Less “not optimized”, & more “not supported”; IE, accelerations that don’t turn on, because companies like Intel, Broadcom, Samsung, & NVidia, have a long history of only giving preferred partner devteams, prerelease hardware access, much less any peeks at unobfuscated firmware.
Imho, the Steam Deck will be the only one with a really long product lifetime. Simply because Valve’s main business is selling games, not consoles. The Deck makes people buy more/different games. Worked on me. I haven’t played much in the last decade because I was too tired to play at my PC after work. Now I can play everywhere. Couch, bed, car, … Basically every other manufacturer makes money exactly once by selling such a console. As soon as their marketing is done with it, they’ll release a new revision and you won’t see a single software update for the old model ever again.
Well, but the same is true for brands selling desktops or laptops with windows, where they only make money once on the hardware (and maybe some additional money by installing subscription crapware like mc afee etc.).
That’s true. And that’s the reason why you’ll get one or two firmware/driver updates and that’s it. These companies have work to do on the other hand. A laptos or desktop is a widespread product. Valve had to go a long way to make the Deck happen.
Yup, there are a number of features for Valve to do this right:
supporting linux frees them of the eternal windows shackles that pc-gaming has become, diversifies steam as a multi-platform service (not just pc gaming juggernaut) without encroaching on anyone else’s terrain, and gets their user’s enormous libraries out into the world, potentially enabling new kinds of games in the future.
I mean it doesn’t have a disc drive and the base OS is Linux, so if the game you want to play doesn’t work on Linux it won’t work on the Linux version of Steam Deck, if that is what you’re asking. If you know how to make isos and move them over if the game requires, you can install windows on the steam deck and basically run anything that the steam deck can handle hardware wise whether its on steam or not. Ive seen people who installed windows on it or also kept the original Linux Steam OS play many non-steam games. Some of these other devices were built with Windows though from the ground up though if you don’t want to reinstall anything or deal with drivers, I personally plan on getting a Steam Deck here in a few months next Christmas then replacing Linux with Windows so i know for sure my software will work as sacrilegious as it is.
Lol, wooosh. A disc drive is an optical drive like a Blu-ray, DVD, or cd drive. Go ahead,show me the built in disc drive on a steam deck and not a USB connected one.
Man, I hear “disc drive” & I think “hard disc drive”. I’ve connected optical drives when USB boot wasn’t supported, but the last time I voluntarily used a disc drive was to test an M-Data disc burned to silicon. But yeah, none of these new devices have a HDD or optical (or floppy disk, for that matter).
Yes HDD are disc based tech, yet I’ve never heard them refered to as just a disc drive without the hard despite having a platter disc in them. While not being the end all be all, wikipedia has disk or disc drives listed as referring to purely optical media.
And I use them to access a plethora of media from old back ups/family pictures, DVDs/Blu-ray, backing up said DVD/Blu-ray to Plex if I like them that much I want them digitally, old games(my oldest still useable disc is my 1998 minted “GOTY” Diablo 1.) Also just never hurts to have the ability to burn a CD or DVD either, though mainly still get the use out of CD burning for cars without an aux.
Oh, I obviously interpreted that as meaning a hard disk drive (which SSDs are still commonly referred to as HDDs) since we were discussing modern PCs. Many years ago external physical file transfer mostly transitied away from using actual spinning disks to USB storage, and even that has been mostly supplanted by network connected storage for several years.
What? You mean how is the linux version of mac version of qemu? Alive and kicking! Same for box86 and box64. Binary tralsators existed before Apple started making x86 computers.
Sorry, i was very late with this whole arm hype 😅 never knew that rasp pi was arm prior Apple silicone 🫣 But Indeed, it is very nice seeing that fast progress there and I hope linux arm goes mainstream and thus get even more supported by app developers and investors.
Don’t Apple’s chips have specific hardware support to make Rosetta 2 as effective as it is? I’ve been really hoping other manufacturers find a way to do something similar.
