Been using Tailscale behind CG-NAT for years. It works wonderfully and very rarely needs to route through the DERP infrastructure - it’s almost always a P2P connection.
They can, with the Game Porting Toolkit. I've played Starfield and CP2077 on my Mac. Performance wasn't great but it was playable. I expect that to improve as the tech matures.
I don’t know about the 8->[6+2]+[6] cable situation. I haven’t seen those. 8->[6+2] is fairly common though, as is 8->[6+2]*2 (some call it a pigtail).
The main advantage of the pigtail cables is that they use a single 8-pin on the PSU, and it’s only one cable.
The main disadvantage is that this single cable has to provide all the power required by the GPU, which means it will be carrying all the current and will get hotter. This reduces the longevity of the cable and could become a fire hazard depending on the quality of the components.
Running 2 cables in parallel means each cable carries one half of the current, which should be safer.
In reality whether any of this will become a problem depends on all the parts involved, but if you have the option, 2 cables is always going to be safer.
I’m sorry, no. I say this as someone who has been full on in the Apple ecosystem for decades. Other than my Linux gaming computer and my Garmin watch, pretty much all my personal devices are made by Apple.
I paid money for that NFC device in my iPhone. I should own it, not Apple. In the same vein, I paid money to have iOS running on the hardware I’m supposed to own. I should be able to decide what I want to run on it.
Unfortunately, at the moment I personally find all the alternatives much worse, so I begrudgingly accept those limitations. That doesn’t mean I like them, it doesn’t make them right, and it certainly doesn’t excuse Apple’s anti-consumer behaviour on those particular matters.
I considered getting a Mini a couple years ago. I tried one. It was not small enough for the reasons you describe. I have a regular sized iPhone for that reason.
I’ve long said the mini flopped not because people don’t want small phones, but rather because it wasn’t small enough to be worth the tradeoff of a smaller screen.
I’ve been using a btrfs partition for my games shared volume. Just install winbtrfs on Windows.
I wouldn’t recommend ExFAT for anything other than a thumb drive used to exchange files between computers. It lacks many features of modern file systems which makes files on it a lot more susceptible to corruption.
I tried installing Bazzite on a couple different computers. It just didn’t work. The Bazzite Portal, which is supposed to come up in first boot, never did. I must have installed it 5 or 6 times.
Clicking on it in the menu did nothing. Running from the CLI makes it come up but one time it just hung on the second or third step with no option to recover (and then wouldn’t run again), and another time it ran through but failed to produce a usable system in any way (again, with no option to recover).
I like the idea but I don’t have infinite time to fiddle with it so now I’m running Ubuntu with auto-login to the gaming user account which starts Steam Big Picture automatically.
It’s as close to a console experience as I can get.
Been using Tailscale behind CG-NAT for years. It works wonderfully and very rarely needs to route through the DERP infrastructure - it’s almost always a P2P connection.