https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech > Operating System: SteamOS 3.0 (Arch-based) > Desktop: KDE Plasma This is sure to excite the Linux community.
It's based on Arch? That really is exciting. I never expected something like this.
Valve Steam Deck
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Re: Valve Steam Deck
#382Impressions:
* 1.47 pounds is 666g, versus the Switch’s 398g (with Joy-Con attatched). 67% heavier.
* I do like that the two people I can see on the landing page both appear to be female, and not overtly "models" at that. I don’t want to read into whether this implies anything about what the marketing for this system might be — rather, I just like that we’re seeing a further erosion of the video-games-as-boys-club trope.
* The visual appearance of this console is brazenly ugly. It sure feels like they were unwilling to compromise something for the sake of appearance, though I’m not sure what that something is.
* They claim that there’s no performance difference between tiers, but obviously disk speed has an impact on how games perform whenever they need to fetch data. This feels like a bit of skating by on ambiguity rather than being fully forthright about tradeoffs — which only hurts since the price jump from the entry level to the middle tier is so dramatic, and we don’t yet know pricing for the dock.
* Countdown until this thing is EOL? Any bet on what the firesale will look like? No, I’m not assuming it’ll flop necessarily, we just all know Valve’s track record for being fickle about hardware.
* This really goes to show how much prowess Nintendo has at hardware, and how hard mass-market product design is. According to my napkin math, Nintendo and Valve are both in the same ballpark in terms of financial status / resources. Though if the Xbox and Surface has shown us anything, if you keep trying and trying in earnest, you’ll eventually get there.
Re: Valve Steam Deck
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
Valve engineers explicitly frame the Steam Deck as a PC with an integrated controller rather than a game console: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLtiRGTZvGM
Yeah, this is an awesome change of pace for an industry that notoriously locks down its hardware.
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Re: Valve Steam Deck
#384If this supports dGPUs, it can actually replace my desktop.
The device has a USB-C port so I think it will probably work. People have been successful connecting up their eGPUs to the GPD Win 3 (which is a similar device)
Re: Valve Steam Deck
#385There’s obviously a lot of people who like playing games in a more mobile format, as evidenced by the huge popularity of the Switch Lite / mobile gaming. Giving the PC games market access to that form factor seems, on its face, like an extremely good move. But we’ve seen products like this before — the NVIDIA Shield, for one. Pretty cool piece of tech, but didn’t exactly start a revolution. I guess the question becom…
>I guess the question becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?” Yup. Before clicking the "Reserve" link, I put a personal threshold for this thing at $300. If it was somewhere around that, it'd be an instant purchase for me. Over $500 for a version with barely acceptable (by 2021 standards) storage? No thank you. The 64GB version is almost a made-for-landfill…
I don’t get this, if you’re using it for gaming then storage isn’t a huge deal. Even on a dedicated gaming PC, most people don’t have their entire Steam library installed at once.
Not only is it just too much space, but it’d be wasted since there’s no way you’re going to play all of those games.
The 64gb version of this definitely is too small though. That’s less than the average AAA game. And while there are certainly people out there who don’t play AAA games, I don’t think the average Joe will do the math ahead of time when buying one of these, and will be very disappointed/angry when they find they can’t play the game they want (without using external storage/a dock).
But, if this thing does have an SD card slot (idk, I haven’t checked), it should solve the problem. SD cards aren’t super fast, but the Nintendo switch is proof that they’re at least good enough for gaming.
Re: Valve Steam Deck
#386I'm going to buy this just to support Valve for their continued support in making Linux desktop a viable gaming platform. Their reasons may not be entirely altruistic, but there's no doubt that they had a tremendous impact on the Linux gaming ecosystem.
And it's not just the Linux gamers that are benefiting from their work. They also seem to be doing good work on lower-level parts of the stack (e.g.: graphic drivers, Flatpak, etc) that are improving the Linux desktop in general.
Re: Valve Steam Deck
#387> Deck What an uninspiring name! (with unfortunate mispronunciations). Looks very interesting though, price point (starting at £349) seems very competitive.
Not a William Gibson fan I take it - I heartily recommend you read Neuromancer if you enjoyed the Matrix / any cyberpunk at all.
Re: Valve Steam Deck
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 love a good distro story but it doesn’t seem very relevant here. A Linux distribution like Ubuntu, Arch or Gentoo provides a platform for users to configure their system. The distro is a toolkit for finishing up a generic OS into the specific workstation needed by the user to do their work. Steam Deck on the other hand has one job to do: launch /opt/steam and run things linked against libsteam. The end user won’t b…
Using Arch probably allows for faster updates, since Steam won't have to wait for ages to use some of the newest Linux kernels.
Same goes for other supporting software.
Ubuntu is good as a stable platform, but it's probably too slow moving.
Re: Valve Steam Deck
#389From 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
The video looked like it was running KDE.
Re: Valve Steam Deck
#390I always felt their controller was a bit of a weird product. Turns out they were just dipping their toes in the water. I wonder if they are going to produce this fully in house like the controller. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCgnWqoP4MM
Valve wanted to compete with consoles. Consoles go in the living room and are played with a controller. Your home's PC is not in the living room, so how does Valve fix that? The Steam Link. Okay, but PC games are frequently designed to be played with a mouse and keyboard. There's lots of stuff to click on. So how do you play that from the couch without some elaborate lap pad with a mouse and keyboard on it? The Valve…
It really is a great controller. The omission of the d-pad was a mistake, but the real reason it failed was because people already had a preference for the X-Box controller. Most games worked with the X-Box controller with no extra configuration.
This is why I think the Deck has done it right: include all the standard buttons plus the extra stuff.