There’s definitely truth to that and I’m currently building up a local library of music to put on my dedicated music player.
On the other hand, I do like the ease of discovery with streaming. I didn’t listen to a lot of music in the pre-streaming days, because the only easy way to discover artists was by listening to the radio, which was mostly music I didn’t love. I have to admit that I only found much of the music I now like thanks to streaming.
Yeah, probably something like that. The controller was not on or connected at that point though, so it seems like even the puck itself might advertise itself as a keyboard.
I believe it’s X11 right now, but about to switch to Wayland with the next major update.
There’s definitely something weird going on with the puck. No drive issues for me so far, but I can’t control the boot selection in the GNU GRUB at all when it’s plugged in.
I do use the headphone jack. I was referring to a phone’s built-in headphone jack in the above comment, as that was the point of comparison.
Not open source unfortunately. People have started reverse engineering the firmware update files though, so you can already flash a slightly modified firmware at least.
I don’t own any bluetooth headphones, so I haven’t tried it. From what I’ve read, it’s fairly basic support and not really the focus of the device.
My phone is a distraction machine. Having dedicated devices allows me to focus better.
It’s smaller than a phone.
It has a long battery life.
It’s a proper high-res audio device. Much better audio quality than what you can get with bluetooth, a built-in headphone jack or most dongles. Even has a balanced output.
And finally, it’s just more fun.
I also have one of those. Really nice, premium-feeling hardware and great sound quality, as expected from Fiio. They really should have added some additional buttons though. Forward/back, menu navigation and volume control all using the same 2 buttons is quite annoying. The software is also rather clunky and basic, comparable to the average mid-2000s “nugget” - I guess that might make it even more nostalgic for some. In any case, it’s cool having my own dedicated device for music I own again. Right now, it’s a solid 7/10 device for me, but could easily become an 8 or 9 with better software.
A flight attendant is now also suspected to be infected, so it could well be a strain with some human to human transmission.
I also paid entirely by wallet, but it still took a good 7 minutes of spamming the continue button until I got past the errors.
If my current employer goes bust and I lose my job (which doesn’t seem unlikely right now), I think I’m out. I’ll have about 1.5 years to reinvent myself somehow. But at this point I can’t really see myself working in tech for the rest of my life.
I live in a country without the death penalty and believe it or not, we aren’t all murdering each other.
Then again, it took many years and a truly insane amount of money until the government either noticed or started to care. Can’t really see this happening in the first place without at least some willful ignorance being involved from those higher up.
The ones I’ve read so far have been quite unspecific in regards to the OS they used. So statistically, they probably used Windows.
Ah, is it? I know that’s the case on Steam Deck, but it doesn’t seem to work on the old Steam Controller (just tried it) and I haven’t seen any confirmation by reviewers that the new controller has this function.
Well, at the end of the day it still has a bit of a killer feature that other controllers don’t: the touchpads. If I buy it, it’ll be my secondary controller for playing FPS, CRPGs etc on my projector.
The fact that this isn’t a new thing doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing. Especially since nowadays there are good third-party controllers with remappable buttons that can also switch to a KB/M functionality at the push of a button. Also, I paid 5,50€ for my brand new original Steam Controller, so Valve kinda has to convince me to spend about 18 times that. I don’t know if this is a dealbreaker for me, but I’d definitely consider it “not great”.
It should really come with an XInput mode. That’s pretty much a basic feature for any PC controller.
For probably >50% of artists I listen to, I never could have discovered them in record stores, either because they never had widely available physical releases at all, or only in their home countries. And my friends have pretty different musical tastes from myself.
Recently went through my parents’ old vinyl record collection though, after fixing up their record player from the 70s. There’s definitely something special about discovering music through physical media, looking at the album art, reading the booklets etc.