Valve Steam Deck
steamdeck.com
steamdeck.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846969&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846969&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846969&p=4
- 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.
Sounds like a scary arms-race, though. At some point the bots will probably be very hard to distinguish from "skilled human."
It will be sad if online play becomes only enjoyable with people you already know. I'm surprised how gleeful some people seem to be about this sort of "soon cheating will be undectable!" tech advancement.
Or you just go all-in on the surveillance path and there are models that look at your performance in the game over time, your performance in other games over time, etc. Mediocre player suddenly amazing? Probably a cheater! etc... Not great sounding privacy-wise, but Steam probably has access to the data to do this.
Or a GAN
They are using deep learning to detect hackers, since 2018
Only in the "do these movement patterns appear human-like or not" sense. These aim bots can use assistive devices to input mouse movements and there's no way to tell whether or not there's a human hand moving the mouse.
As far as performance improvements, oh it's going to make the cheat programmers even more money as they implement a skill ramp up period and get to charge more.
The only way in which I'm "gleeful" is that it might finally put an end to the spyware when we realize that controlling someone else's computer is a losing proposition. Otherwise yeah it does suck.
The YOLO stuff combined with softaim is going to be pretty hard to detect. The game can't tell if your video is going into the cheating device. Even if it can tell if there's a secondary input coming in for the trigger... people could just mod their mouse to take external input for the button. Someone pathetic enough to cheat absolutely would do this.
I honestly don't know how multiplayer will even work in a year's time or maybe even less!
It's easy, IMO: remove the incentives for cheating. If this is the only way forward, I might be more likely to actually participate in the industry, because it'll put the focus back on intrinsically-fun games, instead of treating games as merely a vehicle for chasing status/rankings/items/etc.
I stopped playing most modern games because they stopped being intrinsically fun. I'd like to enjoy them again.
The way to defeat cheating is giving users exaustive options to watch and monitor other players and report them effectively. Half the damn games dont even have this sorted out.
You have a report system that weights users honesty based on usefulness of previous reports - so people.who just report good players get downweighted and their reports count for less, then its just a statistics exercise. Combine this with easily identifiable data for things like headshot % to help highlight players for closer review.
You know, the Steam Deck might be good for that.
I bet at some point in the next 20 years we will all have much more important concerns than anything related to gaming.
For me this has always been the case. I've felt the same since the days of Kali. There's enough jagoffs running around in games to spoil playing with the normal people. To the jagoffs, they're playing the metagame of cheats/trolling and the game itself is incidental.
Random drivers are just too stupid/reckless.
Already long since passed that point for me quite a couple few years back.
Thankfully, it's not that hard to build up a little circle of gamer friends who are fun to play with these days. The messaging options alone currently available are many and featureful, making it dead easy to gather a little group and keep in contact with them to organize a game session any ol' time.
You're thinking of wallhacks or wallhacks+aimbot
Aimbots only aim at things you can see, it's one of their main features. That way you won't snap into someone's head through a wall which would make everyone know you're hacking and get you banned.
Also yes these were invented a long time ago because people got caught snapping through the wall when CS servers started recording demos.
Thanks to latency & the realities of the internet, the server has to bias towards sending data the client can't strictly see/hear at that exact moment, but potentially _could_ see if they move. Which is enough to give a wallhacker a meaningful advantage still.
But what you can't do anymore is see where all the enemies are going at the start of the round and run to the weaker part of the map or whatever. So reduced effectiveness, but still a thing.
BRB I'm gonna ask for VC funding (just joking)
I dunno … Mebbe you should run do that right now, before someone else does … Get that price down by around half and most every gamer everywhere can afford your shiny new "modern game genie"; Once everyone can cheat, the original cheaters have nowhere left to hide. They're on even footing with everyone else.
Cheater problem solved! ;)
The bigger issue, and I believe the primary reason for the rise in popularity of these bots, is when your performance does 'earn' you something. As the OP was speaking of TF2, this comes in the form of hats and custom weapons. Today's counterstrike game has weapon skins and knifes that go for pretty extreme real world dollars.
Almost every modern shooter has some sort of rank up system tied to rewards. Some of the worst examples would be PUBG's real world money trading of loot box items or Diablo 3's real world money auction house.
In my mind, these kind of systems turn video games meant for enjoyment into some weird NFT mining system where normal players are manually mining them with pen and paper while the bots have built ASIC devices.
In cases where the items themselves cannot be sold, you have people selling the whole accounts. There are entire middlemen businesses set up around this stuff. It's crazy but there is your primary driver for incentive.
They can buy players /cheat to farm, then sell the virtual goods over to those with USD; with healthy discount as profit for the other end. Thereby transfering their asset out of China.
I don't know about TF2, but for CSGO weapon skins & knives (and all drops) never come from gameplay wins. So there's no motivation at all to cheat for any monetary-related reason. Botting was a thing to farm for drops, but those literally just joined a server and spun in place to avoid being AFK kicked - that's it.
So CSGO cheating is purely about the human interaction components (eg, feeling good about winning, taking pleasure in making people angry, the thrill of getting away with it, etc...)
On the other hand, PUBG does have Battle Point rewards linked to performance. And there it is very common. Almost guaranteed to see a cheater every 10 matches or so. And there was an easy means to sell those rewards. Contrast that against Sea of Thieves. A game specifically about PvP and stealing loot from other players. I don't know that I have ever encountered a cheater there. But there is very little incentive to do so. There just isn't many vectors to turn virtual work into real world profit.
Seems to me that the lower the barrier of entry together with the higher the real world value of the rewards\drops gives you a clear scale of the cheat potential\incentive\effort. I think there will always be a small percentage of those doing it for the LULZ. You can combat that by raising the barrier to entry. F2P games seem to have a higher rate of these types.
When the reward system cultivates an environment ripe for abuse, it moves from occasionally annoying to game killing epidemic.
Though the FAQ says the following, so it might not be quite as bad as I feared:
> We recommend using user-space anti-cheat components for best results, as they can typically run in the Wine environment and provide the same level of functionality. Kernel-space solutions are not currently supported and are not recommended.
They should design their games such that the client is not trusted, and then the only possible cheats would be UI/AI assistants to the human players, which is not really cheating.
You can't make the client untrusted to the point of "I don't trust that the human really pushed the button" or you don't have a useful multiplayer mode anymore. Cheaters are truly ruining everything, here.
Like so many seemingly intractable moderation problems maybe this is why we shouldn't scale to infinity. YouTube is literally too big to moderate. Maybe this is a feature of humanity. What's wrong with more, smaller communities that have a dang to keep everyone in line? Other than the unfortunate lack of dangs in the world.
Back in my day CS servers were mostly privately run. If you were caught cheating you got banned. If you appeared to be cheating (you were too good) you also got banned. From the perspective of the players on the server those are the same thing. Communities formed on servers with similar skill levels and recognized players. Cheating in that kind of environment becomes extremely risky from a social perspective. You could piss off your actual friends.
There wasn't a need for rank-based matchmaking or anti-cheat or anything like that, you just eventually found a place you fit in and could have fun. Valve tried to replace that with algorithms but maybe they should "crowd source" so to speak, like we did 20 years ago.
This is all a lot of words to say that there is a "right size" for a community to form and enable everyone to have a good time. When you get to the point that "technology can't help us" I think that's an indicator that your community is too big.
They're doing that too.
Fortunately, most cheaters don't know how or are not trying that hard to hide, and are identified by pattern recognition. It's not that big a problem in practice. It's still universally considered cheating.
Gamestreaming (Stadia etc) shows that this absolutely is possible. It might not be feasible due to players on bad connections and hardware cost (in fact, the reason that games do so few checks serverside is hardware cost), but it's not something impossible anymore.
> I can't even think of a way that things like aimbots could be prevented server-side; it's hard enough just to detect them.
Pattern detection can, things like following enemy movements through walls or extreme precision. I agree that it's easier to check for running software on the client, but this is error prone as well and can also be defeated by a sophisticated enough hacker.
That's a fair point, and maybe we're closer than I think, but I don't think that fully-streamed games demonstrate that we're there yet. At the risk of sounding too elitist, those games aren't "hardcore". The things that streamed game players expect and will put up with are a far cry from the things that hardcore gamers expect.
A serious Counter-Strike player wants things to operate as close to the limits of human reaction time as possible. People can typically react (as in press a button) in response to visual stimuli in something like 150ms, and to audio stimuli in something like 50ms (I don't have good links for these, so don't hold me to the numbers; there are studies out there).
While this may seem like it's slow enough that processing and network delays don't matter too much, when you add those in, you're well into the territory of perceptable delays. Advanced/pro gamers (especially younger ones) are even faster. I don't know that it's possible for fully server-side systems to compensate for this. Anecdotally, I can't tell the difference between 20ms and 70ms latency while gaming (at least not now that I'm old), but I can tell the difference between 20ms and 120ms. If everything had to happen server side, I think it'd be noticeable.
I fully agree with you that game streaming platforms, as of now, are not usable for pro FPS players (or any players where tens of ms of latency are important). You're not elitist, that is the truth of it :-) But, if a developer would really want to, there would be options:
1. You could go for datacenters in all major cities. With this, you could probably get <10ms roundtrips for a lot of people. It would still be bad compared to local, but if you control the stack, you could easily get those ms back on other fronts. Bad keyboards and mice, for example, might add a lot of latency. Same for USB hubs and non-gaming monitors. If you supply your own optimized hardware you can easily save quite a few ms compared to a "normal" setup to counter out the network latency.
2. Stadia is the concept driven to its maximum - the client is just a video player, everything is done server-side. For cheat safety, this is actually not necessary - by just sending render instructions (i.e. which object is where), you can let the client do the actual rendering, with only culling being done server side. This would not only reduce the server hardware requirements, but also drastically reduce the required bandwidth (especially at 4K) and latency (since you can skip video en-/decoding and a bit of compression). If cheat safety is the only goal (instead of not requiring hardware, which game streaming optimizes for) this would probably be a superior solution.
Stadia (and NVidia Now and the other ones) prove that the technology is close enough that this would be doable, even though they themself optimize towards other things. However, the reality of it is that this would cost an insane amount of money and still not catch everyone [0]. Cheaters do cost games something, but as long as there are reasonably few (and they're kept out of tournaments), it's fine with developers. This is far cheaper to do with client side anti-cheat right now. So you are probably even right with the prediction that we won't see this for a long time - it's just not for a technological reason.
[0] You could do [Game Console of Choice] -> HDCP Stripper -> Cheat-PC w/ HDMI capture card -> Faked gaming mouse/keyboard via USB host -> [Game Console]. This setup works with everything available on the market right now and is virtually undetectable on the client and the server, at least without analyzing user behavior.
Aimhacking is still fully possible on Stadia. You have the problem here of even if the client only has visibility into what they strictly should, machine reaction time & precision is vastly superior to humans. So aimhacks will always be viable, regardless of how little the client is trusted.
That's why I specifically quoted the part about the server being able to specify what is rendered client-side - this part is possible via game streaming.
> So aimhacks will always be viable, regardless of how little the client is trusted.
Fully agreed. In the end, the platform can only do pattern detection, but this is really, really hard to do. LAN tournaments where the hardware is fully controlled is really the only option where one can be reasonably sure that no cheating is going on, but it has happened even in these circumstances.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8apCPN56PU
https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech/blob/master/readme.md#har...
Modern cheats essentially can give a player inhuman reflexes. "See, aim, shoot" all mechanized, or even "see, dodge, aim, shoot". Some of them even use sound to locate other players, so it's "hear, dodge, turn, see, aim, shoot".
The cost of of infrastructure to reliably detect that on the server across thousands of players is a lot more than running some cheap process on the user's machine to look for other strange things going on (why does the user have two mice and only uses one to shoot?).
Valve is already using machine learning to analyze player mouse movements across all games to look for "inhuman" patterns and send those directly to the community-staffed manual review process called overwatch.
> I find it really difficult to see the value proposition for anti-cheat companies in spending time developing that functionality.
Let's say 1% of the population cheats. Maybe that's high (or low, but I could easily see 1% of the real world population having less than stellar morals w.r.t. cheating). So you play an online game with 20 people in it. That means on average one out of every 5 games there is a cheater in it.
That ruins the experience for you (and everyone in it). Not to mention now because there are so many legit cheaters, people start mistaking really talented players of cheating. Accusing them, starting back and forth arguments online which worsens the experience even if they're not cheating. This adds to the frequency of assumed cheating. Then one of those 20 people decides the way they'll fix it is they'll download a cheat a next time someone on the other team cheats then they'll start cheating too. And so they do, but sometimes they do it when someone is actually just good an not cheating and so they worsen the game.
Overall if you're a company, trying to run an online game you need a positive environment where people will want to return to play. Cheaters very quickly ruin the trust in a game, and that leads to real financial impact.
Specfiically, at about 7:50 into this, he talks about the propensity of encountering cheaters in CS:GO. The tl;dr is that in a 5v5 multiplayer game the percentage of cheaters required to ruin 9 other players' games at once is not high. It only takes 7% of people to cheater to encounter 1 every 2nd game, and a 2% cheating rate gets you a 20% cheater-encounter rate.
