Kart and Smash Bros 2 player in the middle of nowhere, using the detached joy cons. It doesn’t happen often, but it has happened. I have a small adapter that mimics the Switch dock well enough to have it go into TV mode, and I sometimes carry that and an extra pair of joy-cons.
The only way I ever played StarCraft was StarCraft 64, the split screen multiplayer was cool but absolutely hands down the worst way to play it. I don’t know how they managed to make that work at all honestly, I know there woukd have had to have been a lot of concessions to fit it on the cart, but still, kinda impressive to me. I realised just how bad it was to play after playing wc3 a few years later.
Sunshine+Moonlight has taken over most of my console use, there’s so much less screwing around with games needed these days, if you’re not modding they tend to run well out of the box in my experience, seeing so many games with native controller support + local multiplayer is fantastic, steam input fills the gap on a lot of the others. That said though nothing really beats the pick up and go of a console, my GameCube still runs perfectly after 20 something years, I can emulate them (and do for some games, metroid prime trilogy is better on m+k, but that’s the Wii version of the trilogy) but I don’t feel the need to tweak things endlessly on the native hardware.
i started being mindful of eating more fibre a year or so ago, and dear god it’s amazing to be able to just trust my bowels and barely ever have to think about type 2 toilet visits.
I’m not a fan of crypto but between resistive heating which gives no return, and mining heat which gives unprofitable return, it makes more sense to get your heating from mining if you already have the computer for it. The only question is whether it’s financially better than a heat pump short term.
And of course this only really works for one room so it’s not a complete solution.
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