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Valve Steam Deck

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Re: Valve Steam Deck

#791

Post by dkersten »

voxl wrote: post #663
l0b0 wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arch Linux is amazing. The biggest surprise for me was that it's more stable than so-called stable distros, probably because the various packages don't end up drifting several months from each other when keeping up to date. Hopefully this eventually results in more user friendly Arch Linux installers. The learning curve is an absolute wall when installing, even after several years on Linux, but after that it's pretty…

I highly recommend staying away from Arch and NixOS if you're not ready to commit upwards of 30% of your work and free time fixing and tweaking your box. I've tried both, Arch Linux will routinely hose your entire install if you don't carefully read the update notes every time (even if most of the time there is no call to action for you). Unless it has changed, this is still the expectation of users. NixOS promises s…

> I highly recommend staying away from Arch and NixOS if you're not ready to commit upwards of 30% of your work and free time fixing and tweaking your box.

I started using Arch back in 2011 and Manjaro (Arch-based) in 2018. Besides a day or two of initial setup, getting things how I like, I spend ZERO time tweaking or fixing my installation. Your warning simply does not match up with my experience.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#792

Post by all2 »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #779
l0b0 wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arch Linux is amazing. The biggest surprise for me was that it's more stable than so-called stable distros, probably because the various packages don't end up drifting several months from each other when keeping up to date. Hopefully this eventually results in more user friendly Arch Linux installers. The learning curve is an absolute wall when installing, even after several years on Linux, but after that it's pretty…

> Hopefully this eventually results in more user friendly Arch Linux installers. Pretty sure it won't. I bet it's going to use a self-made system upgrade facility and not rely directly on pacman either. pacman is great for its intended use-cases, but it's not a package manager you want to use with no supervision of an experienced user. It may even silently leave a package in broken state just because the rootfs went…

Because Valve's target is deterministic (relatively, hardware revisions not-withstanding) pacman is actually perfect for their use-case.

You can nail down a new release on your local hardware using a bash script that calls pacman against specific packages and specific package versions. Once your local dev works, push that to the update tool. Hopefully you caught all the bugs. :)

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#793

Post by lonjil »

txdv wrote: post #15

Valve, you created a lot of products that were great but then you dropped them for some or another reason. I would like for once for you to keep working on a singular product, release multiple iterations, make it better and make it the market leader.

Steam Link and Steam Controller were dropped because they weren't selling very well, but the steam link application continues to be updated, and the Steam Controller continued to get firmware updates until 2018.

If this Steam Deck thing sells well, they'll probably make another one. If it sells poorly they'll probably keep the software updated and use put discounts on it to clear out stock.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#794

Post by somehnacct3757 »

bogwog wrote: post #306
caslon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to consider that PC hardware is currently spiraling out of control in terms of price, and $400 for the specs it has presently is a fairly decent buy even if you don't care about the form factor.

I wonder if they're selling at a loss? Valve can afford it, plus it'd be no different than Sony/Nintendo/etc subsidizing hardware since they make most of their profits from software sales. Only difference is that, unlike traditional game companies, this Steam Deck thing isn't a walled garden. But of course, Steam has a near monopoly on PC gaming so it's unlikely that'll be a problem for them.

Nintendo sells its consoles at a profit. It's why their hardware is always "behind" the other guys who are, as you say, selling you $4 of power for $3 and hoping to make it up over time on ecosystem purchases.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#795

Post by cwkoss »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #375
yehudalouis wrote: post #241

Halfway down the page on https://www.steamdeck.com/en/ they have a graphic of a user logging in with the username 'gordon' and an obscured password, which conveniently has the same number of letters as halflife3, haha.

Well, wouldn't it be a killer move to announce HL3 on steam, with heavy com on the mobile gameplay?

I think "mobile" and "handheld" are pretty distinct categories at this point. Switch games a pretty qualitatively different than most of the junk in the android app store.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#797

Post by beefjerkins »

smcleod wrote: post #713

Fantastic that it runs Linux by default. A real shame it's not available in Australia at lunch.

As a fellow Australian, I was thinking the same to myself. When it DOES come to Australia, wouldn't be surprised if we get SHAFTED on price.

It's a real shame, because this is some neat hardware I wouldn't mind splurging on.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#798

Post by beefjerkins »

ixacto wrote: post #666

This is kinda cool. Needs a 144hz display though. That would be the killer feature to differentiate between the switch.

That would indeed be killer, but I wonder how difficult it would be for the Deck to push those sorta frames, even at 720p.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#799

Post by beefjerkins »

z3t4 wrote: post #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!?

I have confidence that Valve isn't going to deliver a product of this caliber and then deliver a subpar screen response time.

Re: Valve Steam Deck

#800

Post by seba_dos1 »

msie wrote: post #658
hn8788 wrote: post #6

Storage seems like it'll be an issue unless you only want to play indie games. It says it's got the hardware to play AAA games, but even last gen AAA games like Doom Eternal won't fit on the base model, and the next step up with more sufficient storage is more expensive than the next gen consoles.

You'll probably be able to hack it and add your own NVME drive. Everything is standard and won't be locked down like Apple's hardware.

They explicitly say the storage is not upgradable, and it's absolutely not surprising given the form factor.
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