I'd also touch on the point that cheating ruins an online-only game. Like, it is the #1 way a game falls apart.
Take a look at a game like Escape from Tarkov, where a cheater will ruin a good block of time for a lot of people just by existing in one game. It's especially bad in that game because the distinction between 'being caught by someone in a position you didn't check' and 'being killed by a cheater' is so unclear, and the consequences of losing are so high (and thus losing to a cheater is so much worse). It creates an environment where the players have to be absolutely 100% confident cheating doesn't exist, or it will very quickly sour people to the game.
If this wasn't the case, and the server wouldn't send player positions until they were actually visible, players would pop out of thin air when turning corners or crossing doorways.
This leads to a different kind of disadvantage called "peeker's advantage", where the peeking player shows up later at the peeked player's screen... but this is generally accepted as a tradeoff. Players like their object persistence apparently :)
Latency isn't getting any better soon, and there will always be an impassable limit on link latency due to distance.
>Cheaters use wallhacks to see opponents through walls. In a tactical shooter like VALORANT, this gives them huge advantages when it comes to individual combat encounters as well as strategic decisions for the round as a whole. Wallhacks are especially insidious because they give an advantage that isn’t always obvious - your enemies could be using wallhacks... or maybe they’ve just figured out that you rush B every round. We really wanted to prevent that sense of doubt which lingers with players, poisoning their experiences long after the match.
>At the beginning of development, when we were talking about security goals for the project, the two things that came up over and over again were wallhacks and aimbots.
>League’s Fog of War system works because the game server withholds information about the positions of enemies until a client needs to display it. I knew if I could implement something like this for VALORANT we could solve the problem of wallhacks because there would be nothing for the wallhack to see. If an opponent was behind a wall, we wouldn’t send their location to enemy players, keeping them hidden until they decided to peek the angle. If we could pull it off, this seemed like the ideal solution - but we had no idea whether this would be feasible in Unreal Engine.
E.g. rocket league or online chess. No need to hide anything. Can't have wallhacks if there are no walls.
Also some types of cheats such as wall hacks can only be detected client side.
The internet is filled with stories about locked accounts, lost libraries, games being pulled out of the library due to 'low quality of gameplay' while people are actively playing them on Steam, DLC and in-game currency sold that can never be redeemed or used in the game it's bought for (see: 'Wizardry Online' debacle, Steam/Valve continued selling in-game currency far beyond the point that it was being discussed to remove the game from the library all together.. then removed access from the game for Steam users after making a tidy profit. This was a current/active/new game with a bad launch, not an old title.)
So just to re-state: Valve never won my trust with their behavior with Steam and associated acts. There is just no one else; let's call this phenomenon 'Walmart Syndrome', perhaps?
Bypassing Steamworks basic DRM is easy. Other DRMs obviously require special workarounds.
GOG (and CDPR) on the other hand can't even be bothered to port their own client and games.
Also, GOG is not 100% DRM-free anymore, even if they want to advertise themselves that way. [0]
[0] https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singlep...
I'm not happy about these features requiring an internet connection, but they seem pretty minor. The alternative would probably have been that those features were left out of the GOG versions completely.
> GOG (and CDPR) on the other hand can't even be bothered to port their own client and games.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure GOG has a hell of a lot less money than Valve. They don't benefit from any of the gambling-mechanics or multiplayer game "bling" sales that bring in so much of Valve's money, aside from having a much smaller share of PC game sales than Valve does. Valve's got to be way more profitable plus have much higher income, so have the margin to play with stuff like this—which is in their interest, because the weaker alternative operating systems are, the more Valve operates only at the pleasure of Microsoft.
Luckily Lutris allows me to somehow compensate for GOG's lack of interest in Linux, but still, I feel they really do not care about the DRM thing.
https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader
I only have 12Mbps DSL and an offline game system that I use a FAT formatted microSD card to transfer to so I appreciate the split files, even though it does get annoying with the huge games.
I agree that GOG's Linux support is minimal; often they don't even provide Linux versions that are available on other stores :(.
Two of the isses on the list account42 links to are more serious, although most are fairly minor (there are also a few issues not on the list). Not to excuse those exceptions, however I don't know of any other store that is anywhere close. I have no inside info but my my suspicion is that many CD Projekt investors resent the DRM-free aspect of GOG and would like it to change, while the people running GOG realize it is the major unique aspect of GOG and trying to change it could sink the business. OTOH, I suspect the CD Projekt investors mostly see GOG as a way to get a better deal from Steam for CDPR games. Hard to say what will happen in the future.
https://sharkwouter.github.io/minigalaxy/
It deals with both downloading and installing as well as integrating Wine.
This is also how we used to install and play games on Windows, before the Steam era.
Why do I need Galaxy?
Itch.io has a Linux client, by the way.
I disagree that they "should" have a Linux client, for the reasons I explained. I don't have a use for such a client, and as such, I'm happy to ignore it (and love that it isn't mandatory, unlike Steam).
I've never received support from Steam for any technical issue. I'm resourceful and if there's a way, I'll make it work; but almost every help I needed with Steam games was taken from user's forums, within and outside Steam.
Case in point: I learned browsing Steam's forums that the Linux version of The Eternal Castle is glitchy and in many cases the keyboard input doesn't work at all; one user helpfully suggested just using the Windows version using Wine or Proton; this suggestion worked.
> Itch.io has a Linux client, by the way
Good for them! I hope it's optional, since I've no use for it.
What I love about Humble Bundle and GOG is that their games (mostly) don't try to take over your games collection, unlike Steam. I do use Steam and support Valve, but I'd prefer Steam was optional.
I mean, all they had to do is let users disable automatic updates and keep running the old version of the client "without any guarantees" -- if the Steam APIs end up changing enough that I can't log in anymore, well, so be it. But to permanently lock users out simply because of a forced update… seriously uncool.
Now that the store had that facelift the only issue I am aware of is the honestly pretty lacklustre curation... Which is an extremely hard issue so pretty forgiveable
But hey, you can instead distribute with Epic, a storefront so advanced it doesn't even have a shopping cart.
[0] not to mention community forum, reviews, and art gallery.
I understand the sentiment though.
Which is kind of odd, since the Unreal Marketplace in the same launcher does have a shopping cart.
There is no good justification for this restriction and it makes that whole feature sound more like a PR move than something that was really released to help the consumer.
Good to know, then devs can sell their games somewhere else? Oh, I guess they don't. Nevermind.
The Steam Machines were also equally open, and the (otherwise streaming-focused) Steam Link supported sideloading.
btw to this day it still receives updates!
But, what were people sideloading on it? any alternative usage that might be interesting to explore?
Rather the opposite. I think it ended up as part of several compute clusters because the console was sold for less than it cost to produce, something normally offset by game sales. So suddenly Sony had a large market that only cost it money.
I'm sure internally it was pitched as a neat idea why don't we see what happens (god can you imagine the corporate politics in a decision like that?), but practically it allowed Sony get get special import status.
I'm sure eventually they realized they didn't care about that enough it outweigh allowing those filthy users to possibly do something interesting.
Sony throws a lot of stuff at the wall. There was a good chunk of hardware cut out of later PS3s, not to mention continued attempts and silent canceling of things like those move lightguns, etc.
[0]: https://www.wpafb.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/399987...
Wasn't more an issue that games didn't specifically optimize for cell processors? They had to run on dozens of platforms and the Cell processor was the odd one out.
> to get useful compute out of it during the length of time that option was arounnd.
There were at least three largish cluster setups, the biggest being a super computer with almost 2000 PS3s. Of course you are right, that is barely a blip on their sales.
That’s what being exotic hardware means.
The major use case for these was for number crunching (training neural nets, running physics simulations, etc). And these things were something crazy, like 100x faster than a similarly priced PC server. There were plenty of libraries out there for doing linear algebra.
A quick google search suggests that this was extraordinarily common in academia. I found materials from lots of different universities that were close to what I remember my peers talking about.
This was also a little bit before CUDA hit. So there really wasn't a mainstream offering for doing massively parallel, SIMD calculations.
Edit: I went to Wright State Uni and most of my CS professors did research associated with the Air Force, which as forgotpwd16 notes, had at the time a super computer made from PS3s. This might explain why the PS3 was so popular among our department.
I think it's an urban legend fueled by marketing, I've never seen any hard proof of that, except some BOM calculations from independant analyse, but I don't think mass production work that way.
You can’t run physics simulations on single precision. So the people who would have bought and tinkered and pushed it forwards were all turned off by it.
The military was allowed double precision; but there was no point making it a compute cluster otherwise.
I don’t know if it was a marketing or budget decision but basically all the early adopters who would have championed doing impressive things on there (I was so hyped at the time for the cell architecture) couldn’t do anything useful with it.
I recall I was very excited at the prospect of getting my hands on a ps3 for modelling, but all my work (1) at least required double precision and it left a long bad taste in my mouth when it wasn’t to be.
(1)chaotic plasmas
https://www.theregister.com/2010/01/25/playstation_cracked_w...
https://tedium.co/2020/11/27/sony-linux-otheros-geohot-histo...
It's arguable giving hackers a platform to explore the innards of the PS3 was the biggest contribution Other OS made to the PS3, and I'm not surprised it scared Sony management. In the release notes for the PS3 firmware update that removes "Other OS", Sony also state it was for "security concerns":
https://blog.playstation.com/2010/03/28/ps3-firmware-v3-21-u...
"...will disable the “Install Other OS” feature that was available on the PS3 systems prior to the current slimmer models, launched in September 2009. This feature enabled users to install an operating system, but due to security concerns, Sony Computer Entertainment will remove the functionality through the 3.21 system software update."
The "security concerns" were of course geohot/others using it to crack the PS3 DRM.
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 be doing anything with the OS itself.
Accordingly, the underlying distro just doesn’t seem that interesting. What about the distro could possibly be surfaced to the end user/gamer that they would care about?
It’s not like Steam will apt dist-upgrade their device: upgrades will be a complete reimage.
Ubuntu is good as a stable platform, but it's probably too slow moving.
If you upgrade often and you break stuff people will scream at you, so you need extensive testing of 3rd party games before you release an update of your os, which will naturally limit you anyway.
Since it's based on arch, I assume they will pull the latest software from arch, test it, and push out updates as they are verified.
With PC games, at least in my humble experience, you pretty much always need the latest drivers to run things well (especially so on Linux). With AAA games you will likely need to download several different driver updates within the first month to make it play reasonably well.
My understanding of Arch, is that it's more focused on providing systems which are more up-to-date/current than strictly "stable." [1] This is a pretty big advantage for Valve/Steam/Gamers since its less likely they'll be stuck having to back-port a sea of changes to a dying, but stable, LTS version. Instead they'll be on a platform with a community that prioritizes it. In all honesty, it'll probably make for a more reliable/stable gaming experience since patches will be easier/quicker to ship.
[1] Just to note, I'm not saying Arch is unstable in case someone reads it as that. I honestly was thinking of giving it a go this weekend (currently on a Debian based system), and this is probably the kick I needed to do it.
Steam (via Proton, mostly) already does a lot of development work, and it doesn't care which distro it's on. "Oh no, I updated my kernel and now my graphics drivers don't load at all!" is incredibly common, even with DKMS. Sometimes (mostly) bugs get fixed in Mesa or whatever. Often, new subtle bugs are introduced when a new Wayland/Pipewire/whatever feature goes GA. Having as few moving pieces as possible (by using an LTS distro, or at least something which isn't rolling with upstream and has a modicum of QA) lets you optimize the pieces you need to without worrying that this or that API is going to change underneath you.
Intel and AMD drivers do not have this issue, and Valve was smart enough to not go with NVIDIA, but "I want to be up to date" is a terrible experience.
Additionally, it generally makes for a much less reliable/stable experience (gaming or otherwise) because `pacman -Syu` may at any point break something because you didn't read the release notes, or "mostly" stable features were committed upstream then released so the userbase can put them through their paces and report bugs the developers didn't encounter.
Users of Arch/Fedora Rawhide/whatever accept this, but someone who buys an OEM gaming machine does not need or want this.
Just to note, I AM saying that Arch is unstable. I've been using Linux for 20 years, and I've had my time with Gentoo and Arch. 99% of the tinkering users do is reproducing the work of professional developers at distro vendors who spend a lot of time and effort making sure you never encounter the problems Arch users revel in fixing at all. Sure, you can tell yourself that means you "know" more about the system. But that is time invested that you could have spent doing REAL THINGS, and solving REAL PROBLEMS which are not un-breaking your distro.
> Sure, you can tell yourself that means you "know" more about the system. But that is time invested that you could have spent doing REAL THINGS, and solving REAL PROBLEMS which are not un-breaking your distro.
You can start a sysadmin career with that kind of experience.
Not necessarily on Arch specifically, mind you, but a ton of the experience I had that led to me getting my first tech job was breaking stuff and then figuring out how I broke it. It's a great learning experience.
Historically, sure, but with the leaps and bounds Intel and AMD graphics drivers have made (in no small part thanks to Valve!), we can leave Nvidia in the dust. With said FOSS drivers, "I want to be up to date" is a perfectly reasonable desire and does indeed get the best results as far as gaming goes.
