The handful of companies that can afford to spend $100M+? Sure. There are only so many of those, and plenty of them go bankrupt after spending that much.

I don’t think you’re making an honest comparison if you’re doing it with used parts. You can get lots of things cheaper used.

Definitely not less than half the price. The build I see linked in this thread comes in around $950 with as close to equivalent specs as possible. The machines people on YouTube were building when the specs were announced, before the RAM and SSD prices spiked, were coming in a little under $700 at the time.

The one build I see in this thread is within $100 of the Steam Machine with comparable specs, without the form factor. I’d call that competitive. But if you disagree, they’re also releasing the ISO for SteamOS, as they’re more confident in broad compatibility, so if you were ever in the market for such a machine, you can save the $100.

How recently have you checked? Word I’ve gotten from elsewhere is that this is pretty competitive with what it would cost to build it yourself.

As a realist, I don’t see any way cloud gaming services are an option that customers en masse will be willing to pay what the providers have to charge to make a profit. Stadia was not that long ago, and Google couldn’t make it work under what had to be a softball toss for that business model.

The DRM on Linux browsers that all of these services rely on doesn’t let you stream any better than 720p.

There’s an ocean of hardware requirements between the upcoming PS6 and what it takes to run pixel graphics games. Many customers are still happy on PS4 level hardware, and third party titles like Madden still got PS4 versions until just last year.

They wouldn’t be licensing it to Valve for this device; it would be the DRM vendor updating their software for web browsers on what had been a niche operating system and is becoming less and less niche of late.

I suspect the DRM those streaming services rely on will start to budge on Linux in the near future, as it gains market share. In the meantime though, I’ve mostly been using Jellyfin lately, which ironically works on Steam Machine but not the other consoles. I’ve still got my PS4 from 10+ years ago for the regular streaming services, when I still have a subscription to any of them.

I think that risk is still reduced because the parent wouldn’t have their own Steam account to reserve one. For at least months, anyone buying one of these is probably going to be someone very intentionally doing so.

I don’t think there’s a danger of that person accidentally buying this thing, as you can only buy it from Valve and not Walmart. From a casually overheard conversation on the subway last week, I can tell you that someone who is seemingly “the average NBA 2K player” is pissed off at the upcharge for PS+ just to make his game function in multiplayer, and that guy is aware of the Steam Deck.

AI did a number to gaming, but truthfully, gaming technology was probably about to stand still anyway. Barely any studios can afford to make a game that’s so technologically advanced that it pushes our current hardware to its limits.

But why use one DNS service over another? Sorry if you’ve covered this already and it’s just not clicking yet or something.

Yeah, I’ve only got a handful of services I want to run. It’s possible that the bug bites me and I want to go deeper into this stuff, but for the here and now, I’m only eyeing 8-10 things I want to host, and they ought to work across a mini PC and a NAS.

Why do I need that? From my perspective, it seems like it would be more useful if I had far more services that I intended to run than what I’m actually planning for.

I plan on putting just about everything I can in Docker containers, but I don’t think what I’m doing requires VMs, unless you spotted something that’s eluding me.

I’m not happy with Bazzite for this purpose. Its previous purpose was to be a game console, but I’m reassured by the recommendations for Debian.

Then use a GUI. The extra memory used is trivial and your system will be way over-powered for a reverse proxy to a home network anyway.

It will be more than just a reverse proxy, but I suspect it will still be more than powerful enough for the extras. Thanks.

Are you going to update frequently?

Yes, just so long as I’m the boss. I don’t want any downtime that I’m not in control of.

Your DNS servers would be the ones where you register your domain.

The tutorials I’d been looking at were showing them overriding the DNS servers at the domain registrar with servers from Cloudflare or elsewhere. Is that just because there may not be an automated way to update the IP dynamically with the domain registrar, but there is for Cloudflare?

The type of change you’re talking about would have immediate negative effects on their customers, and they’d never recover from that. Even with more than half of their game sales coming from digital now, they’d immediately alienate the 20-30% that still buy physical, and they need every customer they can get right now as they bleed market share to PC.

I think the tunnel method you’re suggesting is different than what I’m after, and a lot of the “complexity” in learning this stuff is coming from all the different methods we have available to achieve similar results. I ought to be able to just expose 443 once I’m fully up and running, and it will route to the various services through the reverse proxy and subdomains. My “zero trust” separation for security ought to be my VLANs. So if I’m not going exactly that route, where would my DNS servers come from, and why would I need something other than what’s there by default?

I know the CLI is effective. My daily driver has been Kubuntu since 2017, and I dabbled with Ubuntu for a decade before that. But I’m so much slower on the command line, because I have to think so much harder about each command, and the outputs are often unintuitive to read and parse out what I’m looking for.