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Valve Steam Deck

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Re: Valve Steam Deck

#431

Post by whoisburbansky »

gorgoiler wrote: post #347
jchw wrote: post #263

Earlier 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…

Why do you think the end user won't be doing anything with the underlying OS? It seems to me that the sort of customer that would go for something like this over another console is precisely the sort of customer who would love using the underlying OS and this device as a more general purpose compute device.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#432

Post by wtfrmyinitials »

romwell wrote: post #123
ketzo wrote: post #44

There’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…

Since it runs Linux I don’t see any reason you couldn’t put your entire library on an NFS server in the other room. If I get one I’ll certainly be doing that

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#433

Post by treesknees »

rchaud wrote: post #402
spiralganglion wrote: post #382

Impressions: * 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 tr…

An excessively negative take, why? 1.5 pounds is what the 2010 iPad weighed, people managed to use it just fine. As for visual appeal, who knows? PC gamer aesthetics seem to be oriented around dotting your CPU case with the most gauche RGB lights Amazon dropshippers have to offer. At least this is more toned down than say, a comparable Alienware product.

The weight is pretty excessive for something you hold out in front of your face with two hands. Yes an 11 year old iPad weighs the same, but people tend to rest the edge of the iPad on a lap, chest, table. At least with the Nintendo Switch, I find it uncomfortable to play while resting it against something else. The angle on my wrists ends up being painful after say 20 minutes.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#434

Post by metalliqaz »

minimaxir wrote: post #223
css wrote: 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

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

This allows them to proceed without having to obtain new platform rights from every single publisher on Steam.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#435

Post by phendrenad2 »

caslon wrote: post #38

First impressions: Really good hardware for the price. They fixed the worst thing about SteamOS: It's now got an Arch base. They're definitely overcharging for storage, but I imagine it'll be easy enough to modify one, so it probably doesn't matter much. Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days? Going with a relatively low resolution compared to modern ones is actually a surprisingly smart mov…

I really wonder what it means to be based on Arch Linux. Are users supposed to run packman to grab the latest security fixes? Are users going to be installing apps from the AUR or whatever? Why does this thing even need a package manager at all? Or is there more to a Linux distro that I'm not getting? It seems like a distro is mostly defined by it's package manager and repository paradigm or philosophy, with Debian being the slow stodgy stable distro and Arch being bleeding-edge. Everything else they have in common (wayland, systemd, standard components that don't know or care thst they're running on Debian or Arch).

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#436

Post by 4ec0755f5522 »

The abbreviation for Canadian Dollar is CAD, not CDN. Sometimes C$ or CA$.

I checked Valve's website for an email address to let them know but it seems they have scrubbed it quite deliberately. This is not a surprise, it's something we see all the time with scale: if a 100 person company can have 100 million customers, they will happily do so and gladly take their money, but never scale up enough people to deal with this extreme staff:customer ratio. Google, FB, etc., we know they all have terrible customer service and that this is the reason. Seems with Valve it's the same.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#437

Post by hermitdev »

fullstop wrote: post #416
thorum wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One negative: With all that hardware it’s almost 3 times heavier than the Nintendo Switch, which is already near the upper limit for holding comfortable for longer play sessions. edit: On closer look that's comparing the Switch without controllers (297g) to the Steam Deck with controllers (669g). The Switch with controllers is 398g, so the Steam Deck is only ~1.7x times as heavy - though that's still a lot of extra w…

The tech page says that it weighs "Approx. 120 grams" [1] Is this information incorrect? 1. https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech edit: crtl-f mistake, that's the docking station

120 grams is the weight of the dock. You scrolled a little too far. From the same page, "Approx. 669 grams" for the system.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#438

Post by Kaze404 »

aneutron wrote: post #261
mmastrac wrote: post #94

This is a pretty amazing. Given the ports on the back, will this support the Valve Index? I love my index, but having to boot up a PC and keep myself tethered to the desktop is a bit of an effort that I'd love to skip. EDIT: Found a half-answer to this: "Pierre-Loup Griffais: I mean, it has all the connectivity. You would need [a lot] to do that, but that's not really what we're optimizing the performance for." [1] […

I have a lot of doubt about it supporting the Valve Index. Mainly because it's a 15W CPU. Sure, you can optimize for it, but VR is extremely performance heavy as far as I can understand.

Depends on the game. It used to be very performance heavy, but these days any low-mid end gaming pc can handle a decent amount of games.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#439

Post by disambiguation »

this is great! i hope we get access to the underlying linux system

in a similar vein, i just finished installing ubuntu on my Switch. It's a lot of fun so i can imagine this will be even better with fancier hardware!

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#440

Post by Nullabillity »

dm319 wrote: post #389
css wrote: 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

The video looked like it was running KDE.

From the specs page[0]:

> Desktop: KDE Plasma

[0]: https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech

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