That said, I agree that Arch wouldn't be my first choice for something I'd expect non-technical users to maintain. If Valve really wants a rolling release and close-to-cutting-edge kernel/driver versions, distros like openSUSE Tumbleweed could readily do that (with, at worst, an extra repo for bleeding-edge kernels, though I've yet to find that necessary on my openSUSE-running gaming laptop) without anything even vaguely resembling Arch's maintainability nightmare.
For the uninitiated; In programming, "stable" often refers to the programming interface or features a software developer can count on being available for a particular version of a given piece of code (library, server, etc). To the end user, "stable" often is taken to mean "How often does it crash? Rarely or never? It's stable."
First, it's worth keeping in mind that this Steam Deck is for all purposes and intents a fixed-spec system. Valve will control all of the most major components that make various end-user support problems appear (fixed CPU, GPU, RAM, motherboard, controllers, storage, etc.)
Now, with that in mind, if you use a system that has a release cadence like Ubuntu, if you want to fix issues, you must report them upstream and backport them into your current system. This is workable, but it is implicitly predicated on the assumption that the backport is the only way to deliver the fix to users in a reasonable timeframe. Otherwise you would have to wait 6 months for Ubuntu to release anything.
If you use a rolling system like Arch that is much closer to the very latest versions, the same process above occurs. But the window for those changes to appear downstream (from reporting the issue to the person receiving the fix) is much smaller. If this window becomes small enough, say "I report an issue and a patch is issued and released in 48 hours", it often means you don't have to backport or maintain the backport for long. If you're maintaining less backports concurrently, or even none at all, that means you have less workload and can focus on diagnosing real issues with up to date code.
Finally, and this is the important part: it doesn't matter for who they want to buy this. I don't think Valve intends this to be seen as a console, but as a portable PC, and I don't think PC gamers who use Steam (and thus are the target market) are unexperienced with the fact games might not work and bugs need to be reported. It's part of PC gaming culture at this point to complain about bugs in PC games. They actually will probably want one anyway because it will make their massive investment in their Steam library all the more available. And if you're some die-hard guy who likes this thing because it's Linux, well, Proton is basically as good as it's ever going to get at this rate, and it's objectively made Linux gaming massively more available, so, you just gotta deal. (Proton's very existence gives developers less of a reason to deal with native Linux ports when they can just target Windows and let the magical translation layer fix it instead. So actually the focus will be going into making Proton better instead to fix these issues, and that is actually probably the best way forward to ensure older games can be available, too.)
There are a thousand confounding variables in this equation and I'm sure you can line up to list them or whatnot. But the important thing here is that in all cases there are social expectations about how the maintainers of each upstream project and distro fix issues, and on what timescale, and how users respond to them. That's why they think this will work.
As far as why Arch, I think it’s a great “build your Linux OS” distribution that gives you a solid foundation to expand into the bespoke system of your dreams. On my desktop, I have a personalized computing experience using Wayland + Sway, PipeWire and only the software I use. That same DIY principle makes Arch a compelling option for anyone looking to build their own distro; Manjaro is one such example and it’s the distro I used before making the full dive into Arch.
You should be able to accomplish the same thing by using your own pacman repos with compiled binaries that have the right USE flags. They all have the same hardware after all.
Anyway, from my own experience, the video decoding performance of gentoo-on-rpi-64bit was somehow nowhere close to LibreELEC, on the same hardware. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learnt there...
As for the games themselves, Valve's been workin' hard on their Steam Linux Runtime containerized game thingy, and Proton sorta "containerizes" (WINE prefixes) things, so that allows for a reasonably stable environment for any given game which already runs well in those scenarios.
TL;DR: I doubt Valve will have too many problems keepin' this thing fairly stable from an end-user point of view unless you start hackin' around on it changing too much, then it's all on you what happens next. ;)
What makes you think so? The desktop environment will be powered by KDE Plasma.
>Accordingly, the underlying distro just doesn’t seem that interesting.
Valve is pretty clear that in addition to having a gaming mode they want the device to be a full-fledged (linux-based) PC.. hopefully with everything that entails.
>What about the distro could possibly be surfaced to the end user/gamer that they would care about?
Maybe nothing in "gaming mode," but in "desktop mode", it's Arch running KDE Plasma. It's essentially a Linux-based PC with a gaming option. (Or vice-versa, depending on your primary use case and point-of-view.)
Given the fact that the desktop mode exists and is leaned on as an important feature, I'd assume a lot of underlying functionality will be exposed.
>It’s not like Steam will apt dist-upgrade their device: upgrades will be a complete reimage.
I too am interested to see how they will handle this, but based on their website copy I would not be surprised if you could at least apt-get upgrade the desktop portion, with the gaming mode running either on top or separate from it.
So yeah, not exactly an exciting story, more like a practical solution.
So, what is SteamOS?
SteamOS is a public release of our Linux-based operating system. The base system draws from Debian 8, code named Debian Jessie. Our work builds on top of the solid Debian core and optimizes it for a living room experience. Most of all, it is an open Linux platform that leaves you in full control. You can take charge of your system and install new software or content as you want.
I hardly ever even play video games these days, but I'm absolutely buying one of these just to have a nice little portable PC.
Thats what I always think when considering a new Switch game as well. They're so incredibly expensive, Breath of the wild is still 50€ although it was released 4 years ago.
Having a handheld device with all my Steam titles playable is huge!
Speaking of: I wonder if it'll work with a Switch dock? Probably would require some physical modification of the dock itself, but it'd still be neat if they're interchangeable and I can stick either one into any dock.
> Desktop: KDE Plasma
this is probably this most exciting thing about this release. How many days until this thing is running k3s and/or serving up a prometheus dashboard on the same device that is touch capable?
1280 x 800 at up to 30 fps.
[×] Use settings and textures specially optimized for this device?
Sales = f(game quality)
game quality = g(sales)
That's why if I were valve I would set about throwing money at some medium-appropriate game dev up front in addition to discounting the hardware.
OTOH I just learned the switch's battery life was not as good as I thought; it's no M1 idling. So that helps.
There's no way for valve to discount the deck, which uses a cutting edge SoC cut from the same cloth as the PS5, at anywhere near that price point.
Flagship hardware has flagship prices. If valve would have built a cheap but underpowered device to reach the price point of the switch nobody would have been interested. Gamers are into the deck because of its cutting edge specs.
The traditional business view is the casual gamers are growing, and the elite PC gamers are stagnant. Valve is trying to wreck that dichotomy with hardware like this, but I think that goes with making sure there are games that fit the form factor. You can't just sell this to people who rather play on their main gaming rig but are sometimes stuck without this.
Making games for this form factor != a retreat from the principle of general purpose computing.
The only place where I've seen 30 fps being mentioned was when they said that you can switch Portal 2 into 30 fps mode to get longer battery life (which is a Portal 2 feature available on PCs from the very beginning).
IGN clarified 2 tflops "in the ballpark of xbox one or ps4".
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 standard.
Based on this trajectory I expect they'll be migrating to NixOS (or maybe Nix on Arch) in about 5-10 years.
Still, I think Arch is an interesting choice for a console. I'd think you'd want stability (in the sense of very controlled changes / not requiring updates every day).
I have been using Archlinux for more than 10 years and from time to time some major upgrades can make things broken for a couple days until all the packages get updated and all the relevant compatibility fixes have been pushed upstream by the developers. But in most cases this happens with some 3rd party desktop related packages or closed source drivers. I bet that Valve won't have that many problems with AMD since their drivers are open source.
Or just use packages and make regular snapshots.
I bet that the underlying distribution doesn't matter much at all, and since this console is meant to also be a desktop (or living room) PC, might as well ship with a distribution that's good for that purpose. Arch makes more sense for desktops than Ubuntu, and has for a while tbh.
Only recommend using them for subsequent installations. You have to get the basics right first, so you can troubleshoot anything in the arch forums
It is very, very promising. It spits a JSON that can be used for reproducible installs. It is also very flexible in which you can use the API with custom python install scripts. Very impressive and ergonomic.
It's more than an installer. Manjaro and Arch don't even share repositories.
Manjaro Live OS can't be used to install vanilla Arch. Manjaro uses its own package repositories that differ significantly from the Arch repos, in terms of versions (which are held back for at least a couple of weeks) and in terms of which packages are available (quite a few AUR packages are present in the Manjaro's repositories).
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 stability, you just walk back to a previous version! Alas, i've had NixOS hose _all_ of my previous versions because of X server issues. Not only that, but the community of NixOS is hostile to getting shit done, if its not the NixOS way please stay away,
I'm honestly not quite sure what you're talking about. I've been using Arch as my daily driver for maybe 5 or 6 years, and I don't recall ever having my installation messed up from an update. Arch is fair bit along the spectrum of being a "build your own system from the ground up" type of deal though (although not quite as far along as something like Gentoo), so I don't doubt your experience, given how much two Arch installations can differ.
But one of those was a big compatibility breaking one that I hadn't done the prep for (because I'd missed the whole lead up for various reasons and was months late on the update anyway) and I still can't really explain the other.
Compared to Debian which I managed to break many times in the same time frame...
How did you exactly break Debian multiple times?
I've read about people doing crazy stuff, like replacing the default compiler entirely (rather than setting an alternative one) or forcing apt to install incompatible packages... and then complaining that the distribution is not stable.
Non-rolling distros are very very conservative with package upgrades, and they don't "just break", as little changes over a given version.
Alas, I can't remember exactly what happened but it was the late 1990s/early 2000s - no crazy stuff involved, just things getting confused / crashing whilst doing updates and leaving things half-arsed and broken.
Yes, Arch requires you manage and maintain your system, it's not a "just works" thing, but that's a few minutes of work here and there, it mostly just chugs along.
As to hosing your install, I've never had even the threat of that. Yes, you should check the news before doing upgrades to make sure there isn't something that requires your attention, but it's not exactly a big deal to check an RSS feed before you run an update command.
I'd love to hear more detail about this, because `nixos-rebuild switch` is not capable of causing such a problem in a permanent way.
(It can arise temporarily, though, if you switch to a new configuration without rebooting, and that configuration requires a different kernel than you are currently running. Rebooting and choosing your old configuration at the bootloader menu fixes this.)
However, I stopped using arch mainly because I was working with ROS at the time, where every boost upgrade triggered half-a-day recompilation of ROS and it's various plugins.
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.
I also have a Pi2 running Arch ARM at my mom's house, doing one or two updates per year when I visit her, also failed only once, and that's because of a corrupted SD card.
I'd admit I'm usually a bit nervous typing pacman -Syu on those two, but it's doing surprisingly great.
I'm not sure how ready Valve would be to require not only their own game distribution mechamisms but a whole package manager, but Nix + NixGL would be a very reliable and low-overhead way to get cross-platform support and to make it easy for games that might depend on extra libraries or specific versions of them.
What are you precisely referring to with "packages drift from each other"? Stable distros like Ubuntu (and I suppose Debian) don't do release updates at all, only critical/security fixes only. Only some software has special treatment (browsers first of all) and get full updates.
....what. That is not how OS stability works.
Also, Arch is nearly impossible to use in production environments.
Let's say there is a vulnerability discovered in the version of lighttpd you're running in your production environment. On Debian, you pull that package, do some testing, and you're done.
On Arch? It's a rolling release distro. They're continuously updating everything, including system libraries. You can easily end up in a situation where getting a security bugfix means you have to update nearly the entire OS thanks to it being built against updated core system libraries.
Like Gentoo it's one of those OSs that is cool for linux nerds and a headache for people who actually need to practice proper systems engineering.
People have used Arch in prod. But personally I'll still use Debian to be on the safe side despite all of the issues that comes with.
[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Partial_...
But sure, just yoloing a single package upgrade can break things, obviously.
Seen it done and participated.
I've also known a couple shops that run Gentoo as their distribution. Usually a central binary package host / build machine which makes it very easy to have a set of staging hosts. Just test package releases like normal before migrating them to prod.
Its a falsehood pushed by old 80's thinking. It sounds nice, in theory.
In practice, what you often get are bugfix patches blindly applied to older codebases, oftentimes by people (distro maintainers) who are not very familiar with the codebase. As long as the patch applies, and it passes various tests.
Remember, most OSS projects - including some critical ones - do not have large teams of devs able to maintain multiple codelines in tandem. Usually, the dev(s) just work on the latest, and pay only cursory attention to applying security bugfixes to older versions.
After all, how is an OSS dev for proj X meant to know (or even give a damn for) which distro arbitrarily decided which older version is somehow the SECURE and BLESSED one.
The dev in question probably moved on from that version months (and in regard to Debian, probably YEARS) ago.
So in theory, what you said sounds right. In practice, no.
Fear not. As GKE is running on Container-Optimized OS which is based on Chromium OS which itself is based on Gentoo, you can safely practice proper systems engineering within the container environment :)
I would call that stagnant rather than stable. If a version of software remains the same with the same bugs/issues not getting resolved, that seems unstable to me. Yes, not crashing could also be considered stable as well.
In Stable (what you call Stagnant) vulns get backported. Only the code fixing the vulnerability gets updated, the rest is left untouched. Its how Apple deals with older iOS versions, and it keeps their happy users of older devices happy.
