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Comment on If Valve creates an "entry point" for living room PCs, the console-beating Steam Machines will follow, argues Baldur's Gate 3's publishing director

pivot_root@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

If other hardware vendors are going to follow, they have to be using SteamOS or something similar out of the box. Handhelds can somewhat get away with using Windows because of the touch screen, but a “console” experience that occasionally requires plugging in a keyboard and mouse to get past some controller-unfriendly menu or pop-up is just going to annoy users.

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elvith@feddit.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Any other Distribution and even Windows would work fine, as long as you set up passwordless autologon as a default user and then put Steam in Big Picture Mode as autostart.

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- pivot_root@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Respectfully, I’m going to have to disagree about stock Windows working fine. There are multiple places where it necessitates having a keyboard and/or mouse connected.
  
  Interacting with UAC prompts and other elevated-permission windows that block synthetic input events.
  
  When a popup hijacks focus away from the game window.
  
  When Steam (or other controller to mouse software) is not open, such as during the logoff screen where you sometimes have to click “Close Anyways”.
  
  After a BIOS update, when the TPM refuses to unlock and you need to enter the BitLocker recovery key within the pre-boot environment.
  
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  - elvith@feddit.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    You can disable UAC (thinking practical, not necessarily security minded - but for an auto login w/o password, what’s security?)
    
    Popups: yes. But then you’d need to actively use other software besides steam. Why would you do that, if using only a controller? Also that can happen in Linux, too. If you mean those desktop notifications - those should be silenced automagically when running games.
    
    For the logoff or shutdown: Set or createHKEY\_CURRENT\_USER\\Control Panel\\Desktop\\AutoEndTasks to 1 to auto kill hanging/not ending processes automagically. Also you can use WaitToKillAppTimeout there to define how long windows should wait before killing the processes (in milliseconds).
    
    And regarding bitlocker after a bios update: why would you use bitlocker on such a machine (auto login on boot which would allow access to all files anyways)? Anyways, set or create HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\BitLocker\\PreventDeviceEncryption to 1 to prevent bitlocker from running after an upgrade. With Pro, you could also leverage GPOs for that.
    
    At least for the new Steam Gamepad they announced trackpads to be able to control the mouse with the gamepad, so clicking away a popup or sich shouldn’t be a problem.
    
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