A truly blessed Steam Deck, praise be to HolyC.

That's glorious. Now I want more information.

I....what...does Tongues -> God Doodle do??

God says: hop rally embark fortify joy giraffe propose

PSA

If you see Windows 11 online DO NOT DOWNLOAD IT!!!

It will install a virus called Windows 11 and it will run Windows 11 on your PC!!!

Even Windows 7 actually didn't care if you had no key.

You could leave it unactivated forever and the worst thing that would happen is it would have a "Activate windows" watermark message bottom right over the desktop, and it wouldn't let you change the personalization settings eg theming (oh no).

You're right, they don't care.

The very fact they no longer care about enforcing licensing anymore is itself the strongest evidence that selling Windows as a product is not where the money is.

They want you on their operating system for any price - including zero -because once you are there that's when the advertising, cloud service upsell and data monetisisation can begin.

And if you really do want to activate it (which is kinda worth it because some system settings are locked behind it), Massgrave takes 2 seconds.

Microsoft missed the mobile boat by a long shot.

Windows is ever shrinking as people don't buy computers like they used to since phones can do what they need.

This means that for Microsoft growing Windows user base is a non starter. They are well into the extract portion of the product lifecycle. The os now only exists to support the products that still make money are extract what can be extracted from a shrinking user base.

Don’t they lock customization settings and updates being the license?

https://massgrave.dev/ is your friend.

I needed Windows the other day and it wouldn't even let me change the volume without activating it.

Why would they enforce the activation? Window is no longer their product. You are.

To add on to what everybody else said, it's probably not worth the time/money to have a team of developers play cat and mouse with pirates for the rest of time when they make the large majority of their sales off OEMs. Dell, HP, and Lenovo probably make up something like 80% of Windows license sales. And if it's a business buying them, then they are also making money off of M365, Azure, and Intune subscriptions. Losing the sales from people who build their own PCs is chump change to them.

You know, and all the data slurping and ad sales etc etc.

The moment the installation finished you get bombed with ads and shit and they instantly earn more than the value of  a couple windows 11 licenses.

It's pretty annoying though. I'm sure there's some way to remove it but until you activate there's a watermark that shows up over every single application telling you to activate.

This seems to be the case.

Honestly I kind of wish Valve didn't release the drivers. Make people actually work to get that abomination working if that's what they really want.

If they want it badly enough they should have to write the drivers themselves.

Does linux even work on steamdeck? Has anybody tried?

When I bought my Legoin Go, the first thing I did was to turn it on, see it's W11 asking for network settings without a way to continue without. So I turned it off and installed Bazzite instead. Much better experience.

Nothing wrong with the Legion Go hardware at all. I like that it’s got those Switch-like removable controls, tho I’m not sure if I’d use them.

If you’re interested in a non-Windows experience, Steam OS supports the Legion Go. There’s also Cachy OS a rolling-release Arch Linux distro, Bazzite an immutable Fedora distro with atomic updates, Nobara a customized Fedora distro maintained by Glorious Eggroll who is known for Proton-GE, and Chimera OS.

Slap Bazzite on that bad boy ASAP.

Why does your wife need a transsexual for her car?

A buddy of mine bought one of those a while back. We recently switched it over to steam OS and the performance improvement was substantial.

I thought legion go ran steamOS??

Finally, the steam deck plays the best game, the random word generator!

I do regret paying for windows once years ago. I always hated Microsoft a lot, but truly never thought they could sink as low as they have.

How is it? I considered trying it, but SteamOS just runs so well. Not sure what I’d gain

I only have my Windows partition for the one weekend per year I play Rust

My only issue with it is that some people install windows the moment they get the SD out of the box. No interest in even trying SteamOS, they consider it just wasting time before they can get windows installed and have the Deck "ready to use".

I drive Windows mostly on my Deck but only because Marathon doesn't run on Proton (yet).

Otherwise I always ran SteamOS for Chivalry 2.

I remember when I used to write ridiculously long and detailed guides on Steam Deck things, so many people asked me to do the same for installing and tweaking Windows for the Deck! I don't begrudge anyone who wants to install and use it, but it sure isn't my scene. Or recommendation.

Or if you do, plz look into O&O ShutUp 10+11

One of the great things about the steam deck much like Linux is that it won't stop you just because something is stupid and a bad idea.

Board games are more difficult. There's a minimum requirement of at least one friend.

The vast majority of my game time is coop shooters, fighting, and racing games with real life friends on voice chat. We get to chat daily about things without spending an hour or travel each way.

So for me playing video games is playing with real people. We even play DnD on virtual tabletops some of the time and then play on a real tabletop in person when our schedules match up.

Board games played in person are great, but being able to hop online and play with friends for an hour more regularly is great too.

I mean most of the games i play are just board games on the pc, less cleanup and easier to play with others on discord than meeting IRL