If I run some old piece of hardware/software, there are a few things I want: I want it to keep functioning the way I bought it, and I want it to remain secure and reliable. So what I want is security and reliability fixes ie. what Debian Stable (and e.g. Ubuntu LTS) receives.
This isn’t always possible. And sometimes creates more problems than it solves or ends up not mitigating the issue completely.
In any case, backporting is a slower process. And back ports for non-stable are not done by the security team but volunteers.
NixOS is more sane because it has roll backs, and declarative configuration is like a gigantic black hole eating everything which was known before it.
I've had the same problem on Arch Linux on my desktop. To be fair, I was using AUR, but without that there's far less software (less than Ubuntu I suppose). So what I did was trying out Arch Linux on a separate NVMe during some free time, learning some specific tools (it also has NixOS installed on another partition for the same purpose). I come back after a while, want to update my OS first because that is the first thing I do when I use any computer. What ya know? Boom, dependency issues. I really do not want to deal with that before I can use a tool. And every time I bring this up I get these replies "I never have issues with Arch". Sure thing, I must be special.
Look, I ran Debian Testing and Unstable for a while before Arch was cool (1999 - 2003 era). That way I could run Linux with tools such as a decent package manager, while running recent software. But this was a different time, and not mission critical computers.
I would recommend following the wiki and installing Arch Linux (I know, no UI) over Manjaro to have a true Arch experience.
That said, AUR is the reason I use arch linux, because there are scripts to install pretty much anything in a frictionless way.
When installing esoteric stuff the dpkg / apt repositories dance gets old pretty quickly on debian derivates. Often I would just install things on the system instead of creating my own deb. On Arch Linux I can often find a package in AUR (or quickly write a PKGBUILD).
Upgrading the system every few months and breaking a lot of things all at once (making a reinstall the easiest option) is also not very appealing in my book. I prefer the rolling release model which gives me the latest update immediately and let me fix things once at a time.
That said, anyone has its own preferences, no need to bad mouth distros.
Thanks for playing games on NixOS!
https://nix.dev/tutorials/cross-compilation#cross-compilatio... for an approachable introduction.
Currently we just support Unix -> Windows via MinGW. That's not good enough for AAA games.
But in the works is:
- https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/72366 Windows cross via LLVM and auto-downloaded MSVC runtime (you do need to indicate you signed the license, but that's it). I've heard of running cl.exe in Wine, and we could do that too
- https://github.com/nix-windows/nix Windows port of Nix
We finish these things up, and then we have the flawless Unix <-> Windows I advertised.
However, https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/3160 to switch to Meson, has gotten new life breathed into it. Pamplemousse, who is interning where Edolstra works, is fuzzing Nix and needs Meson to make that less burdensome.
If that does get merged, than nix-windows can just be about Windows and not also be about Nix's build system, which will make it a lot easier to finish.
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 full during the upgrade.
And at the very least, pretty sure they're not going to use actual Arch system repos but roll their own.
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. :)
For the system data, which could be immutable, they could either take an A/B approach with two different partitions, or perhaps use either btrfs or ZFS to allow the new version to be applied over the old version as a 'diff' of the system partition. On a failed update, or to rollback for any other reason the system partition would simply be rolled back to the last snapshot.
Canonical doesn't have any reason to be friendly towards the specific features Valve needs to make SteamOS a thing, and Valve probably doesn't want to maintain their own fork of the entire Ubuntu distro.
Not to mention, a default install of Arch is tiny and minimalist. It's the perfect base to apply your own packages on top of without having to worry too much about conflicts with system packages, or anything else that might break between Ubuntu LTS version updates.
It means Valve can mostly have their own custom distro without having to do most of the work required to maintain a custom distro.
It also means Valve can deploy the latest package of something that boosts gaming performance (like some new graphics driver or whatever), again, without jeopardizing the core os. Arch is well known for being "bleeding edge" and getting the latest packages out immediately which is something gamers (the target audience for SteamOS) want (every single extra FPS matters, etc).
SteamOS was based on Debian directly, not Ubuntu. Ubuntu is just what they officially support for the desktop Steam client.
I wonder if they considered alpine? Though arch is a fine choice and makes me want one all the more!
Funny you say that! Arch images now ship with an official installer as of a couple of months ago - which is comparable to the Ubuntu or Fedora installers in ease-of-use.
However I do welcome an installer, it's fun to install Arch a couple of times, but after that I'm not really learning anything new.
- Able to connect to WiFi from within the installer.
- Full-disk encryption setup, ideally with a single checkbox like Ubuntu.
- Interactive partitioning.
- Auto-detects or allows choosing between BIOS/UEFI.
- Supports creating a NetworkManager-based network setup, so that I don't have to switch network managers after installation.
Thus your expression "an absolute wall" would mean that you immediately grasp everything there is to know.
But since the meaning since has unintentionally shifted and the original meaning is universally ignored, we all understand you.
I'm surprised, I found it very easy to get into Arch linux. But I came from distributions like Slackware & Gentoo where it was common to do the installation almost entirely from commands in the terminal.
IMO distributions that keep the installation primarily command-line focused are a good way for beginners to get started, it gives them a real grasp of how linux works, and how to change things to suit.
1/ You can search for stuff on the internet and get quick results (not a video) 2/ You can _paste_ a command and send it to someone to run it instead of a word document with instructions and screenshots. 3/ Once you learn to find and search for stuff in files, it is easy to discover where stuff is configured. 4/ Manual pages are great once you know how to read (I mean skim) them.
Not really, unless you did everything with a GUI in other distros before and refused to learn anything about the underlying guts of the OS.
Does this mean all steam users will get this now that they have hardware to get support of? IMO this would be huge
> Arch Linux
> KDE Plasma
> Will be able to install whatever they like
Is that you smartphone? The one I've been waiting for?
I'm sure there will be keyboard cases for the steam deck, We still might have to carry round a GSM radio module if we want that LTE/call/SMS.
I'm anxious to see how this turns out. Valve's history with hardware is not so great, so it could go nowhere like Steam Machines, Steam Link, and the Steam Controller did. On the other hand, it could end up all but killing off PC gaming if it is super successful. If it lands somewhere in the middle it will at least be yet another boon for Linux gaming brought to you by Valve as more developers will port or ensure compatibility with Proton.
I think users care more about being able to play their games on any hardware platform they own than about which software platform hosts their games. Also, it seems like Steam Deck is just running a customized Linux distro, so it isn't really a lock-in.
If Epic Games or Ubisoft decides to make their game stores work on Linux, I bet they would run on Steam Deck too. If that's the case, then how is it Valve's fault that other vendors/game stores aren't bothering to make their software platforms/games work on Linux? Valve put in the work, and they want to reap the fruits of it, without even trying to lock-in their device from using any other competitors' software (as far as I am aware). Competitors just gotta put in the work to make their platforms work on Linux.
Apple to Valve?
They can, because the FAQ says it's just a PC running Arch linux and you can install Windows on it if you want, which means you can do whatever you want. Maybe it can run on the same OS (probably, if it's just Linux, but we'll see how customized it is), or at a minimum you could just install something else.
valve so far has been miles better than any other big DRM platform. i would almost bet valve will let you have root on these and do whatever you want with the hardware without any jailbreaks. It may not be supported, but I really cannot imagine them locking this down. That would be very much unlike valve.
iirc steam machines back in the day did also let you go into a bash shell?
full disclosure: i may contain traces of a valve fanboy.
This is pure speculation on my side and I really hope I'm dead wrong but that's the first thing that comes to mind when I think about it (also, their own DRM right?).
Edit : the reply bellow seems to prove me wrong =)
>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.
and
>The default Steam Deck experience requires a Steam account (it's free!). Games are purchased and downloaded using the Steam Store. That said, Steam Deck is a PC so you can install third party software and operating systems.
They do, and they let you install your own OS.
https://www.steamdeck.com/en/software
> The new version of SteamOS is optimized for handheld gaming, and it won't get in your way with other stuff. But if you want to get your hands dirty, head on out to the desktop.
And https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLtiRGTZvGM has a Valve engineer it's more accurate to view these devices as PCs with custom controllers, and that you can install your own OS.
Definitely. I have a Steam Link and you can enable ssh access to the root account by simply plugging in a USB flash drive with a particularly named text file and rebooting.
https://www.ign.com/articles/steam-deck-hands-on-impressions...
> This flexibility means you can do pretty much anything on the Steam Deck that you can do with a regular PC. Connect a mouse and keyboard? Yep. Alt-Tab out of your games to a browser or video? Sure. Load third-party programs or even other game stores like Origin, uPlay, or Epic Games Store? No problem. You could even wipe Steam OS entirely and install a fresh version of Windows if you want – but the default Steam OS is smooth and efficient at getting you into your games, so I imagine most people won’t want or need to go that far. The point is, you can if you’d like to.
> Do I need a Steam account to use Steam Deck?
> The default Steam Deck experience requires a Steam account (it's free!). Games are purchased and downloaded using the Steam Store. That said, Steam Deck is a PC so you can install third party software and operating systems.
I imagine that would be because the "default Steam Deck experience" probably defaults to booting into Steam Big Picture mode, just like SteamOS does by default.
On the hardware page they show it docked and running a normal desktop interface and say "Use your Deck as a PC. Because it is one" and "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."
On the spec page, it says the OS is SteamOS 3.0 (Arch-based) and Desktop is KDE Plasma.
I guess I'm just not understanding where you'd even get the impression that it would be locked into a Steam account.
With Valve's track record, I absolutely believe they have limited plans for production in the long term. But their long-term hardware support is impeccable. I have several discontinued pieces of hardware from Valve (the Steam Link and Steam Controller), both of which are still used and work as well as they day I bought them - better even, thanks to continued software updates.
Valve's long-term support of the hardware they do release really is impeccable.
I'm still bitter about how bad & expensive Internet access is in the Silicon Valley
Besides, when it comes to infrastructure and consumer habits, influencing any change for the better is still better than none at all.
What are you paying?
It is completely random what internet speeds you can get. The only constant is the monopoly of Comcast & AT&T.
Two can be as lonely as one, but it’s still two.
1Gb fiber symmetrical - 30 €
40us for 45mbps feels old. Any money for 10mbps feels antiquated in an urban area of a developed country :(
I live in a rural city of France and I pay €24 a month for 400Mbps (upload: 200Mbps).
My family in rural areas are waiting and hoping for 5G internet to save them, but I live in a rather hilly region and many are worried their homes won't get good 5G service!
Rural users are sick of slow speeds, and in low density areas there should be enough bandwidth for starlink to work well.
Dont know how starlink would handle a city-full of users; Think that is something we are looking forward to finding out.
Comcast: $70/m 1gbps/30mbps down/up
Chicago
Both are copper. RCN is slowly rolling out fiber but I think it’ll still be asymmetric.
Of course, for that price I have to regularly deal with the shitty service of Numericable (payment service down, money extorsion for which I have to send snail mail to recover... and I still haven't).
At these speeds, the WiFi adapters are more of a bottleneck than the ISP. I can only get close to full speed on ethernet.
Still a problem in many places in the USA in 2021.
I heard that the 3 best speeds are in Romania, they bad 500 Mbps dirty cheap about 7 years ago.
The very clear message from Microsoft was that the future of Windows was in fullscreen tablet apps and that the desktop - as well as third-party app stores - was going away. Valve would proceed to launch a Linux version of Steam a few months before Windows 8 RTM'd, their own Linux distro a year later, and consolized PC hardware another year after that. Basically, the whole company made a very clear pivot away from game development (which they still haven't fully gone back to) to ensure Steam had a lifeboat if Windows 9 were to drop the Desktop or enforce app lockouts on it.
Of course, what actually happened is that Windows 8 became the laughing stock of the entire PC industry. Microsoft was trying, like, five developer transitions at once and nobody was interested. (Not even Apple can do that, and they actually did try. Ask me about Rhapsody sometime.) So the end result is that app developers never wrote anything to the new native XAML APIs, users just used the Desktop app, and nobody had any interest in Windows on ARM tablets. That's why you don't remember the Windows Store lock-in; in Windows 10, Microsoft got rid of it.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/06/24/build...
(Yes you might have to switch out of S mode, but that wasn’t an option in RT)
Windows store is already in place.
I'd actually love to hear what you think about rhapsody, a quick google search doesn't tell me too much about it
In order to explain why that comparison makes sense at all, I first need to go over some basics.
After shipping the original Macintosh in 1984, Apple's investors got really mad about how the computer wasn't selling, and more or less forced Steve Jobs out of the company. Jobs decided he was going to build another computer company called NeXT, which was going to out-engineer Apple and make the next big thing. It didn't actually work out that way, but conveniently for Steve, Apple had been mismanaged into the ground and drowning in technical debt. So Apple basically bought NeXT because OPENSTEP (previously NeXTSTEP; at this point Steve was trying to turn it into a cross-platform API) was a functional operating system and all of Apple's attempts at System 8 (including asking IBM to finish Copland, which is another boondoggle called Taligent) weren't.
