Platypus

Just like any other compute workload, performance is going to vary significantly by game and by hardware setup. Generally AMD hardware does see good improvements in Proton, while Intel + Nvidia is more of a mixed bag, and there’s plenty of reporting out there on slowdowns when switching over. I’ve invested real time in this—tried Cachy, Bazzite, Nobara, mucked around with drivers, proton distributions, launch options, all that. As much as I’d love to report Linux has blown me away here, that’s just not the case. The ecosystem keeps improving and I’ll keep trying because I fucking despise Windows, but at the end of the day I’m rolling with what works.

None of the big ones have matched Win11 performance on my machine, or even come close enough to justify switching. I’m hoping that SteamOS’ planned Nvidia support, which reportedly is being developed with some degree of collaboration with Nvidia, will move that needle.

For gaming, until the instant I can run SteamOS on my rig

Three points:

1. “Meaningfully different” does a lot of heavy lifting for your theory. You open by defining meaning as downstream of a consciousness; it thus appears that, in order to judge whether a system perceives something as meaningfully different, you must first judge whether that system is conscious. For your theory to be useful, you need to show how we can judge the meaning-attributing faculties of a system without first proving its consciousness.
2. Many comments here argue your theory devolves into “everything is conscious at some level.” This is called panpsychism, and it’s a well established theory in philosophy of mind. You might want to check it out.
3. The way the world appears to a foreign consciousness might be mutually unintelligible with ours. If AI is conscious, it likely has no conception of humans or the world we live in. Its world is composed of tokens, not nerve signals, arranged according to grammar, not physics, and so it and we could never interact one consciousness to another the way we do with fellow humans.

PC. A console is just a super locked down computer anyway, you might as well get the real thing.

A lot of people have pointed out the auto industry lobby, but even if it were removed, getting high speed rail in place would still be a tough sell because of the settlement patterns that the postwar car + suburb boom created. Boston to DC is easily dense enough to support high speed rail, but huge swathes of that corridor (especially Connecticut and New Jersey) are so thoroughly suburbanized that getting to the train in the first place is a non-trivial drive, which renders the train much less attractive. New Jersey is the densest state in the country but The Acela, which serves that corridor, only has stops at either side around New York and Philadelphia because Jersey’s density is spread fairly evenly across a functionally infinite suburbia.

I’ve found Obsidian to work well for me. Its plugin ecosystem is pretty robust, so there’s a lot of room to bolt on features.

And if you really need an open source option with every possible tool and a full customization language… emacs