My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI Cable

On this page You can now pre-order Valve's Steam Machine! Fortuitous timing as I drafted this as a follow up to my post from December where I wrote about using Linux for PC gaming. At that time Steam ran well on my desktop and I chipped away at lighter games on the Deck. I ended that post by saying: I don't think I'll buy a Steam Machine, but I'm very happy it will exist. I've been testing out dual booting Bazzite on my desktop and I'd love to replace that with SteamOS proper. If I can pick up a controller and play a game on Steam with my TV as easily as the PS5, then I won't need to boot that up as much. I underestimated that last sentence. The Desktop to TV experiment Initially I ran a 20ft HDMI cable across the floor to my TV so I could play games from my NixOS install. The setup was fiddly though. Each time I wanted to play a game I had to hook the cable up, change sound outputs/display, etc. I installed my Steam games on their own NVME drive separate from my NixOS install. So I…