So, right when Apple announced the NeXT buyout, they also announced that the next version of the Macintosh's OS would be built on top of OPENSTEP, with all existing Macintosh software running in a fullscreen "Blue Box" VM. The "Yellow Box" would hold new software written to the OPENSTEP APIs, and these apps were properly memory-protected. (Context: At this point in time all System 7 apps ran in kernel mode with separate segmented heaps. It's exactly as bad as it sounds.) This new OS was code-named "Rhapsody", and it even came in an Intel port that would install and run just fine on most PCs (albeit without the Blue Box).
Apple's plan was basically to continue the NeXT business as-is, with some quick rebrands (including rebranding the Windows NT port of OPENSTEP as "Red Box") and hastily-written compatibility bridges so that Macintosh users wouldn't be completely left out in the cold. Users were anticipating the new OS, but developers were utterly furious that they were being told to basically abandon all of their software and rewrite it to this entirely different and far more complicated API. They called the Blue Box the "penalty box", because they felt punished for staying loyal to the Mac.
I call Rhapsody "Apple's Windows 8" because it basically tried the same thing Windows 8 did a decade later: foisting a technically superior but entirely incompatible API on developers who weren't interested in any of it. Some might disagree because, well... Apple never actually shipped what they announced. A year after assuming control of Apple, Jobs would come up on stage again and announce that Rhapsody was "cancelled". Instead they'd build an entirely new OS called Mac OS X, built exclusively for the Mac, with three new subsystems; "Cocoa" (OPENSTEP APIs), "Classic" (Mac Toolbox APIs), and now "Carbon"; the latter being specifically intended for quickly porting existing Macintosh software to OSX without rewriting your app. This made developers a lot happier and saved the entire transition.
In the meanwhile, because Mac OS 8 was terrible for running servers on, Apple would ship another """unrelated""" OS called "Mac OS X Server", which was literally just the cancelled retail release of Rhapsody with some extra server applications bundled in. It even called itself Rhapsody in uname.
If you're wondering what happened to the Intel version of Rhapsody, well... not counting the two developer releases before Rhapsody's faked death, Apple would maintain Intel ports of everything up until actually announcing a proper developer transition from PowerPC to Intel years later. Just as proof of how much Apple had learned their lesson of how not to handle a developer transition, Carbon would actually get ported to Intel, and there were Intel OSX apps that needed it. It was ultimately removed only in macOS Catalina.
Existing Macintosh software could be run under emulation, and the original plan was that everything going forward would need to be rewritten using the NextStep APIs. (All those NS frameworks still used on iPhones and Macs today)
Eventually Apple decided they would have to create an additional set of APIs (Carbon) based on the existing Macintosh APIs that would allow software vendors an easier path forward.
Developers could adopt Carbon with much less effort and eventually transition to the NextStep APIs as part of a future large scale rewrite.
Carbon never transitioned to 64 bit, so those NextStep APIs did eventually become the default for native software.
You might not have noticed this because nobody cared about the store and just used Windows 8 like Windows 7 with some annoying tablet UI duck-taped to it.
No, even native ARM executables weren't allowed to run if not downloaded from the Store.
Hardware is extremely difficult and extremely expensive.
High effort and almost always low to no reward unless you manage to create a breakout device.
Valve already has the business that most people build the hardware for in the first place. The reason Microsoft makes Xbox is to get a cut of game sales and sell a subscription. Valve already gets a cut of almost all PC sales so really trying to build hardware looks bad on almost every conceivable company chart within Valve.
Yet they keep doing it every 5 years ago due to presumably due to their weird management.
IMO, this is a great move. They're building a cheap device that plays AAA games in a cool Switch-like form factor. I think targeting teenagers and young adults.
I think the industry is changing how they do business, a mainstream Linux/AMD device is leading the way.
I can tell you from personal experience this isn't easy at all and is just as difficult as any other hardware project, even if you're not literally building new processors or hardware firmwares it's still a huge mission getting something like that to market let alone making it profitable.
I work on a company that has shipped laptops where we designed all the casing with off the shelf processor/storage/etc, so have worked on what you're describing here.
It currently sits in a box somewhere in my house because I have never had any use for it, which I think is the case for most PC gamers, hence its failure.
Do any major Switch emulators natively support JoyCons the way Dolphin does WiiMotes? (Do JoyCons even use regular ol' Bluetooth the way the WiiMotes do? EDIT: quick Google says yes :) )
I'm waiting for some company to release a decent hybrid standalone + tethered headset (that can compete with Oculus Quest at least on the hardware specs), but most companies are only interested in selling very expensive devices for enterprise
With that said I vaguely remember seeing a patent for a wireless index 2 recently. Can't remember where though so I may be wrong.
The Q2 is good, and certainly a better value, but I'm not sure I'd say "not even comparable".
The Quest is nice because it's cheaper and self-contained, but that's about all it has going for it.
Why? I thought PC gaming is about powerful graphics cards you can't have pretty much anywhere else.
Oblivion on PC= glitch? Options are- Unofficial patch, console, mod myself
Heck I would have deleted the marauder from Doom Eternal if I didn't quit playing video games forever out of frustration. Now I read nonfiction books.
This is directly from valve. It's probably what Valve looks at when making these decisions. I assume this APU is relatively similar to the 1060 in power? Maybe the 1050. But I haven't seen any benchmarking around the APU.
This is just not true. Most pc gamers are playing free to play competitive multiplayer games. Think league of legends, fortnite, call of duty warzone, and hearthstone. The people playing these games care about framerate for competitive reasons which means they need good gpus.
"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."
It's also an interesting counterpoint to all the streaming services popping up these days. PC game streaming to mobile has major downsides, even more so when you're away from stable and fast internet. Until 5G is everywhere and mobile bandwidth [soft] caps aren't a thing anymore, a mobile device that can play games locally will be a much more attractive option for a lot of people.
But I agree with what you're saying. If this thing is actually good, it could have some real mainstream appeal.
Steam chords are brilliant. If you have a steam controller and don't know about steam chords, go look it up. Life changing.
There are plenty of people with great things to say about it, but they largely seem to be people who wanted to play FPS games without a mouse and keyboard, and were willing to put in some effort to get it configured right. I can imagine it being more successful if it had gotten first-class out-of-the-box support for more games, but it seems like it never reached the level of adoption where that was worth it for developers.
I've never tried it myself, though. If the Steam Deck is a success, maybe we'll see the Steam Controller model finally take off (since the Deck has similar touchpads built in). Or maybe it will be like the Kinect, a pet feature deleted in later hardware revisions.
The biggest single win for me is replacing the right stick for camera control, as the trackball emulation with haptics on the touchpad is so much faster and more responsive than a traditional thumbstick. There are some games that I'd still prefer the standard twin sticks or dpad (twin-stick shooters maybe, some platformers, or hyper-specific designed games like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons), but overall I've much preferred the touchpad over thumbsticks for almost every first- or third-person game I've played.
Not every game will be a perfect fit, certainly, but I've had a great time with my Steam Controller playing things like XCOM, Prey (2017), and Divinity Original Sin. IIRC Civilization 5 was explicitly a part of the advertising for the controller in the first place, as a way to play mouse-heavy games from the couch.
Fewer than people think, in my opinion. Snake Pass and Outer Wilds insisted to me that they would be better with a controller and both were wrong.
> Lots of PC games can be played without K+M, what's your point again?
The comment you were replying to directly answers you question about the point:
> PC games are built with power in mind that Switch does not have
The part of comment about "can be played without K+M" is entirely irrelevant to what I am saying because the preference _for_ K+M is the premise of this whole comment subtree.
It's not the same as a mouse but it beats the pants off of thumbstick aiming.
I have been gaming for 35 years, and in the 15 of those where I have played first person shooters, no controller compares. Even when I'm playing other kinds of games, the ability to do everything without having to remove your finger from the pads to hit buttons, the size is perfect, everything is so responsive.
They "feel" cheap, but I don't care. They are gaming nirvana for me.
Only things I don't like are the bumper buttons and I'd much rather USB C than micro usb.
I wish they would make an SC 2 with fixed bumpers, ditching the thumbsticks for bigger trackpads with more advanced haptics and a doubling of paddle buttons like with this new device.
What?? Like you flip the controller upside down to open the map? How do you set that up?
I'd be inclined to buy one of these for gaming and an ultra light laptop for laptop stuff when the time comes, versus getting a gaming laptop or desktop.
Competitive FPS playing is kinda like NASCAR. The hardware and configuration of hardware is critical if you actually want to win.
Good enough for 85% of gamers, hilarious-looking and infuriating to any serious hardcore gamers.
The Index was genuinely revolutionary, despite also being punishingly expensive. It's hard not to feel a sense of envy on seeing one in action. But this? No one will care in a year (or maybe even six months).
Steam Deck is a slightly more expensive gaming device, but it does so much more. Previous attempts at these palm sized gaming PC failed because they were half assed, software and hardware wise. Steam deck isn’t.
The switch isn’t “just a handheld games console like any other.” It is “this thing you must buy to play the latest mario/Zelda/animal crossing game.” Obviously if you aren’t interested in those games there isn’t so much of a point.
Steam: more support, lower price, won't have to buy it again if another "version" of the hardware comes out
Switch: portable, multiple controllers for local multiplayers.
Now I don't have to choose anymore. And I already have a big library of games. I will only need a switch for exclusive games and local multiplayer games.
And sure their hardware projects often don't hit mainstream success & stick around for multiple generations, but I still had a Steam Alienware Alpha that was both my daily driver & gaming rig for a few years, and still occasionally use a cheap Steam Link for in-home streaming.
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.
And 30FPS is just fine, especially for an ultra portable, and when you can probably get more than that out of it with customized graphics options. When I played Witcher 3 years ago it was actually on a machine that barely kept it going at 30FPS w/ low-medium settings. It was fine. One of the best games I played, and the lack of high quality textures too nothing away from that. Do you think people don't know they're making a quality trade off when they play the Witcher 3 on a Switch? Of course they know! NOW they'll be able to play it on a more powerful device that can serve as a full PC and has access to an enormous library.
You're complaining that this isn't good enough to be a primary gaming PC, and that misses the point: That's not the market target. This is setup to be a secondary device for existing gamers and an entry to PC gaming for others that want a wider selection than on a console or a Switch.
>Same. I already have $1,100 saved for a gaming PC, but since that might only buy a GPU right now I’ll just jump into this and hopefully wait out the GPU crunch.
I guess if you're holding out though, maybe the Deck will scratch the "buy new gaming shiny object" itch, and play games reasonable well at it's native resolutions, but if you have $1100 and it's not getting you what you want in a gaming rig, the Deck doesn't fill the gap.
Also I'm not confident that GPU cards will became easier and cheaper to find for a while. Someone that is related to the general chip industry told me 1.5 years. Until then constrained supply will probably make demand even more frantic.
Heck, just on cars alone: I just traded in a car for 2x the value it was listed at about 6 months ago. It was 12 years old and I knew I'd need a new car sometime in the next 1-3 years, and a new car today has massively more safety features (I have kids to worry about that for too) so I wasn't going to hold out and hope the used market went even higher.
And if car manufacturers whose electronics don't need the latest fab methods have these bottlenecks, I don't see the high end chip market getting much better, especially with Apple & Samsung eating any capacity TSMC can provide.
> For Deck, we're vastly improving Proton's game compatibility and support for anti-cheat solutions by working directly with the vendors.
Would be interesting to see how this does on Zen 4 with the 5nm upgrade.
The fact that the Zen 2 is 7nm vs the Canyon's 14nm means the performance/watt will be much better. It also has significantly more RAM, and better quality: LPDDR5 instead of DDR4. This also lowers power requirements while at the same time that it improves performance.
But no, I don't think this will be as powerful as a Hades Canyon. Although it also won't have to push pixels to a 2k display like my Canyon does. It doesn't need to be nearly as powerful to provide a similar experience on a small display. (in terms of smoothness. Also higher quality gfx setting will be wasted on this display size, so there's no point worrying about it not running well on "high" textures when the difference between "medium" won't be noticeable on 720p @ 7")
And will buy it as a thank you to Valve for supporting us all these years. I think this will pay off for them in the long run.
It should be great for debugging random server problems while on vacation though.
Perhaps I’m atypical, but I type more relaxed, smoothly, and faster on non-mechanical than mechanical.
Point of comparison is 150-175 wpm on laptop keyboards as opposed to 120-145 on mechanical. I’ve owned many mechanical keyboards, including very high end ones, and remain mystified about their aura.
Obviously not going to try be productive with an onscreen keyboard and 7" screen - will use it with peripherals in those cases.
I got myself an Anne Pro 2 from banggood for 65 euros and I take it everywhere. It connects to my laptop, tablet and phone.
https://www.ign.com/articles/steam-deck-hands-on-impressions...
The joystick layout looks funky to me, but apparently it works?
> However, as soon as I held it myself, the layout felt completely natural: the intuitive hand orientation when you grab the Steam Deck is more straight up and down, like holding the sides of a steering wheel, whereas with a controller your hands are at more of an angle. As a result, it’s easy and natural for your thumbs to reach the Steam Deck’s face buttons, D-pad, and thumbsticks.
