Lawful evil monitor alignment

Transcript

Mark Johnson 0:03
So do you remember that meme that did the rounds last year that told you your Dungeons and Dragons character alignment based on your monitor layout?

Alan Pope 0:12
I think so. Was this the thing with a grid of different images of layouts?

Mark Johnson 0:17
Yeah, how you have your various numbers of monitors and rotations and monitor set up. So from that, I learned that my my alignment is lawful evil, because I like to have one monitor above the other monitor.

Martin Wimpress 0:30
Okay, I’ve learned that mine is chaotic evil, because you’ve gone all over the place. Yes, I’m one of them. Isn’t there even a real monitor? Is it a mirror, it’s a hidden dongle that I have shoved in the back of my GPU for when I livestream.

Mark Johnson 0:46
So the reason that I started doing this was because we got our desktops at work at the time replaced with laptops. And I just, I already had a big monitor on my desk. So I just sat my laptop underneath that, I found that was actually really nice way to dual screen because if I have two widescreen monitors side by side, I get a crick in the neck from looking back and forth all the time. So then, after a while, I got another monitor, and just had two external monitors, which is actually really impractical, because although I like that layout, it takes up a huge amount of disk space, and having that mounted, and then being quite big, heavy monitors, I couldn’t really adjust them.

Alan Pope 1:23
I’m having difficulty picturing this in my head. You have a laptop on the desk, and then two monitors side by side.

Mark Johnson 1:30
Sorry, no, I now have the laptop out of the way with the screen turned off. I then have a mounting pole with two monitors slotted vertically onto it one above the other,

Martin Wimpress 1:40
right? In a landscape orientation.

Mark Johnson 1:44
Each of the screens is landscape. Okay.

Alan Pope 1:47
I mean, if I had committed to memory, the vdu alignment chart, I know that lawful evil is two monitors one above the other. Monitor your chaotic evil, apparently, yes, there isn’t a finger on there for how I have my monitors, which is side by side horizontally, and then another one above. There isn’t an arrangement for that.

Martin Wimpress 2:12
I think your chaotic evil too, because you don’t have like a uniform alignment. They feel quite well aligned to me. Well, mine do to me as well, but they’re all over the place.

Mark Johnson 2:24
I’m sure that everyone feels their monitors are perfectly aligned.

Alan Pope 2:27
I have to say, I don’t know what a Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart means. I’ve been seeing these lawful, good, neutral, good, true neutral and all this on the internet for years. And I don’t know what it means. And I feel like now it’s too late for me to ask.

Mark Johnson 2:48
I mean, it’s never too late to start playing games. But yeah, this one might have passed you by I’m afraid. Yeah. But anyway, I found I found that the actually having two big screens like that is actually not terribly practical, because they take up a lot of room on your desk, and they’re not very easy to adjust. And then it turns out that someone made a monitor like this. LG made a screen called the LG dual up. And it’s like two monitors stuck one above the other. And I got one. Oh,

Alan Pope 3:19
so wait, it presents itself as one display or as two displays?

Martin Wimpress 3:23
Yes. Both of those are one of those. Yes. Oh, what?

Mark Johnson 3:30
So you know, when there’s always some sort of acronym for every monitor layout. There’s VGA, there’s, if HD there’s Q HD and so on. They call this one SD Q HD, which means square dual quad high definition, how many pixels by how many pixels is it? So it’s like having 214 40 p monitors in one panel, okay, one above the other.

Martin Wimpress 3:56
So therefore creating a square aspect ratio because they’re stacked.

Mark Johnson 4:01
I don’t know why they call it square. It’s silly. It’s definitely a portrait aspect ratio. Okay. But yeah, so now rather than having two screens, I have one big screen. And even nicer than that. It has a nice big power supply. So I now don’t have two screens plugged in. I have one screen plugged in. And it also provides USB power to my laptop via the same cable but it provides display output. And it has a built in USB hub. So I have all of my external devices plugged into my monitor. And then I have one cable that comes from my monitor and goes into my laptop and I have one power socket

Alan Pope 4:38
for all of it. It’s brilliant. I’m picturing you having this vertically large monitor. And for some reason my mind thinks that you’ve got one window open across the entire thing with a font really massive so that you can see it

Mark Johnson 4:55
so that’s really nice. If you want to read a document that is a really nice way to do it. But that’s not the They’ll work most of the day,

Alan Pope 5:01
couldn’t people across the street also view that document?

