Even with the importance of physical media ownership in the current era of digital product ephemera, it’s often unlikely your PC will actually be able to play the CDs, DVDs or Blu-Rays you have around the house. Internal disc drives aren’t common amongst desktops or even laptops anymore, so your only recourse is often an external drive.
One Steam Frame user was hoping to connect his own detachable disc drive to watch movies and play Need For Speed Carbon (valid!) using the headset, which can run both VR and ‘flat’ games without a separate PC, but found that the Frame lacked the drivers to read a disc. In a very earnest community post, user Aiodensghost lamented that this fact “KILLED MY ABILITY TO INSTALL MY ABANDONWARE FROM 2006. You don’t sell NFS Carbon anymore (fuck you very much EA) […] May I PLEASE have the ability to use an optical drive?” So polite!
A Valve employee by the username gaberowe would respond a day later, simply saying “we will look into this thanks for alerting us”. Around ten minutes pass, and the ‘deckard-linux-no-oopsies’ GitHub repository (yes, it’s really called that), which is the Linux kernel sources used in SteamOS for the Steam Frame, sees a commit from Rowe that effectively turns on CD-ROM support. More savvy Steam Frame users can hypothetically install the updated kernel themselves, as this commit enabled an existing Linux kernel feature, but it’s likely that this support will simply be added in an upcoming software update.
In a news role where I am continually reporting on generative AI and layoffs, it’s nice to report on something that boils down to ‘software developer does something cool, quickly.’ And, hey, Aiodensghost can play Need For Speed Carbon despite EA, which is always a gift.