And as a Mac user who has to load up Boot Camp to play most of my Steam library, a portable dockable PC is extremely appealing:
> As a result, in desktop mode the Steam Deck honestly just feels like a PC. The OS is Linux-based, but it feels largely familiar to Windows and is capable of running everything I threw at it from either platform. I played a bit of Factorio and Death Stranding with mouse and keyboard on a 32” monitor, and if it weren’t for the Steam Deck sitting docked next to me on the desk I would have forgotten it wasn’t running off a traditional desktop PC.
If I can have a dockable PC that can churn decent frame rates, It's just a matter of switching the input on my monitor and switching the bluetooth mouse/keyboard to it. For me, the fact it's portable is just icing on the cake to be honest. I'd buy it even if it didn't have a screen or controls to be honest.
I have a Steam library full of games bought on sale that my Mac was never quite up to the task of running, and the prospect of having them all on a neat little handheld for less than the cost of a midrange iPad is awfully compelling.
Coming from previously having a top-of-the-line ($6k+) gaming PC a decade ago that still does "okay" on most titles at 1080P to trying to game via GeForce Now from my Macbook was a shockingly bad experience. I'm very interested in the SteamDeck specifically because it allows me to use local hardware to run the game without requiring me to build another $6k+ gaming PC which I might get to use one day a month.
Alternatively, gaming laptop. I’m missing the use case of the Steam Deck except in the event of a budget crunch, since you can get ultraportable 14” gaming laptops that have good oompf - examples being the Asus G14 and the Razer Blade 14.
That said for playing 2d or lighter indie games it will probably run fine at native 1440p... assuming with external display that you can use native res.
There was a learning curve though and games needed to support its weird style of giving inputs.
It's a shame different, even if better, is too big a hurdle for some people.
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 move, given how small the display is.
USB 3 is clocked at 5 GHz, which requires more power still. Just having a transceiver capable of that frequency enabled will draw a significant load from a battery, regardless of whether you're using the bus for power delivery.
SteamOS 2 was Debian-based
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 weight to hold in your hands.
Tingling in your hands sounds worryingly like RSI, I’d see a doctor about that.
I've had success with daily low reps, but some longer intervals may work too. Once they've been primed, muscles grow when you rest, so rest is crucial.
1. https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech
edit: crtl-f mistake, that's the docking station
That issue alone is bad/wide-spread enough they should replace joycons for free.
That could have saved some time on tooling/packaging adaptions.
Not that I dislike Arch Linux, I run both Arch Linux and Debian (Stable on servers Sid on laptop).
Not only is having new stuff good from a feature and hardware-support standpoint, but, paradoxically, new software seems to have WAY less bugs than old software. (I assume this is because devs are mainly on the new versions and don't care about old versions that much.) Try using CentOS 7, with ancient, should-be-rock-solid versions of apps. Dolphin crashes every time you load into a large directory. Kate's keybinds are broken. Tmux refuses to support 256 colors. I get none of these issues on Arch or Manjaro.
I'm also sure that Valve's system is going to have a smaller set of software than I'd use on an Arch desktop anyway, so there's less surface area for stuff to break.
Maybe the people using lots of AUR are complaining a lot, and the people who don't just quietly switch distros?
I'm sure that Valve is going to install a much smaller set of core software than a typical desktop, though.
I have the exact opposite experience, I used to use sid and had to do full-blown reinstall every couple months because e.g. dpkg would break too much and I wouldn't be able to install anything, or once, even boot and ended up migrating to arch despite the warnings - never had to reinstall the distro once since then
That said, never had to reinstall either of them. Had my system broken by pacman in ways dpkg would handle much better, but it was fixable anyway.
With the opi package you can install: chrome, codecs, dotnet, msedge, msteams, plex, skype, signal, slack, teamviewer, vivaldi, vscode, vscodium, zoom and more.
Brave is app i am missing so far, but having the newest version KDE and other software that required a PPA on Ubuntu is pretty nice.
And it feels much snappier installed on a SATA SSD than Mint from a NVME SSD on the same machine!
The auto-snapshot feature on updates was really cool, and direct integration then (almost 10 years ago for me) was ahead of most other distros IMO.
I then setup Arch to be more confronted with the things that actually go on under the hood, learned a lot and had generally a good experience with it. A bit later I got a job where Debian plays a key role, that sealed the deal on using Debian and Arch only for me (remembering the usage of two package managers is enough for me ^^).
But I have good memories of openSUSE, and it was the distro that I first used "full time", even introduced me to Linux to some degree (I dabbled a bit around with Ubuntu and Knoppix before).
(My go-to though)
Debian is in general really rigorous with ABI/Symbol versioning, dependencies and packaging in general - there are some outliers, but most of the packages in Debian is just high quality work.
On the other side is Arch Linux, where they do not even care about Kernel ABI bumps, which are trivial to detect and track, so if you pull in a kernel update you cannot load any new module, as they just overwrite the modules of the running kernel - I used it, but I find that still lunatic!
Nothing like having some complex workspace setup and then needing to connect to a VPN/WireGuard network but also forgetting to preload that module (I just load all possible relevant on start nowadays), forced a reboot, nothing lost but tedious.
On Debian this and other things where you're in limbo while some library version mismatches, or some AUR package is depending on another one, won't ever happen on Debian. It has its disadvantages, but they certainly dot their i's.
Arch is still a better choice because gaming is generally using cutting edge software.
It works great if you mostly stick to official Debian packages through and through.
I need external repositories (albeit rarely) with Arch too though and that has never caused a problem.
If you want iPhone ease Linux use Ubuntu based distros. But traditionally Linux hadn’t been single click easy. Much like smartphones weren’t originally iPhone level easy.
Polite edit: if you’re a Linux noob start with a vm or live disk Ubuntu image and play around. If you like computers and understanding them, you’ll find the lessons you need as you need them by searching the web. Then you’ll install a bunch of distros and understand what I mean.
I'm a little surprised they didn't go with something like Fedora. The kernel / drivers are kept just as up-to-date as Arch but the rest of the system is a little more stable.
The most important libraries for Steam are things like Mesa, which Fedora updates on a rolling basis along with the kernel.
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/grub2/tree/rawhide
Some of these are pretty questionable, particularly disabling the use of "grub-install" on UEFI systems (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1917213)
Mesa and the kernel would be less important, as all the hardware needs to be supported by them on release.
That's not the case w/ the Fedora release cycle. Like I said, it's only slightly behind Arch.
I guess I don't understand what complexity there is to remove in the first place.
I'm not talking about the workflow for an end-user: Valve is definitely not going to force people to run terminal commands to update their systems. While pacman's update workflow is way simpler than dnf's, it's just not relevant here.
I was primarily talking about the complexity of the tool itself, of updates, and also the complexity of packaging. Arch is a packager's distro, and much of the foundation Arch is built on is the Crux-style "as simple as possible" mindset. There's much less that can go wrong when you're doing much less with much smaller tools.
I'm not hating on dnf or rpm, here, for the record. They're fine tools for their use cases.
1. Fedora is not a rolling release, so you don't get every single kernel point release like you do in Arch.
2. Steam does not want to do a full Fedora 30 to 31 upgrade every six months. They want to roll. It's a better model, especially when kernel/drivers are improving gaming quickly.
3. Arch has a stable base and gets small updates every day. Regular software services tell us this is a better model than infrequent large updates. Things like RHEL are the exception, but take years of QA, and leave you with old drivers in between releases.
Wrong. The kernel and mesa stack rolls and is rebased regularly throughout the life of a Fedora release. Fedora is prepping for a rebase to Linux 5.13 for both Fedora 33 and Fedora 34 now: https://fedoramagazine.org/contribute-to-fedora-linux-kernel...
Fedora rolls the kernel. I'm on Fedora 33 (a full release behind), and yet I still have kernel 5.12.15, the exact same as Arch currently has. I don't have any custom repos configured.
On rare occasions Fedora even gets new kernels faster than Arch, but usually it's less than a week behind.
>2. Steam does not want to do a full Fedora 30 to 31 upgrade every six months. They want to roll. It's a better model, especially when kernel/drivers are improving gaming quickly.
Fedora gets constant Mesa updates as well, it's not pinned. Admittedly it's 2 months behind Arch (21.0 vs 21.1)
My favorite part of Arch is the rolling packages and my least favorite is the rolling kernel. I dislike having to reboot so often.
You will not get security and bug fixes but that's what's bothering you, I think.
What caused this shift is that the current generation of consoles shipped with SSDs. The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S both shipped with NVMe storage standard. Games going forward are designed with this baseline in mind.
The reason this affects game technology is because it changes the tradeoffs. You always wanted assets to load quickly, since forever. The amount of time it takes to load an asset has two parts that contribute: I/O time and the CPU time spent decompressing.
In the past, storage was more precious and slow, so your game would load much faster by compressing the data. NVMe users would never see worse loading times than SSD or HD users, so you'd just compress everything, and the NVMe users would see a slight benefit.
Now that NVMe is a reasonable minimum requirement, you can ship a game that uses uncompressed data on disk. People with NVMe see faster load times, and people without them see slower loading times, possibly MUCH slower.
When I say "uncompressed", I just mean "uncompressed, relative to the runtime representation" which may still use compression, like ASTC.
The situation with the Nintendo 64 is remarkably similar to what's going on now... because the Nintendo 64 had such a fast storage system, games could "easily" load assets on the fly. The system had only 4MB of RAM, which seemed like a very severe limitation, but you could make very expansive areas in games by streaming assets from the cartridge while playing. It was fast enough that you could load some assets from the cartridge into RAM, and they would be available to render during the same frame! These are the kind of technological changes that are going to happen inside engines, now that NVMe storage is more common.
I put "easily" in quotes because nothing about Nintendo 64 programming is easy.
As fast for sequential data, but at least an order of magnitude more IOPS.
Just take a look at the painfully long loading times on the Switch to see the difference.
UHS-III works with Micro SD cards and it's supposed to give you 624 MB/s. SATA 3.0 is supposed to give 6.0 Gbit/s, or 750 MB/s.
That's only 20% faster. I'm sure the real number is different due to overhead, but how different can it be?
I'm not going to be shocked by low Switch performance, since the Switch is basically an obsolete mid-range phone, in terms of specs.
Sure, might change in the future, but no game right now uses the future APIs (direct storage) that might lead to bigger differences. Which is no surprise, as Windows 10 does not support it.
This makes buying the model with limited storage a bit of a no-brainer. I'm glad Valve supports external storage.
I think for the types of games I’d want to play on it (emulation) that’d be just fine, but for some it could be a bit annoying.
I think they should have gone with a faster interface though.
But then, it cost 60€ for 512 GB, and that's way more price effective for most. At least on the Switch, loading times are not that noticeable imo.
Almost certainly has to do with cost and PCI-E bandwidth. Mobile chips like this only have so much bandwidth, and USB3 requires more dedicated bandwidth than USB2, not to mention more complicated circuitry that drives up price. And when your expected use case is attaching keyboards and mice, which generally are USB2 only anyways, it reduces the cost and bandwidth needed to support that many ports.
That's exactly what we call a "Mobile" chip in the x86 CPU market.
The mobile phone grade chipsets you are probably thinking is probably called "Embedded" chip in the x86 market. ("Embedded" chips is wider than a mobile phone though)
Because it's cheaper to produce and easier to design for USB 2. The cpu and chipset are limiting factors as well.
https://www.amd.com/en/products/chipsets-am4
Scroll down to the table at the bottom of the page to see what AMD's chipsets can support.
there are plenty of graphical frontends for updates on Arch.
Another big thing is more recent glibc and mesa for instance which can be huge for performance. Also, Arch makes it fairly easy to rebuild all packages with optimizations for a given CPU ; for instance someone recently made a test of arch built with x86_64-v3. Also there's the way packages are built (much simpler than with debian), etc.
As for packages, why does SteamOS need packages? They can just make one large update package that includes all library updates for the latest SteamOS version. Or are they expecting users to say "Oh I want to update just this one library"? Seems like a huge missed opportunity to make SteamOS a "stable target" that Linux devs can make games for. But if everyone is like "I want this weird glibc!" then that's impossible.
The adage that you have to use a terminal if you want to run a distro has been out of date for over a decade.
I think it's not a case of "having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 slots", I think it's instead a case of "having precisely two USB-2 slots", no matter how many USB-3 slots there are. The reason for exactly two USB-2 slots is obvious: one of them is for the keyboard, the other one is for the mouse. Neither the keyboard nor the mouse need more than USB-2, so there's no reason to have the more complex USB-3 hardware for these two ports.
Other than those two ports, it makes sense to have the rest of the USB ports be USB 3, which seems to be the case here, even though there's only one (the USB-C port seems to be meant to be always plugged into a charger, so it might also be USB-2 only).
Most of the prospective users don't need more USB-3 ports than they have.
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 becomes “what percentage of current PC gamers are motivated to shell out $400 to play on the train?”
Frankly, I feel like it’s probably a decent number of people? Enough for this product to do okay, if not change the whole market. But people have been very confidently incorrect about almost every iteration of mobile gaming in the past. I guess we’ll see.
If I played more games I would absolutely buy one of these. I already own the NVidia Shield that plugs into your TV because it’s a great streaming box even if you ignore the gaming aspect.
I'm waiting to buy a laptop I want for some months now, still not available.