Mark Johnson 5:05
They could if my monitor was facing the window, but for privacy and security reasons, it is not.

Martin Wimpress 5:10
You said it presents like two monitors. So does this mean, in your display server configuration, you have two physical displays that you can stack and align like you would if you had separate monitors.

Mark Johnson 5:26
So you can do it two separate ways. One way, you just plug it into a single output, and it displays as one very large monitor, or you tell it to do what it calls picture by picture mode, where it presents as two separate widescreen monitors. And that way, you can either plug it into two separate outputs on the same device, or you can plug it into two completely separate devices. And it has a built in KVM switch. So you can plug the USBC cable into one device. And it’s also got a separate USB cable, which will go into another device and then you can switch between the two. So you can have one outputting to the top half of the panel and one output into the bottom half of the panel,

Martin Wimpress 6:03
I have to say I think you’ve may have done my shopping for me this sounds intriguing. So there is no pixel boundary or border between these displays. It is one physical lump of pixels that there are they can be logically addressed differently. Yes.

Mark Johnson 6:21
So if you if you do put two outputs in and they’re from the same screen, you can’t really tell the difference between if you just have it configured as one the dragging between them, there’s no sort of aberration in the middle as the window goes between the two or anything like that.

Alan Pope 6:37
The main benefits that I see to this, like all modern displays connect via USB C, they all have USB connectors, they probably all have speakers. So the main benefits to this is one less power plug and the flexibility to drag windows up and down without there being a seam across from the bottom to the top. Right,

Mark Johnson 6:57
exactly. And yet no bezel in between, like you’d have with two screens. And the other thing that I found is it’s actually given me a sort of renewed appreciation for window management and the way I have my desktop set up, because for years, I’ve just been using a single virtual workspace and basically just having two windows maximised one on each screen, whereas now, I’ve got lots of virtual workspaces, set up all of my windows open at once across them. And I’ve started using G tile, the gnome extension for tiling, window management. And I’ve got a couple of ways I’ve got it set up, I found that the defaults are all geared towards the assumption that you’ve got a widescreen monitor, so none of them really worked. But what I do now is I either have four corners, or sort of two by two grid and four things each corner, which is what I’ve got, now while I’m talking to you, or I have sort of half in half, I have one at the top and one at the bottom, like I always used to have, or I found it’s quite nice to have two thirds and 1/3. So if I’ve got like, if I’m developing, I’ve got my ID on two thirds of the screen. And then I might have my web browser on the bottom third of the screen to like run the web pages that I’m developing or whatever, which I don’t think you’d do very well with any other kind of monitor.

Alan Pope 8:09
How much was this ludicrous piece of equipment?

Mark Johnson 8:12
It’s not cheap. I wouldn’t say to anyone go out and buy this, unless you already know that this is the alignment view. It’s somewhere in the 500 pounds range, right? You can definitely get more expensive monitors. You can definitely get cheaper monitors.

Alan Pope 8:28
Well, can you get two monitors? 500 pounds that are 1440. Decent 1440 That’s the thing, isn’t it?

Mark Johnson 8:35
That’s a good question.

Martin Wimpress 8:36
Yeah, I mean, I’m running to 1414 monitors, and I have mine in a very wide side by side aspect. So I’m intrigued by what you’ve got here. And it sounds like something I could make good use of because I do need to address these screens. discreetly. But what I’m thinking is I love what you’ve just described. I want to have them

Alan Pope 8:56
yes, it’s also my birthday soon. Next April. And I think I think I should put one on my birthday list.

Mark Johnson 9:07
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Alan Pope 9:42
I have been spying on the skies with a PI. What kind of pi a Raspberry Pi. Ah, I had a spare one in a drawer. You know like every nerd has a spare Raspberry Pi although I imagined less so these days as they’re commanding a high price on eBay. So if you want to get rid of them and make a bit of money to pay your electricity bill, then that might be useful or make use of the ones you have. I have a spare one. And I thought I’d do something with it. So I discovered there’s this thing where you can monitor aircraft in the skies above your, your location, and submit this data to our website. And so that’s what I’ve done. I’ve got some software that runs on the pi, and a bit of hardware, which is an antenna, and it listens out for radio waves. I don’t know exactly how it works, as you can probably tell, from the planes that it can see in inverted commas, and then submits them to a popular website. And it’s good fun.

Mark Johnson 10:45
So other than the obvious answer of because you can Well, indeed, why would you want to do something like this?