I don’t know about hardware support, but I found this article on box86.org which seems to be the best alternative to rosetta on Linux. The performance drop on box64 vs native is still much greater than the performance drop in rosetta:
I found nothing, that implies that there would be specific hardware features in m1 for making the translation faster. Only that it does translation mainly ahead-of-time (AOT) and saves “that version” of the app somewhere as cache). I only scrolled through it and did not read it all, so maybe I missed it.
According to the totally impartial LTT review of the Ally it’s worse than the Deck in every way but if it’s plugged in and you’re using a kb+m then it’s only a slightly underpowered laptop and you should totally buy it over the Deck
So I guess the “power modes” that can’t run on battery
Yes! I had three NiCd to every one NiMH, & the NiCd would all be flat within minutes; then I’d switch to the NiMH for some actual fun & within 30 minutes they’re all spent for the day. Sometimes I stripped the single-use flat cells out of used Polaroid film packs, for just a few minutes of superior power:weight ratio on my littlest RCs
Then there were the flashlights we’d use for hours but if you put the same cells in the GameGear, dead in no time.
LiPo cells were like a revelation…
Come to think of it, the PSP had an optical drive which was a battery hog too; I remember a friend being elated that I’d found an aftermarket pack with more mAh.
Fucking hell the “Steam Deck killers” is a stupid trend.
They really do hit you with all the specs that are supposed to put the deck to shame, but the reveal their ludicrous price, completely ignoring the major advance the things has.
That’s a simple trick, but cheap and dirty, so it’s pretty garbo anyway. No respect for handhelds themselves or anyone reviewing them or taking any sponsorship that do anything like that.
The idea of a console where the manufacturer doesn’t have total control over the OS is ludicrous, no way a Windows box is ever going to “kill” the deck
Yeah, Sony lost me when they broke my Linux install and degraded the DVD playback functions, within six months of me buying my PS2. Similarly, the last “good” smartphone I had, was the Palm Treo (650p\680p\Centro); since then, I’ve never had a single phone that granted direct hardware access & allowed unloading/sideloading the OS by default.
Manufacturers want deep control these days; way beyond mere root permissions.
Not only they can’t sell the device at a loss, but also they have to use Windows for driver compatibility.
What’s holding back the Steam Deck, and the whole gaming on the go, it’s x86. For the rest, it’s x86 plus Windows plus drivers.
The one to win will be who makes a tightly coupled device that’s also efficient. Apple is good at that, but has nowhere near the catalogue than Steam and lacks a Steamworks SDK.
Valve kind of pulled a George Foreman/nVidia and reused a lot of names to make things confusing.
SteamOS from the Steam Machines era is just another distro. I want to say that was a Debian?
SteamOS for the Steam Deck is Arch (?) and IS technically available and anyone can do whatever, but it is not really packaged for distribution and a lot of aspects of it are very specifically configured/set up for the Steam Deck.
I am not sure what the official line is on if another company wants to distribute (Arch) SteamOS with their device. But… unless GabeN himself is on a video twirling knives and talking about what a great partnership this is, I would consider that to be a negative. Because SteamOS for the Aya Neo Whatever is going to be a second class citizen, at best. And if the company thinks that is a viable option it does not bode well for their support and communication models.
I used the steam deck as a daily driver between laptops. It was good enough to the point that if I had a decent mobile monitor, I would consider it exclusively for a travel rig.
I’ve got an external monitor and my full keyboard and mouse with a dock and my steam deck. I can set up anywhere with a desk and game, program, whatever. I’ve found very little that it can’t handle.
I’m using this portable monitor but it is kind of finicky, and I worry it’ll break easily. It’s the biggest one I could find at a reasonable price, and happens to fit my backpack.
I’ve used it with my 3440x1440 freesync monitor at home, and it works as well, but like anything, whether you can game at that resolution is very dependant on the specific game and settings you use.
