Original article does complain about headphones, but I don't think Sony uses Bluetooth for their Playstation 5 headphones either, just their Playstation Link ones that are custom USB 2.4Ghz like most other gaming headsets
Playing 20 or so games on my Steam Deck I had to edit one only .INI. The Steam Deck is the only device I've ever seen that pairs perfectly with AirPods every time, it beats Apple devices.
I also have a big gaming PC/AI development with a NVIDIA GPU and, yeah, NVIDIA's app to maintain drivers is a little skeezy but I just download games on Steam and they "just work" though I am not really a day one kind of gamer unless it is a new Dynasty Warriors or Fate game.
I'll grant that kernel anti-cheat sucks, if you play that kind of game and cheating bothers you well then... Maybe a locked down environment like the PS5 is a feature and not a bug.
You kind of undermine your own argument here. The Steam Deck is more a console than a PC, with lots of "just works" baked in either directly or through community support that makes it simple.
In 2026 I still have to mess with game settings, driver issues, and DRM garbage behavior as a primarily PC gamer. PC gaming is still a long way from "just works" and I think you probably just take for granted a lot of things you have to do to make it work vs a typical console experience.
Look, in the 1990s I was horrified of PC gaming because I was always dealing with kids who thought they were having fun with their PC whereas they were really fighting with an ugly plastic oversized joystick that fell apart two times during a level and had to be recalibrated three times. Or that it was a sweaty battle with the keyboard and mouse that reprises the sweaty battle with the keyboard and mouse I have at work and with my productive hobbies.
I got into console gaming in the late 00's and had a few portables and an Xbox 360 and a PS 3 just after they became obsolete and played through the libraries. My favorite games were games for the PS Vita from Japanese publishers like Altus, Idea Factory and Acquire. When Sony and the publishers quit investing in the Vita those games went right to Steam. And my experience with Steam is, "click on the Steam icon", pair the Xbox controller, use the controller to pick a game, and sit back. Like yeah, there still are sweaty keyboard-and-mouse games and I might even play one once in a while, but I'd say my experience on the big machine is "console like" with the condition that the kind of games I play are "console like" games.
I haven't had a driver issue other than 'you didn't upgrade your drivers lately' on a gaming PC in years and years. The problem now with pc gaming is the cost to enter the market with the GPU, RAM and storage prices.
In what sense is the steam deck more console than pc? I agree that there's convenience in it being a single target for people to work on, but it lets you run anything you want even on the stock operating system, and you can trivially replace that at will
The line between console and blurred significantly lately. Consoles became X86 machines running PC OSs but locked down. PCs gained options for console hardware with the same OSs.
These days the only difference between PC and Console is having a locked down OS. Which makes consoles seem purely a worse product, but the difference used to be a lot more.
The deck is a standard configuration they can test for, the “works with Steam Deck” badge sells product, game publishers covet it. Problems with Proton get worked out.
SteamOS is basically just a Linux distro with Steam preinstalled and set to autorun in Big Picture mode at boot. Everything you are describing is available in the plain Steam client because SteamOS runs the same client. You can just set your PC to boot into Steam and get 99% the same experience.
Immutability has been the greatest improvement on the linux desktop in a long time. I'd never recommend a traditional distro to someone who can't fix or install linux themselves because mutable distros tend to grow warts over time, and diverge from a clean state. Eventually requiring a reinstall to fix.
But immutable distros stay in a clean state, updates become trivial and safe, and can roll back in case of a failure.
80/443 is all that's necessary for Headscale as a control server.
UDP/3478 is STUN for the embedded DERP. I recommend hosting a distinct DERP server, thus decoupling the control and data planes. DERPer is open source from Tailscale.
50443 is for GRPC. I'd not expose that, even if it is protected by authentication (and tested).
I'm absolutely hooked on Caddy. Just developed an AITM phishing tool like EvilGinx2. Challenging project, but Caddy's modularity really brings it all together. Need encrypted landing pages? Just string together a few modules. Need conditional forward proxies to make sure requests originate from geographic regions? Placeholders to the rescue.
Another interesting point is that VPN providers have access to server-side keys and, obviously, the processes. This just makes the VPN provider the new ISP.
There's no guarantee that VPN traffic isn't being decrypted and inspected