Alan Pope 10:51
That is a great question. Actually, why would you want to do this? Well, I the website that I’m submitting my data to his flight radar 24, which is a popular website, where you can visit and you get a map and you can zoom in and see the planes that are going overhead. I use that app quite a lot. Because I live near an airport, I live near two airports, I’m not far from Farnborough airport, which is where I live. And also not far from Heathrow Airport, I’m in the flight path. So I can see the planes landing and taking off from Heathrow. They’re quite high in the sky. But I can I can tell that’s where they came from or where they go. But there’s also Gatwick nearby. And so often, in the summer, when I’m sitting in the garden, we play a little game where we look up at the planes and try and figure out where are they going from or where are they going to and we have a little guessing game. And then we’ll pull out the app and click on the plane that we see flying overhead and figure out where it’s going. And we’ve been doing that for years. And also using it for practical purposes like finding out when a flight is landing, when you’re picking someone up at the airport, or similarly waiting for your plane to arrive and then turn around and fly home. So there are practical uses for this. But I mostly use it for spying on planes. And the key benefit to doing this is when you have this set up and you start sending data to flight radar, they upgrade your free account to a business account and business account, you get more features lots more features, there’s actually three tiers of account well for if you include the free one, and the business account is the highest one. And if I were to pay for that it’s $500 a year. Now there is no way on earth, I’m paying $500 a year to play a silly game in my back garden spotting planes in the sky. But if all I’ve got to do is leave a Raspberry Pi on spotting planes and sending that data to a website. You bet I’m gonna do that for $500 worth of value each year.

Martin Wimpress 12:37
So how does it work? What is the Raspberry Pi connected to because I imagined by itself it can’t actually pick up the transponders from the aircraft

Alan Pope 12:46
you read. There’s a USB adapter, which is commonly called RTL, SDR, which means it’s a software defined radio, which means you can software drive it to determine what signal is listening out for the RTL bit is because the chip inside is made by real tech. So Realtek limited software defined radio. There are lots of manufacturers of these things. And in fact, it’s a repurposed typically DVB T stick. Ah, a lot of people just repurpose those. And it’s just plugged in via the USB port. And then there’s a little antenna, which is I don’t know about six inches tall. It’s not very big. And I’ve got it sat on a biscuit tin on my windowsill in my office. And because that part of the house is north facing which is towards the flight path of Heathrow, it gets quite a good view out the window of the planes landing and taking off to Heathrow so I get actually a better view north than I do south. And the Farnborough airport is to the south of me. And you can buy bigger aerials, and you can buy some people upgrade them and put them on the outside of the house to get even better reception. But I still see a good 1000 planes a day. Wow, at least. And I think as far as 70 nautical miles is about the distance from where I am to the planes that I can see. So I can’t see like, you know, we live on an island. But you know, you can see quite far not quite to the coast, but I can see pretty far.

Martin Wimpress 14:15
Excellent. So did you consider getting one of the satellite receivers that can be adapted to use this because I had a friend who done that in the past with an old SAT receiver? No,

Alan Pope 14:28
I went to the flight radar website and discovered there’s a bit where they can provide you with the device like it’s a sealed unit that you plug an antenna in. But I think they only provide those for free. If you’re in a location that’s not got coverage now because I live near an airport. Then there’s already enthusiasts near here who have them Yeah, so I applied and they said no, but then I go to their build your own website, which tells you how to make your own and the way that they recommend you do it is to get a Raspberry Pi USB stick. And then they actually have a downloadable image that you put on an SD card. And it’s basically Raspbian with their software, or you can just use your own OS and download the software and put it on there. And it updates itself, it sends the data off the flight radar, and it alerts you if it ever goes down. Because if it goes down for too long, your business account gets cancelled. And I have had that in the past, if you stopped submitting data, they just cut your access, you still you can still use the site, you just don’t get the bonus features that you get with business.

Martin Wimpress 15:30
And I assume if you log into the flight radar 24 website, you’re able to see the catalogue of aircraft that you’ve captured and submitted.

Alan Pope 15:39
Yes, and no, it gives you pretty graphs and like a plot showing like which compass direction you’re seeing most planes from in a circle. And it shows you graphs of where the most planes are in the day. You can actually see if you SSH into the box, you can have a thing that constantly tells you when planes are being seen. So you get the ID number and you can click through to the flight radar website and see that plane. The more interesting stuff is that the business account gives you access to like the history of a plane like the flight history. So you can see everywhere a particular plane has been so obviously I spy on certain planes that I know, like, Oh, why MSI, which is Mark Shuttleworth plane and spy on where that’s been going recently. And it turns out not very far, because it’s sat at Farnborough airport down the road from me. Yeah, so yeah, it’s just quite good fun. And it’s minimal costs the price of $50 I think the kit was plus the Raspberry Pi. And I just leave it plugged in and turned on all the time. And it

Martin Wimpress 16:38
it works. And what model of Raspberry Pi Did you happen to use?