I’ll add, because the deck doesn’t have thunderbolt, plan on using HDMI instead of type c. It’s possible you can find a type c (non-thunderbolt) dock that supports powering and driving a monitor over type c along with the deck, but I wasn’t able to find one.
Outside of the better gpu, the one advantage the other devices have is emulation. Steamdeck sits on the edge of performance for some of the harder to emulate devices heavy titles (PS3, Switch). The ones using Ryzen 3/4 would trivially handle emulation better than the Steamdecks CPU, which uses Ryzen 1+ (part of the reason why its low cost)
I am looking specifically for a single device for travelling with. But the built in controllers of the Steamdeck are just a little too goofy for me to give it much serious consideration.
You could, but what makes Steam Deck special is that it's SteamOS is built specifically for that hardware, enabling functions you wouldn't normally see in gaming PC hardware.
The main benefits of SteamOS proper is that it is a distro that takes a very “windows” like approach to papering over/obfuscating a lot of the internals. And the main feature it has over the competition is that, because Valve have so much control over the OS, the gamepad controls of desktop work a lot better.
But I want to say Aya also provide that, but in Windows? I know either they or GPD do that because that was a big reason I didn’t want to GET (probably) an aya neo: Not super huge on so much closed source software provided by a random company having that much control over my OS.
And… I am still not super huge on Valve having that much power. But I “trust” them more.
But curious if am missing something.
And I’ll add on. This should not need to be provided by the vendor. On Windows, they have pretty strong tablet/touch screen support which goes a long way with keyboard popups and the like. Linux needs to step up its game and make sure that gamepads can be treated as first class citizens input wise and distros/workspaces need to make keyboard popups in a similar state.
Small nitpick. I’m not sure why you don’t like the idea of the vendor having stuff installed on hardware they make, to ensure it functions optimally. Like, on a primary compute device, sure, be picky about the OS. But this is a game platform. Nobody gives a shit that Nintendo makes their own OS for their hardware, why does anyone care how the Steam Deck does it’s thing?
I actually have a lot of issues with the walled gardens the console makers sell. That doesn’t stop me from using it, but I should not need to wait for Sony to “add support” for basic HDMI standard features like VRR and question why the only tvs that support that are their own.
In a perfect world? Standard, preferably open source, libraries and tools for anything possible with “ease of use” and the like provided through the same package managers and management tools that allow IT departments to manage/monitor deployed systems. This greatly reduces the need to hope that Microsoft add discord support to the xbox or that nintendo… understands what an internet is. And it greatly reduces OS development/overhead for the consoles because… it isn’t like people are buying playstations for the… I can’t even think of anything unique to the OS that isn’t purely UI/UX.
Fair enough! I mean, that would be really nice tbh. Also it makes me realize that consoles only exist for DRM, which is sucky. Granted, I stopped buying consoles almost a decade ago, so I never stopped to think about it.
At least one of the main features is seamless suspend/resume. Not sure what the state of that is on Windows but I’ve seen a lot of people mention that SD feature specifically.
And with VRR in general it matters a lot less if you have a steady framerate. Pretty much my only complaint with the steam deck hardware is that it is not a VRR display. Much like with dlss/fsr, freesync/gsync is perfect for when you are running an emulator with wild performance swings or at the limits of your hardware.
And, back in the day, you could do weird stuff with telling windows that your monitor had a different refresh rate to do this but it was far from pretty and prone to strange behavior.
The difference is that if the device comes with Steam OS, then it’s ready to go out of the box and you’re assured the hardware has good Linux support.
If it’s originally a Windows device then you may have to jump through additional hoops to get everything working. Also you’ll have to deal with allowing other OS’s in the BIOS if it’s locked.
Also you’ve paid Microsoft for a license you won’t use.
The flip side is that there’s work to make a native Steam OS build for 3rd party portable devices:
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