Take note Bluesky fans: Your “benevolent” controlling nonprofit can quickly become a for-profit if enough cash is thrown at the governing board…

Isn’t Bluesky an open-source implementation of an open protocol? And isn’t Bluesky already a for-profit organization? The point is you don’t trust the corporation. You trust the availability of the code and the protocol specification. People should be setting up instances just like they did with lemmy.

Does SteamOS offer something significant over other GNU+Linux distributions?

It’s pre-installed on the device and pre-configured. If you can configure and troubleshoot a GNU+Linux system I don’t think it has anything unique to offer to you. The thing where it boots directly into Steam big picture mode should be implementable on other distros as well. But most people can’t or don’t want to learn how to set up a Linux distro so it’s actually a big deal for the average gamer. It’s also made by a big corporation that people already trust, which might be something Gamers Nexus feels more comfortable implicitly endorsing by including it as a platform for their benchmarks.

On HDMI 2.1, you can do 8K30fps before you have to compress the stream with DSC, which is “visually lossless”, so actually lossy. We don’t even have 5K120fps or 4K240fps without compression. These are common refresh rates for gaming. So you could say that the highest resolution that supports all use cases without compromises is 1440p. That’s definitely not enough even by today’s standards. I think you’re underestimating the time it takes for standards to reach widespread adoption. The average viewer is not going to have access to it until the technology is cheap and enough time has passed for at least a few hundred million units to have reached the market. If you think you’re going to be using it in 2030 or later for your “average broadcast”, then it needs to be designed today.

Of course HDMI is shit for reasons you mention. DisplayPort is better, but it’s not an open standard either and it supports DRM as well. But designing for higher bandwidth is necessary and it has nothing to do with HDMI’s problems.