Alan Pope 16:42
I think you can use a three or a four, it does some Okay, maths. I don’t know what it does. But it keeps the CPU pretty pegged a lot of the time. And I only send the data to flight radar 24. But there are other open source equivalents that you can send the data to. And you can send the data to multiple locations at the same time. I just haven’t explored that yet. Because I really wanted flight radar 24. But I might do that.

Mark Johnson 17:07
And is there anything more that you might do to build on this? Or do other stuff with the data in the future?

Alan Pope 17:14
I certainly could, I certainly could intercept the data myself and do something with it. But actually, all I would probably end up doing is re implementing all the user interface that I’ve got on flight radar. And and there’s not a super challenge in doing that, because people have already done that. So I don’t I don’t see the challenge in that. What would be more interesting, I think, is getting permission from my wife to put a stonking grey hand side of the house so I can see as far as Scotland or something I don’t know. But yeah, some people take it as a challenge. There’s a leaderboard, and you rise up the leaderboard by having high uptime and seeing file distance. And lots of planes. Which Yeah, that nerd in me likes fake internet points. So that’s good.

Martin Wimpress 17:55
I was gonna say you are a sucker for Internet points. I can see how this could get out of control.

Alan Pope 18:00
Yes, that’s a driver for it as well. But yeah, it’s good fun. I’ll put a link in our show notes to the flight radar wheel drone website. And I’m sure people will tell me the other places that they send their data to as well. Linux matters is part of the late night Linux family. If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting us and the rest of the late night Linux team using the PayPal or Patreon links at Linux matters.sh/support. For $5 a month on Patreon, you can enjoy an ad free feed of our show, or for $10 get access to all the late night Linux shows ad free. You can get in touch with us via email show at Linux matters.sh, or chat with other listeners in our telegram group. All the details are at Linux matters.sh/contact.

Martin Wimpress 18:49
Last time we spoke Mark made a very good case for the steam deck. But I’d like to present the alternate option which is I think I’m playing more games on Linux as a result of cancelling my Steam deck preorder last year. Is this despite valve is that what this is? No, not at all. I was really looking forward to getting a steam deck. And the email came around on July the 14th. Last year 2022. And I looked at it and I looked at the amount that was due to be paid. And I thought to myself, now I think about it. I’m not sure I’m going to get much use out of a handheld games console. Because I wasn’t playing a whole lot of games. Anyway. I was playing those on my desktop PC. But I didn’t see myself playing a handheld device. So I thought Hmm, it’s quite a lot of money for a dice. I’m not sure I’m going to use and then it occurred to me. If I thought about it, I’d actually got almost all of the parts to build a games PC,

Alan Pope 19:52
probably about three times over I would have thought

Martin Wimpress 19:55
well actually you’re not wrong. I’ll get to that in a bit. But yeah, I had A collection of parts which could build a games PC, the one thing I didn’t have was a case to put them in. So instead of buying the steam deck for whatever it was 500, and something pounds, I think at the time, I bought a case for 100 pounds, which is a small form factor case. So if you think of sort of Hi Fi separates the size of like an old school DVD player, or VHS cassette player, and I built a PC inside of that, and I made effectively a games console. And as a result, not just me, but my daughter and my wife are now playing games on the regular using that device. So

Alan Pope 20:45
the fact that you didn’t buy the steam deck has kind of spurred you on to make something that you can play games. And as a result, you do play games.

Martin Wimpress 20:53
Yeah. And what’s interesting is, is we always had the option to play games, my daughter and I would play games on my desktop PC. But of course, that meant that she could only play games when I wasn’t doing something. And we’ve now built this dedicated devices in the corner of the room sat behind me, and I believe it’s a lawful neutral monitor alignment. And so what I built was, it’s an AMD risin APU. So a 5700 GPU and a mini ITX motherboard. And I had the low profile cooler already for a different project. And it had a one terabyte SSD that I had knocking around. So I built all of this up and I had a RX 50 700x Ti graphics card, which just about because this is a small case,

Alan Pope 21:40
I was gonna say Guinea crowbar all these things into it, what is effectively like a 19 inch rack thing.

