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Valve Steam Deck

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Re: Valve Steam Deck

#331
post #187

Gotta admit, I never saw that coming. I thought SteamOS was dead after the failure of Steam Machines and Valve was only continuing with their Linux efforts because it's still a useful hedge against Microsoft locking everyone in the App Store. I totally did not expect them to copy the Switch use-case with it. I'm anxious to see how this turns out. Valve's history with hardware is not so great, so it could go nowhere l…

> On the other hand, it could end up all but killing off PC gaming if it is super successful. Why? I thought PC gaming is about powerful graphics cards you can't have pretty much anywhere else.

It can be about that, but it's also about the low end, the modders and weird hybrid devices like this.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#332
I hope it has better latency than the Nintendo Switch - if you build your own hardware with display included, why not make it fast!? Why does it need to have a 20+ ms response time!?

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#333
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also wondering if they'll open the door to third-party apps on the Steam Deck, which could let you use it for other cloud-based gaming platforms like Stadia.

It's a PC running SteamOS (apparently Arch base with KDE Plasma). You can install anything on there that you can install in Arch, or install Windows or another Linux distro if you want. This is all in the copy: "You can also install and use PC software, of course. Browse the web, watch streaming video, do your normal productivity stuff, install some other game stores, whatever."

I just saw about the dock, if I didn't build a new PC recently I'd be definitely considering that for gaming.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#334

I might be the target audience for this. I have a steam account for years but I barely touch it. I don't feel like building a PC, and games for MacOS were limited last time I checked. I've been happy playing my Switch and PS4. My first thought when I saw this was that it better be able to connect to an external screen, and it does! An added bonus would be if I could hook up external controllers to it as well. I've he…

Here is the community created ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com/

You can check how well titles are supported, or if you need tweaks to make it work.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#335
post #17

Typo in the title. It’s “Steam Deck”, not “Steam Desk”. Interesting that Valve is diving deeper into hardware. Remember when they still made video games? Remember when there was still a hope they would some day release Half-Life 3?

Honestly I'd much rather have Hardware Innovation and Linux Gaming Enthusiast Valve than Made Yet Another AAA Shooter Valve.

Yet another successful game vs Yet another failing hardware device.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#337
I don’t know if this has changed but the problem with This is the same as the stream controller. Pc game interfaces aren’t designed for controllers and aren’t intuitive. This can be seen if you just compare Minecraft Xbox vs Java and the lack of some little menu optimization really makes Java a pain to run on controller only.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#338
post #219

For those of us with older eyes, I am skeptical -- the screen is pretty small for the amount of detail PC games often want to display.

The screen's as big as the largest model for Nintendo Switch, I think the hardware is fine. The problem is that most PC games are optimized for higher resolution and screen size (especially the 4x or strategy ones), and unlike Nintendo where there is a standard 5.5" ~ 7" size you have to optimize for, the PC developers don't have any top-down pressure to port their game for smaller screens.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#339
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USB 2 on a mobile device might be for limiting power consumption?

Nope, it's on the dock. One USB-3, two USB-2. There's no power consumption reason for the dock.

Internally, it might be a single USB 3 interface routed to a hub chip that breaks out one USB 3 and dual USB 2, or maybe even three with one of them going to a GPIO controller or some other random peripheral.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#340
post #263
post #135

From the FAQ [0]: - What OS is Steam Deck running? SteamOS 3.0, a new version of SteamOS based on Arch Linux. - Will people be able to install Windows, or other 3rd party content? Yes. Steam Deck is a PC, and players will be able to install whatever they like, including other OSes. [0]: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/faq

I’m super excited to see that they’ve chosen Arch as a base for SteamOS. I understand fully why they originally chose Ubuntu, but I feel like Arch actually hits a lot of sweet spots for consumer use cases and could be adapted for such use quite effectively. (To be fair, I feel similarly about Gentoo, which was similarly adapted for ChromeOS quite successfully.)

I'm required as an Arch user to also reply and say I'm an arch user, and approve this message.
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