mnemonicmonkeys

but Wikipedia does say that the Deck has HDMI out

No, it has USB 3.0 type-C that's capable of video output

The patent troll you're referring to is SCUD (fuck those guys and fuck their owners, Corsair).

Thankfully, Valve won the appeal in their lawsuit a few years back and the patent is no longer valid. Unfortunately, the damage was already done

This is huge Bro energy with little understanding of AI and they are fully on the hype train.

Aparently one of the companies that made the purchase is owned by Jared Kushner. You're probably spot on with that assessment

You can front any three un-clustered nodes with a load balancer to the same effect

Good to hear. Are there specific example you could point me to? I'd like to learn more

I do find it a little odd that you're so concerned about uptime with a casual gaming server, but to each their own.

Personally, part of it is that I don't want everything to be solely dependent on a box I own. I don't like the idea of lording a petty fiefdom over my friends. If there's multiple distributed boxes that are technically equal, then there's less potential for interpersonal friction.

Also, while I have the more powerful server, I also have very little free time. If my box stops working for whatever reason, I don't want my friends to have to wait 1-2 weeks for me to fix it

100% uptime is really not feasible so forget that. Even the commercial servers have downtimes.

What I was thinking of doing was having 2-3 separate boxes distributed between houses and could automatically switch which boxes handles resources when 1 goes down. No individual box would have 100% uptime, but you'd have minimal disruptions when any particular box has issues or needs maintenance.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like kubernetes works that way, and I don't know of any software that would. Best bet now is probably to distribute backups between the boxes and manually spin up a secondary box when the primary goes down

But you could have a setup where one server hosts the game and syncs the game state with the other servers in the network, and if one server fails the network decides which failover server to connect to, all the clients connect to that server and continue playing on the new host.

This is kinda what I was hoping that kubernetes did. It'd be awesome if there was some software that automatically did the hand-off, but I haven't heard of one either

Going through some of the more detailed responses, yeah this is probably the best bet, and it'll most likely be my server that's the primary. I've got a Jellyfin server / NAS with an Intel 12700k, and I could either simply add a docker container or dedicate resources via Proxmox.

Meanehile one of my friend is experimenting with an old $50 desktop with a 3rd gen i3. It's... a decision, but he's got more free time than I do

Thank you for the detailed explanation

It sounds like my friends and I are better off just having 1 primary server running everything, and pushing backups to 1 or 2 other servers that can be spun up if/when things go wrong with the primary server.