Its a death by 1000 cuts sort of thing with a few key omissions that fill the grave.
I’m certain there are far more things but I will just list the things I recall being missing/being lacking/being better with potplayer.
Playlists are sooo much better on pot player. I’m sure there are dedicated apps for having some netflix like experience at home like jelly fin etc, but if you just have a loose collection of shows and content, just being able to have simultaneous tabs for playlists where you can drop a whole season and switch with low effort is awesome. The fact that it remembers your place in the playlist and your place in the video (I know VLC does do the latter) is also awesome. You close the app and open it, and everything is like you left it.
VLC has well known, or rather long known issues with image quality where upon starting, seeking, pausing, (and this is a very laymans long memory explanation), pot player would basically go back to the last key frame so that the image looks perfect right away, while VLC will just have a few garbled frames for no good reason. Not to mention, the UI of Pot player makes codec choices for both audio and video extremely accessible.
The UI of Potplayer is lightyears ahead in terms of functionality. You can do so much more, so much more easily with hotkeys, the important controls and menu’d options are faster to find (behind less layers and searching), and its easier on the eyes.
Pot player supports 360 video while VLC does not. It says it does, but the experience is so horrifically bad (or at least was the last time I checked it), that it in practice does not support 360 video, so if you want to just play a 360 video on a 2d screen you are very out of luck. The biggest issue is surprisingly just that there is no fast and easily available method to just tell it to treat a video as a 360 video, nor is it easy to access the relevant 360 video settings (like is it side by side, top down, equa… you get the point). Pot player has all of that immediately available and you can even set whether or not a video is treated as a 360 video via a hotkey. VLC relies on some terrible method that doesnt work the majority of the time to figure out if a video is 360, and I wasn’t able to find a convenient way to just tell it to treat a video that way. Painful doesn’t begin to describe it.
The UI while being nicer to use, also takes up less space and has more sane default keybinds.
Those are just what I thought up in the process of making this comment. I don’t have like PKB for this so I’m sure there is a lot left out and there might be minor errors due to memory, but potplayer not having a linux equivalent at least to me is a big downside.
Also VLC requires you to curate a movie collection. I’m too old to keep doing that shit.
These days I use a Debrid service to steam torrents directly to my TV at gigabit speeds, with Stremio as my frontend to give me a Netflix-like experience. You get all the convenience of a modern streaming service, without the exorbitant fees nor the hassle of managing a Jellyfin server. Just fire up the TV and pick something to watch.
I had an Ouya. I was hoping to use it as an open platform to play games on the TV, but yeah, that didn’t happen. The Raspberry Pi fulfilled that need until I got a Steam Deck.
I love how so many of these old games has custom servers up and running. Metroid Prime Hunters apparently has a thriving community too (though I left the biggest discord as soon as I joined because it looks the lead admin is literally a DHS nazi 💀)
The bigger hurdle really is the DS’s wifi compatibility since WEP is so outdated and insecure. I haven’t actually messed with it in ages, but seems like hotspots are the way to go and are super easy to set up on linux, so maybe I’ll dust mine off and give that a try.
I’ll have to figure out what exactly that enables and how to set it up but it looks neat! If its just setting the DNS like the page says that seems super duper easy
Sony’s DualShock 4 and DualSense controllers are plug & play on Linux. (IIRC, Sony contributed native drivers.) They work nicely over USB or Bluetooth. Their motion controls are great if you ever play certain console emulators or want to map them to mouse-like movement in Steam Input. (I use this for free look in flight sims.) The built-in touchpad is nice for navigating menus on PC games without having to reach for the mouse. I think they also support headphones, which might be handy when playing while others in the house are sleeping, but I haven’t tried that feature.
Edit:
Also, the analog stick dead zones are nice and small, which can be helpful in some games. They are traditional potentiometer-based Alps sticks, but mine have not developed stick drift in half a decade of use. (Perhaps because I keep my controllers clean and never throw them across the room.) If they ever do start to drift, I can calibrate them in Linux.
Some people prefer sticks with Hall effect sensors for their resistance to stick drift. I like the idea, but those also consume more power, affecting battery life. Some day, perhaps tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) sensors will be used in more game controllers and retrofit sticks. Those seem to offer the best of both worlds: low power consumption and drift resistance. Since stick drift hasn’t been a problem for me anyway, I’m happy to stay with Sony controllers and all their nice features for now.
Edit 2:
Well, look at that: Valve is using TMR sensors in their upcoming Steam Controller.
Dualsense controllers are likely the best controllers you can buy for PC gaming.
Fully supported feature set, including microvibrations the pressure triggers and even the mic and speaker. The touch pad is a god send for PC gaming too.
I remember a lot of love for the Guild Wars franchise and for the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMOs.
But as a business model, they’re dinosaurs in every sense of the term. Very expensive to produce and maintain. You really need a critical mass of players to cover the costs. They can’t compete on graphics/gameplay relative to your Looter-Shooters or JRPGs. And once the title launches, you’ve got this vanguard of power-users/whales who demand all your attention while the bulk of your player base burns out before they even get to the endgame. So unlike a seasonal Fortnite or Minecraft, you risk a rapid fall-off in participation unless you can satisfy both the high and low ends of the market.
When there’s one or two big MMOs, they can build these enormous audiences and clean up. When there’s a million of them, they can’t kept people engaged long enough to cover their operating costs.
Still waiting for the full release before buying/playing it. I tend to burn myself out on Early Access games before they are finished, never returning for 1.0.
I often agree with this, though for Death Trash given the slow pace of major updates I figured I’d just jump in. It only took me about 10 hours to beat the main content, and a few more hours poking around to feel finished with the game. This isn’t something like Zomboid with a big sandbox element to sink hours and hours into.
Honestly, at the pace it’s being updated I don’t know if it will get a huge proper ending.
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