Unless this custom APU for Steam Deck is made in a special foundry with a special process, then they will be in line just like everyone else.
Plus scalpers love this shortage to make easy money.
It's not about being ready or not, it's about supply and demand.
An example from Valve themselves from early this year regarding Index, an interview with Gabe:
“We actually have components that are manufactured in Wuhan and when you’re setting up your manufacturing lines it doesn’t occur to you that you’re suddenly going to be dependent on this peculiar transistor that’s sitting on one board that you can’t get,” Newell said.
“Everybody ended up running into the same problem simultaneously — you go from, ‘Oh, we’re in great shape,’ to, ‘What do you mean Apple or Microsoft just bought the next two years’ supply of this just so they could make sure they aren’t going to run out?’ You went from a situation where everything was getting done just in time to people buying up all the available supplies.”
Newell says these constraints are also why the headset still doesn’t ship to some markets like New Zealand or Australia. “The only thing keeping us from shipping in New Zealand at this point is just getting enough of them made — we’re very much manufacturing constrained.”
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.
If Valve isn't locking the hardware down, but is subsidizing it, then they might run into a situation where cryptominers (or some other group) start buying these things up in bulk, but never playing any games on them.
I could see owning one of these as a non-gaming desktop.
https://www.crypto-news.net/what-does-ethereums-proof-of-sta...
One major difference (besides the form-factor obviously) is that the Deck doesn't require WiFi + desktop to play your PC games. I'd also argue that the trackpads will be a major difference. The Steam Controller's trackpad wasn't perfect, but it made possible to sanely play a ton of designed-for-mouse games
However, this is far better. Not only are the specs very impressive for the size/power, but it runs an OS that can plan anything (with Proton). It's like mixing the switch with a ps4. Imagine playing the Witcher 3, or Doom Eternal on this compared to the 480p blurry Switch version. I hope this does well.
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 device. I can't imagine people not running out of space very, very fast (even with microSD card slot, which we may or may not be able to install games onto: I wish they made it clear in the specs). Still, for $300, it'd be an instant buy for me - just to be able to play in bed.
I really hope enough people buy this thing, because I'd really want it to thrive - and the price to drop :)
At least Todd Howard can't sell Skyrim yet another time, it's already in my steam library.
The required storage is listed on the steam store page, Cyberpunk for instance requires 70 GB free.
I think that hints that you can install games... hopefully :).
I felt that way about the Quest 2, and opted for the maxxed-out version. As it turns out, I use it a few times per week and have ~40GB of storage in use.
I originally used Virtual Desktop to remote in to my desktop, mostly from across the house but also over 5G. Now that Airlink is available in beta I use it exclusively at home, and mostly play "PCVR" titles wirelessly.
The Steam Deck seems to be taking the same approach. I see myself using it to play games from my desktop library while in bed or sitting outside. Few if any games will actually get installed on the device, because I won't want to use the on-board processing and drain my battery anyhow.
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.
However, when the hypothetical average Joe you propose picks up a cheap 256 GB SD card off of Amazon and it takes five minutes every time they reload from a checkpoint in Control, I think they will be at least as frustrated as when they ran out of space on the internal SSD.
https://www.steamdeck.com/en/hardware
> All models of Steam Deck support expanding your storage via microSD cards. Games stored on a microSD card will appear in your library instantly.
Anyway, you can more or less do that today already with external disks, etc. You can certainly connect a USB3 SSD. I wonder if the nvme drive is user-replaceable? I guess not?
Though given the open nature of the device, expect mods sooner rather than later. Replacing a chip and telling Linux to override its size (or mod the bios/dtb) should be a breeze.
Disc: Googler.
Most action games require at least 3 simultaneous inputs to be played effectively.
There's definitely workarounds like the ones you mention, but unless a game is actually made for touchscreen controls, as in optimized for no more than 2 simultaneous inputs, it's not going to be as playable on a touchscreen as it would be with anything else.
Unfortunately, some genres of game just aren't as suited to only 2 simultaneous inputs.
There's lots of fun touchscreen based games, but they're always better with game mechanics specifically suited to touchscreens.
On phones with the feature, you can use your left thumb to walk, right thumb to aim, and 3D touch (press down hard on the screen to shoot). I know at least call of duty mobile supports it, and when I tried it out it felt revolutionary.
But rather than add new input methods, they’re removing them at the same time they’re trying to push harder into mobile gaming (with Apple Arcade).
It’s baffling as an outsider to see such obviously bad/stupid decisions like that from such a massive company.
Tapping the back of my phone now, I can see it maybe working for some types of games/shooters where you don't have to hold down the fire button, if implemented well (which probably isn't easy to do for all hardware). The tactile feedback of smacking the phone could help provide a good experience if paired with appropriate audio/visuals.
This isn't quite the same thing, but the Playstation Vita has a rear touchpad, and not a ton of games managed to use it well, even with the much higher precision (Tearaway[1] is the only good one I can remember).
Tearaway gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw5LD4B-3DI
ps4 controllers are generic bluetooth gamepads that I've been able to connect to a surprising range of devices.
The price isn't out of line even if you consider it as a "thin client" gaming device.
And you can still keep your switch for nintendo exclusives because they've just made it clear that they're not upgrading the switch in a worthwhile way for at least a year.
I would say this is squarely aimed at the existing switch customer base.
PC gamers and steam gamers are often very different markets. Nintendo, for decades now, was about fun, not power. I'm casual gamer, just for fun, and steam deck, while super cool, is certainly not going to replacement my switch.
So certainly a lot of switch owners are playing indie games that they could be playing on this device with better performance.
Seems like something is very wrong with either Switch hardware performance or Nintendo quality control.
Also many switch ports are abandoned by the devs in a very buggy state. This will probably replace my switch and PC. Very excited.
Nintendo charges you money for new copies of each game you want to play on their latest hardware. You can't just pull out your old copy of Super Mario Bros and install it on your Switch.
Hell, I've heard that there are Switch games that have been out since the very beginning of the console that are still full price.
Atari Lynx. Sony PSP. Sony Vita. Nintendo Switch. Any others I don't remember?
People forget that these devices without marketing and consistency they won't go far.
Nintendo, Sony, even MS that came later to the party have hundreds (if not thousands) of millions poured to build their brands, over decades... Sega knew how to play this game and still didn't manage to hang on...
They are already taking the crops of nostalgia, that's for how long they have been around. Leveraging these devices base on hardware it's nothing in the great scheme of things.
I see what you did there :)
But seeing Valve's track record, marketing isn't their strong point too.
At first glance at least, it seems like it may end up being much more than that. I see appeal here for non-gamers as well - or at least, for people who aren't only or even primarily gamers.
It's a very nice cyberdeck for general use, though granted it doesn't have a hardware keyboard. Given the size and form factor any keyboard they'd tried to graft on the thing would be basically unusable anyhow so I'm glad they didn't try.
I can totally see myself picking one of these up and throwing it in my bag alongside a small Bluetooth mechanical keyboard. For working in coffee shops in a terminal it'd be just fine. Connect it up to a TV via Chromecast or something and you've got a damned nice setup for less than a grand.
I find its really hard to beat the convertible laptop form factor in general
Now if it can somehow act as wacom tablet I'll instantly buy it, though it may be not the case.
I call it the ipad effect, where an ipad + keyboard of the same size ends up being heavier than a laptop of the same size.
Convertibles also tend to have a touch screen and pen support too.
I find the 7" form factor only good for personal usage, if you want to play a multiplayer game on it, it's too tiny usually.
Steam Deck at least stands a chance, although I'm worried about the weight and the battery life.
If it can do low-resource gaming for 8 hours, its not lie. And honestly, thats not something too far-fetch.
The only one lying here is you, since its not even released yet for you to test the claim. Not to mention how you conveniently left out "2-" from the battery life range
What? Did you expect to run Cyberpunk 2027 for 8 hours on single charge this machine?
Mostly I'm thinking about controller vs keyboard+mouse. Typically you have more controls available on PC and when I play the same game on PC I am complete garbage at it because I'm used to controller, maybe I'm too old though.
Plus it natively supports "mouse" controls via a few input methods: thumb touch screens and tilt-o-whorl. And if neither of those work, you can use a bluetooth mouse/keyboard.
Does it even matter? For consumers, they get what they paid for even if Valve shows zero commitment as long as Steam does not actively shut them out. For game companies, support for controller and Linux/Proton is valuable with or without Steam Deck.
And for Valve itself, all the software investment is a long term hedge against the existential threat of Windows failing them, this is just an opportunistic bonus use. The only actual cost is the hardware side of the project. If it tanks in the market they'll simply refrain from doing a v2 and do damage control with long tail sales of v1. While taking comfort in knowing that the Deck hardware will at least have lured a few game companies into the arms of Proton, strengthening their Windows hedge.
Other than emulators, Android is a barren land for good controller based games. Specially compared to Steam.
The shield runs all the major streaming networks and there's now Airplay apps that run in the background, closing that gap.
As with all chrome-based devices, the Google voice assistant blows away AppleTV and Roku.
On one hand it would be nice to have my Steam games on a portable without having to double-purchase(a problem ATM with Switch, on top of the higher typical costs of those games on eShop).
But I have the Switch and Switch Lite already which plays Nintendo exclusives. Honestly it's nice to get a break and dip into a catalogue that's not on my PC when I'm on the go. And I'm 100% not going to take two portables with me anywhere.
Then there is the cost. $650 for me would be better spent toward a PS5 if I could get my hands on one. I like the Sony exclusives(GoW, Last of Us, etc) and would really like to play Returnal.. Though it will probably go cross-platform before I ever see a PS5 with my own eyes.
The more I think about it's price point and value to me the more I get the Shield vibes, and the more impressive it is how well Nintendo knows their customers and rides a very fine line with their product placement.
Edit: As an added thought; I like to experience certain games, shows, and movies in a very controlled environment. I won't play/watch them on-the-go.
1) Nintendo switch game prices
2) The size of your existing PC-compatible library (including emulators).
That drastically changes the value proposition to me.
Or, if AMD would please get on with it and release a small form factor like the Intel Nuc, that would be great. But this device does have a screen attached to it and a battery, so it would work fine as a nuc for me.
Super excited!
> The default Steam Deck experience requires a Steam account (it's free!). Games are purchased and downloaded using the Steam Store. That said, Steam Deck is a PC so you can install third party software and operating systems.
I like their middle finger against other console and smartphone manufacturers.
I know I can get it to work, but when I'm at the point in the day where I just want to play a game for an hour before bed, the PS4 can have me into it in 10 seconds or less with a very low likelihood of drama.
Anyway, I know this isn't universal, but it's enough of a thing for me that I've even re-bought Humble Bundle games on PSN just so I can enjoy playing them that way.
Maybe Steam Deck would be polished enough to change my mind?
I used to worry about the thermal cycle of playing Civ 5 on my MBP, but it's a 2019, and I WANT it to wear out early -- if such a thing is possibly -- to justify upgrading to an M-based, TouchBar-less version sooner.
But if those things aren't a consideration and/or your main jam is single player action adventure, going console is a no-brainer.
Processor AMD APU
CPU: Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32)
GPU: 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.0-1.6GHz (up to 1.6 TFlops FP32)
APU power: 4-15W
RAM 16 GB LPDDR5 RAM (5500 MT/s)
Storage
64 GB eMMC (PCIe Gen 2 x1)
256 GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)
512 GB high-speed NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)
All models include high-speed microSD card slot
KDE Plasma visible in this video of a docked SteamDeck:
https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamdeck/images/vide...
Maybe this is equivalent to something like a MX-150 or GTX1050?
Should be totally fine for Valves games though (CSGO, TF2, Etc..)
It’s about perf/watts
> with a metric ton of post-processing FX to hide the textures' low resolution
That doesn't matter at all to me if the result looks good. Of course it cheats. Many switch games (mostly?) don't even use anti-aliasing. And here is a fast racing game, 1080p@60, with a bunch of effects that manages to look good. The "ton of post-processing FX" is not free. It was important to show what the switch could do on launch, even before developers learn how to optimize for the console.
well, lucky you, to me they stick out like a sore thumb ; likewise with the weird lightning on the plants around the tracks. Likewise when looking at this video https://youtu.be/fQESQueSMLI?t=1418 I can't help but have my eyes linger on the super static blue / orange exhaust at the back of the vehicle, be angered at the very cheap splish splash here: https://youtu.be/fQESQueSMLI?t=1445 or the smoke sprites suddenly disappearing here https://youtu.be/fQESQueSMLI?t=1495 ; it'd definitely break my immersion while playing and make it an unenjoyable experience. And don't get me started on the aliasing...
That's half as many pixels as the 1080p screens that people in 2014 were playing on. Keeping "rendering quality" fixed, pixels and flops aren't necessarily linearly correlated, but half the pixels does mean approximately half the flops to hit the same quality targets, ignoring the new upscaling tech that will almost certainly be used to close the gap. So 1.6 TFlops today vs. approximately 2.5-equivalent 2014 TFlops is probably not that dramatic of a gap.
And running on a battery. That's actually really damn impressive.