Martin Wimpress 21:47
Yeah, you can the thing with the 50 700x T GPU is the shroud that houses the fans, they’re quite big that they’re plasticky lumps, and that didn’t fit. But I read online, you can take that plasticky shroud off, effectively remove the fans. And it’s just got the fin stack. And what I was able to do is put that in the case and then underneath it put two case fans underneath to actually provide the cooling for the GPU. So we built this thing. And what also happened was is the Steam Controllers that hadn’t been used in ages have now been refurbished and dusted off and connected to this thing with the wireless dongle and also two wireless X Xbox controllers with a Windows 10 Wireless X Xbox adapter. So it’s got four controllers that can all be connected wirelessly. But I suppose the interesting thing about this wasn’t so much assembling a group of pieces and like installing Ubuntu and steam on it, which is you know what I could have done and I know how Mark had run his sort of Steam Box server in the past.

Mark Johnson 22:57
Yeah, this is all a very familiar story to me, right? Yeah.

Martin Wimpress 23:00
So where things have deviated is because of the steam deck. There are distributions out there that provide a steam deck like experience, but on general purpose hardware

Alan Pope 23:13
is this because Valve have not released steam OS version three. So people are stepping up and making something which is to all intents and purposes like Steam OS version three,

Martin Wimpress 23:23
exactly what’s happening. Yeah, and the one the one that’s getting all of the attention if you go on YouTube, and search for this is something called holo ISO, which is what I started with. That lasted just a couple of days. Because as somebody who knows how Linux distributions are put together, I could see this was not going to go well who do it’s built with Arch Linux, which in itself is fine. But it is just Arch Linux, in a fully read write basic sort of installation, including packages in the a EUR. So you just know, full well at some point in the future and update is going to break and it’s going to be a busy Sunday afternoon. And my daughter’s not going to be able to play Lego Worlds because an arch update has failed in the background

Alan Pope 24:12
feedback from arch users do you Martijn that wordpress.org.

Martin Wimpress 24:18
Anyway, there is another option. And this was recommended to me by our friend George Castro, and it’s called Chi mirror OS, which is also built with Arch Linux. But they’ve done it the right way, in that it’s an immutable file system, and you get atomic updates. So they produce basically like a file system snapshot. And you get the whole update come down and it doesn’t AB update a bit like the way Chrome OS does its updates and in fact steam OS and steam OS Yes. In fact, the author or the original creator of Chimaera OS said, It’s astonishing how similar steam OS is to Chimaera OS and Chimaera OS. predates steam OS three, because they’ve been building this thing for years. It used to be known as gamer OS years ago. So I’ve been using Chimaera OS, it’s been installed since about July last year, they do sort of monthly release updates. And it is a games console. I have these controllers connected to wireless dongles, you push the steam button on the Steam Controllers, and the thing powers on automatically, it will automatically shut down after periods of inactivity, my daughter will frequently be in the middle of a game, then realise she’s got homework to do and stroll off to do that, and the thing just suspends. And she’ll come back several hours later, pick up the controller push a button, and she’s just back into the game exactly where she left off.

Mark Johnson 25:47
We’ll have a conversation about parenting techniques.

Martin Wimpress 25:50
Fair enough.

Alan Pope 25:51
You said the operating system updates like monthly updates? Do you have to apply them? Or can you like skip them? Can you go from January to December straight through without doing the ones in between?

Martin Wimpress 26:03
You can pin them? Yeah. So there is a mechanism to say I just want to stay on this particular version, which I did have to do some time ago, because there was an update that was incompatible with my GPU. So I skipped a month basically.

Alan Pope 26:17
All right, I was more thinking, if it’s turned off for a while because you haven’t been playing or you’ve been busy working or something. Not that you did anything to actively prevent updates, but you just didn’t apply any for months. Because that’s one of the things that that frustrated me about arch and some other distros is if you leave it too long, it just rots and right. The updates just don’t work. And you know, because there’s something in the middle that you missed. And I wondered if because it’s image based, you don’t get that problem or

Martin Wimpress 26:46
Absolutely, yeah. So if you left it off for months, you would go from 30 Something to 41 in one update, because it’s just downloading a single file and flipping it on the file system.

Mark Johnson 26:58
And what’s the actual sort of interface experience? Like does it boot into steam Big Picture Mode, or does it use Latrice, or some other open source, multi library interface, something like that.

