Well that's pretty compelling!
Ever since the failure of Windows mixed reality, there hasn't been many non-Meta HMD's worth buying. At least with inside out tracking.
Maybe this will finally pressure Valve to lower the price on the venerable Index? Probably not. But one can hope!
I'm running a Steam OS like experience on my Lenovo Legion Go. Not quite a steam deck, but very similar.
You should be able to use the heroic launcher. And you should be able to install it as a flat pack or a snap. That will make your GOG games as easy to download and install as a steam game. If I recall correctly, it even automatically adds entries for steam.
I regularly play Bomb Rush Cyberfunk on this device using the GOG edition.
I normally would, but my wife has the same problem and she's done that 3 times in the last 6 months. In fact, her problem became MUCH worse because the "clean slate" was far more impressionable. She'd search up beauty routines, only to find that Youtube thinks she now wants to see "popping" videos, even though she's now searching for dinner recipes.
So yeah, I saw her experience and decided "no thanks".
To be fair, MOST of YouTube I watched can be found on Nebula and Floatplane, both of which will likely not have this issue since it's not a user-content platform. Not to mention, the creators likely make more from those platforms anyways.
YouTube is basically unavoidable though, so now I just view everything through a piped instance if I absolutely need something that can only be found there.
I used to subscribe to YouTube premium as of just a few days ago. Even without the ads. There was something very seriously wrong with the suggestion algorithm.
I was getting cartel violence videos, and dead animal videos. Never watched one before in my life. Yet. YouTube seems to think that I should want to watch this crock of shit. This started coming up about 6 months ago. Until now I've been reporting each video as they come up. But that doesn't seem to help at all.
At this point I think YouTube is a danger to society - if it's recommending cartel violence videos to me unsolicited, what are they suggesting to my nieces?
I have completely nuked it from my life. Almost all of the YouTubers I like are on Nebula or Floatplane so it doesn't feel like I'm missing much.
It's just my client. Boost for Reddit doesn't appear to show it correctly. It's the opposite though. It just shows the text. Spoiling it for me.
yeah…
They asked for easy, or newbie friendly - and didn't particularly mention privacy concerns.
Other than that, if they don't have a port 80/433 ingress from their ISP there are scarce simple solutions that don't require another server that also needs management, either by them or a corporate entity.
back when i was on a DOCSIS modem, i noticed concurrent downloads would disrupt uploads and vice versa. i think this may depend on the type of connection OP has.
I used to work at a cable company, that was either a problem that people with low SNR had. Either from external factors (tree branch on a cable line) or in-home ones (bad splitter). A modem will ramp up it's gain in order to offset this (to a point), and in so doing, create a lot more interference between channels. OR they were hitting their ingress rate limit (which is quite agressive on residential plans because DDOS'es). It's surprisingly easy to hit your ingress rate limit for modern http/https webservers hosting complex web apps. Lots of concurrent connections open up to try to download all the resources when you go to any website in a modern browser and while it's not a TON of data, the short period of time causes the traffic to easily hit the PPS/BPS rate limit that ISPs employ.
But yeah, it all depends on the ISP.
I'd argue that the cloudflared daemon is even easier to use than a static wire guard or openvpn tunnel. It's basically set and forget. The downside is that you must use cloudflare. This may, or may not be a big deal depending on OPs needs.
I moved from a place with symmetrical gigabit to "gigabit cable" with 30mbps upload, it definitely wasn't good enough for my small family. Photos are quite large these days - not to mention videos. Though it likely has a lot more to do with the bandwidth shaping my ISP does than the 30mbps rate.
Also agree that it's not perfect, but very likely the most newbie friendly solution at the moment. Especially from a deployment scenario vs going piecemeal.
The best "bang for the buck" in your use-case is to use Nextcloud - Nextcloud Talk is your Jitsi replacement, and the files feature can be extended with the Nextcloud Photos plugin (https://github.com/nextcloud/photos).
As for your domain question:
You should use any computer you'd like that meets the Nextcloud recommendations, the key is of course isolating this machine on your home network so any "funny business" stays on the server. You can do this with VLANs or an entirely separate LAN connected to a different WAN (ISP).
Many places, I like porkbun.com for real custom domains for cheap, but for your use case, you might be able to use a Dynamic DNS provider for free. It just likely won't be an easy to remember URL (or at least, as easy as a root domain only). If you have a newer ASUS or Netgear router/modem they both have Dynamic DNS built in and you can select from a few different providers that have both free and paid tiers. ALSO it might be better to use Google Domains (now squarespace domains) since, IIRC, many DynDNS configs for routers support Google Domains too. Cloudflare can also be a decent registrar, and I'd recommend using them if you use any other cloudflare services (see below).
Other things to consider: Your ISP may block port 80, meaning lots of issues. If this is the case, you might want to use a tunnel of some sort. Cloudflare has a great solution here. Even if they don't block port 80, they may aggressively throttle and shape your incoming traffic - causing issues. Again, the tunnel is a good solution here. And, of course, your upload bandwidth matters a lot, you'll need something around 100Mbps upload for a decent experience when accessing your stuff over the internet. The 30Mbps that's typical of DOCSIS modems won't cut it. Outside of these concerns it's all about making sure you isolate your server from your "home stuff" to keep things secure.
With today's announcement, I'm super happy you did this 4 days ago. Time to make a few clones myself.
Well, seeing that Insurgency: Sandstorm was on a sale, I just picked it up for him (and myself). Seems to have a lot in the map making scene, and that's a really important factor for him.
It also helps that the prior Insurgency game has the most hours on his profile, by far. Gave me a good hint that he should enjoy this one.
Thanks so much!
EDIT: My dad just got back to me, and loves the gift. Apparently that's where most of his online buddies went and still are. Nailed it!