But they won’t stop. It’s like if some people complained that I’ve been speeding consistently over the past 15 years, so the state fines me ($3.9T ÷ $130M = 30,000; my monetary worth of £2,000 ÷ 30,000) £0.06 while I’m ripping through a residential area towards a school and continue for the next 15
Ring is owned by Amazon, so it makes sense. You can’t really trust any company fully, but Anker and Reolink are OK for now
A budget midrange PC with good performance would still cost about $1,500. That might be expensive compared to a $700 console but put it this way - I built a flagship in Feb 2017 for about $3,000. When the Xbox Series and PS5 consoles came out in Nov 2020 they were raving about this measurement of power called Teraflops. My flagship had more power than these consoles and in most cases ran games better. As you may know those consoles haven’t been replaced by a new generation yet, so that build is still med-high quality.
In terms of raw performance a good PC is always the best choice. Choose a motherboard with built in wireless and you can use Xbox One >, PlayStation 3 > or any third party controller via Bluetooth. Buy a USB adapter and you can use Xbox 360 > controllers via RF.
Steam has a ‘big picture mode’ that can be set to turn on at startup - if you wanted you can simplify everything to booting the machine and powering up a synced controller - sofa friendly UI.
Multiplayer gaming is free. Heavily discounted games are more common. Pirated copies, as long as you choose the right sources (start with FitGirl), are top tier. Community-made mods that improve or fix games. GOG for DRM free copies. More control over data collection and updates. Offline/sandboxed games that think collecting your IP, age, device hardware and playtime is necessary for a solo campaign. Heroic Launcher for GOG and adapting DRM games bought on Epic/Amazon/Steam, Freesm Launcher for Minecraft.
Recently, AAA publishers have been so toxic that their employees suffer greatly and their released games have alpha-level bugs. They’ve become lazy, forcing always-online components and relying on post-release updates to actually finish the product or add more monetisation. These issues have started to appear on console releases too.
I’d highly recommend Linux (Mint with Cinnamon or Gnome) for a host of reasons, but it’s up to you - just know that Linux is often just as plug-&-play as Windows 10.
Regarding games with anticheat, most are designed for Windows so if you do go Linux, the games will be sandboxed pretty much and even if anticheat is unavoidable it can’t install to the primary OS. Regarding pirated games in the event you get malware from a bad source, I don’t know how bad it’d get so I’d recommend just buying the games again (GOG or Steam really is inexpensive, just wait for seasonal sales and wishlist everything you want).
Finally, the last good time to buy components was September last year. RAM is absolutely required to run a PC and its market price is thoroughly raped by generative AI server farms. You could build with whatever motherboard last supported DDR4 and save some money there, but GPUs are still 50% higher (relative to performance) than they were before crypto farms, SSDs are 100% higher than they should be, CPUs have spiked by 10% and rumour has it the corporations are going to suck up HDDs next, destroying possibly the cheapest component in computing. If you value value, keep this in mind.
I’d even say to build a PC with used but high performing parts. Steam Machine might well be inefficient cost-wise, and so is a prebuilt PC.
Acronym for ‘Jesus fucking Christ’, referencing a book character. In this sense it conveys a sense of shock/disbelief.