Martin Wimpress 27:10
So I’ve had some hands on time with Allen’s steam deck. As far as I can tell. It’s exactly like the steam deck user interface with all of the features that that presents including all of the bindings to the GPU scaling and framerate, capping and TDP management, just everything that the steam deck does. This doesn’t exactly the same way. But what they’ve done is they’ve baked in a few extra bits and pieces. So in addition to steam, they have their own little web app, which you can connect to from any browser. And once you’ve authenticated through that, you can also access games on the epic game store and GOG and flat hub is connected. So you can instal stuff from flat hub. And they’ve got about two dozen emulators hooked up as well. So you can drag and drop roms from your legally acquired retro consoles, or whatever. And it seamlessly integrates all of those emulated games and games from other storefronts into the steam UI. The gamepad UI I think is what the steam DAC users,

Mark Johnson 28:25
that sounds like a really nice way to do it. Because obviously on the Steam deck, as we’ve discussed before, I think you can switch into desktop mode if you want to do, you know installing other things, and then you can load them into the Steam library. But it sounds like that’s a really nice way of doing it from another device via a web UI.

Martin Wimpress 28:42
Yeah, it works really well. And I’ve used it for the handful of retro games that I like to play from time to time, and I had one game on Epic that I’ve now got access to all built in. It also pre bundles a bunch of the proton G runtime so you can pick from those.

Mark Johnson 29:01
So you say that your family have been using this as well, what’s their experience been like in terms of having access to the kinds of games that they want to play on Linux?

Martin Wimpress 29:12
So I think the first thing is from my daughter’s point of view, she doesn’t really she does, no, but she doesn’t think about this being a Linux device. As far as she’s concerned. This is our games console. And she was just telling me the other day she’d been round to some friends over the Easter break. One of her friends has got an X Box something another friend has got a PlayStation something. And she was playing the same games at their house that we have here. So as far as she’s concerned, you know, they can play Five Nights at Freddy’s anywhere. This is not special or different, or in any way. Unusual. It’s just the place where she plays games. And aside from like platform exclusives, you know she just got a games machine.

Alan Pope 29:58
I think that’s a virtue. By virtue of the fact that you’ve only bought games that work, you’re not actively going to buy games that you know, do not work on your steam deck or Chimaera OS machine. And so what she will be presented with is a user interface full of games that that work, right? Generally, yes. And that’s the same on the PlayStation and the Xbox, the Xbox and PlayStation are not going to show you Windows XP games that don’t work on Xbox or Playstation, because they’re a curated storefront, just like steam is,

Mark Johnson 30:27
but what I’m thinking more of is issue hearing about games from her friends, or someone else who’s who’s a PC gamer. And she thinks I want to play that game. And you know, it might appear to be available. But oh, it doesn’t actually run on Linux, or it’s janky because of your proton, isn’t there yet with support for that game? Or things like that? Or, at the moment? Are you enough of a moderator of the experience that that’s not going to be a problem.

Martin Wimpress 30:55
So I’ve not been moderating. So she did say, so there were some games that she was playing on Android in the past. And those were all in the Steam Store. So we installed those, so that was fine. She had a friend who plays Five Nights at Freddy’s and she wanted that, and that was in there. And I just snagged it, and it installed and it works. And stray was another game that she wanted to play. And that was on the Steam store, just installed it and played it. And then some Spyro stuff and some Crash Bandicoot remakes and what have you. But as far as our family is concerned, we come up here and the three of us sit here and play games together, which I don’t think we would ever have done if I’d have got the steam deck. And we’re now as a family playing games on this device. We’ve got controllers for everyone hooked up. And I think as Alan was alluding to earlier, actually having had this device could well be a gateway to justify buying a handheld device. Now we’ve actually found regular utility in playing games, on a Steam Box and steam. The storefront has become our console experience. Basically,

Alan Pope 32:02
the counterpoint to that is I have my Steam deck behind the TV plugged into a dock and all four Steam Controllers in the lounge, we do exactly the same thing. So it is possible to have a multi user play together experience with the steam Deck, just not while you’re holding in your hands. Yeah,

Martin Wimpress 32:17
I don’t think I would have got there if I’d have just had the steam deck. And I’d have thought of it as a thing for me though, right. In any case, I highly recommend Chimaera OS, it’s excellent. I should be interested to see what valve do with steam OS three, when they publish that as a general purpose thing, but for now, anyone wanting to make a console. I can’t speak highly enough of Chimaera OS. Great team, excellent project, well documented, give it a go