With the new architecture the APU in this machine should be faster (despite the low TDP?), and isn't it combined with really fast ram? If it beats the GTX 750 Ti then that makes a lot of games available on the target resolution, and maybe that's too low a target and your GTX 1050 comparison is apt. The 128MB cache integrated with RDNA 2 could have the effect it had on the Intel Iris Pro 6200 and give a big performance boost in some scenarios, that graphics hardware was awfully strong for an old igpu. Something like that on newer hardware could be really nice and make this a lot stronger than one would expect at first.
[0]: https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/gpu/compare?ids%...
But you are right in saying that a 15W APU can't be expected to be very fast.
I don't recall any APU with that combination. The 5700G which is due next month is Zen 3 with Vega graphics.
Personally I don't care much about RDNA 2 but I would like the hardware AV1 decoder.
From the hardware section on the website.
Also agreed that this looks very price competitive. Given storage is SSD-expandable, $399 gives you a fairly powerful mobile gaming platform and PC.
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 heard of Valve's Proton[1] but not sure how stable it is and if it can support any Windows game on their platform. If so, then that would be pretty amazing to have access to some Windows-only games without building a PC.
I'm definitely interested but I'm in no rush. I'd rather upgrade to a PS5 first but I'm gonna keep my eye on this. If the reviews in the long term are good maybe I'll get the 2nd generation of it.
Wonder if they'll release a Oculus-Quest-like all-in-one VR system next.
You can check how well titles are supported, or if you need tweaks to make it work.
You still need to have Windows for a couple bleeding edge must play AAA games and a few slackers that haven't been ported over, but there's a wealth of wonderful games that run great on Linux now. More than enough to last a lifetime.
Let’s not forget they were the single most important player in the whole VR Revolution. Oculus took the huge improvements that were made inside valve in VR and took the team to FB. But pretty much all the major breakthroughs were done at Valve, not oculus.
> Operating System: SteamOS 3.0 (Arch-based)
> Desktop: KDE Plasma
This is sure to excite the Linux community.
It's a good fit.
Gentoo is source based, and while distribution of binary packages is possible with it, why would they do that?
NixOs ignores FHS, and while it is possible to install a steam compatible runtime, why would they do that?
And Fedora belongs to RedHat, and why would they do that, when they actually try to switch away from a OS distribution controlled by one company?
I am not saying those distributions aren't good, just that it would not make sense for Valve to use any of those.
Debian (via Ubuntu) and Arch are probably the most well tested Linux distributions by gamers, that do not belong to a single company.
Fedora is also very friendly with derivatives and features the ability to upgrade painlessly through atomic upgrades/rollbacks, thanks to rpm-ostree. Something that is shared with Nix. RedHat is mostly a sponsor and Fedora is community-maintained. Unlike CentOS, RedHat didn't get any bad press on how it tries to influence Fedora. Fedora is pretty consistent and quite polished on the desktop side. You also get a distribution who has access to the most influential upstream distributors (including for the graphical stack for example).
Debian/Arch do not offer such things. Arch does not even offer a stable base to start from. Taking a random snapshot of a rolling distribution needs a lot of work. Ubuntu does that with Debian. All Arch derivatives are desktop distributions. It would be interesting to know why Steam did not continue with Debian. Is it bad experience on the previous SteamOS or inability for Debian to move forward?
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]
[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/steam-deck-valve-faq-big-questi...
Like other said though, the worst of it goes away after using it a few times. I noticed though that if you're really susceptible to motion sickness, you basically need to adjust to every type of locomotion or movement individually -- and any vehicles or cockpits are still totally unviable for me still, from No Mans Sky to American Truck Simulator.
Though it's not just one kind of locomotion either -- I adjusted to head-position-relative smooth locomotion with a joystick on a flat surface at a walking pace, but what about downhill at a running pace, on horseback? Then I have to spend another week getting used to THAT. Or what about smooth locomotion circle strafing in a dungeon around a bunch of skeletons? Another week. And I still can't handle any camera rotation at all.
But it's been rumored for a while that Valve is working on a Index successor with wireless connectivity.
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?
Seriously, Alyx is pretty obviously the future of video games. Have you tried it? It's incredible.
And no, I don’t own a VR setup.
Because it is video.
It's cool tech, but I have to ask how will it be used against me? Will it only be pushing me to spend more of my money on Steam games or is there something more?
What?!
It does look very appealing: it could become a Switch with the whole PC library available. Damn cool.
That's the problem proton does not run all the games.
It's not perfect, but it sounds like a much better deal than the Steam Machines which didn't really offer any additional value to anyone and were much more limited.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Switch_games_...
I installed Steam on Debian sid via Flathub / Flatpak, and then installed https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom using their flatpak instructions as well.
Honestly, it has never been easier to get a version of proton that makes gaming on linux seamless. Of course, I understand "run these terminal commands" is the usual defensive linux nerd^H^H^H^H coward's reaction, but installing Steam and this package from flatpak and then going from there is a _vast_ improvement from yester-years. I've been fairly happy with it, and I didn't have to do any actual compiling / building!
But now with Proton most problems I have are caused by hardware/driver incompatibilities. Which is exactly what Valve can get rid of by launching their own hardware which is actually built and tested primarily for Proton. That's why I'm really hoping this takes off. I'd honestly have preferred a stationary device, but now that the Switch is the only serious portable console they might be able to build a market there. Especially as people can just keep using their Steam library.
Too true. Steam Machines solved a problem for Valve (existential fear of a Windows store built into Windows), but didn't really solve any problem for the bulk of their customers (existing windows users).
For me personally, I value the openness and out-of-the-box hackability of this device very much and it will likely be the first handheld gaming device I'll buy since the Nintendo DS. I'm interested to see if that sentiment is shared more widely as well.
Valve seems to want to get in on a price that is more competitive with the Nintendo Switch, so its hardware specs are a bit worse it seems than the others in the market. The plus side to this is that the base model comes in at just $399, though that is with eMMC storage, while the next bump up uses NVME. The other specs seem to be identical across the 3 SKUs, though.
The trackpads a la the steam controller seem appropriate for the types of games that require a mouse on PC, which is unique in this product market. Gyroscopes are also built in, which I'd presume would work similar to the Wii U and Nintendo Switch for aiming. I don't think it'll be as good as a mouse, but I've found that aiming with gyroscope on the Wii U was much easier than using just the analog stick, so hopefully it makes FPS games with a controller more pleasant for me.
I also think it's interesting that it is using SteamOS, which had been kind of abandoned by Valve for quite some time. This also means that it is depending on Proton for game compatibility, which in itself is a huge statement on their confidence in the maturity of it. Without it, this would be a complete failure like "Steam Machines" were. If it works out well, maybe we'll finally see a real product instead of a tech demo from Dell and other PC manufacturers. Exciting.
[1] https://www.ayaneo.com/aya-neo
[2] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/onexplayer-best-performin...
[3] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gpd-win3-the-world-s-1st-...
EDIT: Otherwise 'runs the latest AAA games - and runs them really well' seems like oversell.
EDIT2: From their 'software' page: 'For Deck, we're vastly improving Proton's game compatibility and support for anti-cheat solutions by working directly with the vendors.' Yes!
I don't actually play games much anymore, but do people actually want a portable gaming device in addition to their phone? They always felt like gimmicks to me.
One of the biggest pain points of linux laptops is getting the drivers right.
That being said The screen is quite small if you are dealing with text & while you can do some typing with the steam controller you won't want to do too much.
If your general set up is doing a tiny bit of work while away from a dock (with mouse + keyboard + monitor) and you dock it most of the time I think this could be a really nice package.
Second pass, anti-glare ok-nits screen means I can use it outside. Format means I can use it on the fortnightly train. Whilst I don't want to code with it without being docked I can review, plan, read, have meetings, and make minor edits + run tests while sitting in the garden.
Having meetings outside will probably be the best use of time and justify the spend.
https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamdeck/images/vide...
Looks fairly attractive otherwise.
I must say for programming or office related workstation, a non-joystick version will be better. But if we want a lite programming pc that's able to be docked that can also act as multimedia and gaming, it's suitable.
Well if the controller can be detached (maybe nintento patented them?) like switch it'll be awesome.
GPU: 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.0-1.6GHz (up to 1.6 TFlops FP32)
RAM: 16GB LPDDR5
Display: 7", 1280x800, 60Hz
OS: SteamOS 3.0 (Arch-based), KDE Plasma desktop
Storage: Onboard 64GB eMMC/256GB NVMe/512GB NVMe, microSD slot
Let's see how Pat Gelsinger do.
So for a device like this you'd probably compare it to an iPad. The latest one is 264 according to a quick Google search.
That's not to say this thing's display is bad by any means, but it's worth noting.
I do recommend measuring the distance from your eyes to a gaming handheld that you're playing while it rests in your lap, and then measure the distance from your eyes to your work monitor; for me, these are only a couple inches different, so it makes sense to me that Nintendo is willing to let the PPI drop down to Apple macOS Retina levels with this year's OLED update, since they have some PPI room to work with.
Detailed breakdown for the curious:
Apple's macOS retina displays are all 220ppi +/- an insignificant amount:
MacBook M1 Air 13": 227ppi
MacBook Pro 13": 227ppi
MacBook Pro 15": 220ppi
MacBook Pro 16": 226ppi
iMac 4K Retina 21.5": 219ppi
iMac M1 24": 218ppi
iMac 5K Retina 27": 217ppi
Apple's iPadOS retina displays are all 264ppi, except the 8" Mini which is halfway to an iPhone (probably to maintain fidelity at the much lower screen size?):
iPad 7.9" Mini: 326ppi
iPad 10.2" Retina: 264ppi
iPad Pro 11": 264ppi
iPad Pro 12.9": 264ppi
Apple's iOS retina displays are all 460ppi, with negligible variation, with the Mini offering more support for the "maintain fidelity at small sizes" thought above:
iPhone 12 Mini 5.4": 476ppi
iPhone 12 6.1": 460ppi
iPhone 12 Pro 6.1": 460ppi
iPhone 12 Pro Max 6.7": 458ppi
However, the nearest competitor to this Steam device is actually the Switch, so let's look at that. These numbers might be off by a few points, but essentially Nintendo seems to maintain the exact same resolution and just sizes the pixels based on that:
Nintendo Wii U 6.2": 158ppi
Nintendo Switch 5.5" (Lite): 267ppi
Nintendo Switch 6.2": 237ppi
Nintendo Switch 7" (OLED): 221ppi
And finally, Valve's entry here is nearly an exact match for the 2021 OLED Switch:
Valve Steam Deck 7": 215ppi
Having the battery as low as 2hrs is brutal. I know the early Switch consoles weren't much better running AAA titles like BoTW but they've revised the chipset a few times since, and newer models floor at ~4.5hrs (3hrs for the lite).
I'm all for more competition, but I'm not clear on who the intended audience is for this device.
I'm suspect games like Among Us, Mindustry, Poly Bridge or Human Resource Machine or Life is Strange will boast a good battery runtime (just scrolling through my steam library).
USB-C charging also opens the door to some quite large battery packs (Dells sells a 65Wh power bank)
IOPS is important.
For random 4kb blocks / second
SD Card => 2.1 [1]
SSD => ~200 [2]
[1] https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/reviews/micro-sd-cards/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS
And that's comparing good SD cards to good SSDs.
As I was saying, bad SD cards can be REALLY bad. The difference can be over 1000x. Anything that depends on being able to read ANY small piece of information regularly in a reasonable amount of time from disk would simply not be playable.
If this is Debian/Arch OS, I'd assume they are writing to a system folder.
If the game is on the SD Card - it will be read from the SD card.
Sure, if the game needs to randomly write data to disk (I assume this is much rarer) - then it would write to the system SSD as usual.
It's the same way I wouldn't say that film is optimized for storing lots of data with horrible access cheaply. It just happens to be what it is.
SD cards also have the drawback of having pretty limited write cycles compared to any SSD.
Plus you're gonna be targeting a much wider userbase for the time being by not targeting SSDs.
So then yeah, sticking with a load screen _might_ be easiest. But if the tooling supports it, it might be even easier to just not worry about loading and having to make a loading screen, and let the engine handle that stuff for you. UE5 at least seems to be going in that direction.
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.
The Wii U was a failure, but I feel (and I guess the sales can confirm that) that Nintendo learned from their mistakes.
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.
The rumors were discussed a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27288653
Didn't turn on your PC for a week? Enjoy a 45-minute wait while Steam downloads and installs yet another giant update, preventing you from playing anything until it's done.
If this is going to be like that, I'm out. Even though a device like this is what I've been looking for.
Does anyone know why hardware product launches tend to be region-constrained initially? Is is for shipping/logistics reasons, or legal/tax/etc stuff?
Software/SaaS launches never have these constraints, so I figure it must be shipping related, but that would amaze me. Is there still no company that makes international shipping painless/simple? What would be the difficult part for Value here?
I'm curious if more folks interested in portable emulation will go for this or wait for an FPGA-based Analogue Pocket.
Thanks you Valve for this awesome shopping experience.
Nothing they could have done.
this is what I am seeing :(
It claims to be a eMMC but goes on to clarify it is a PCIe Gen2 x1 connection. Does this mean it is just a m.2 card?
unfortunately, IGN's video says you can't upgrade the internal storage. I'd guess its soldered on.
https://www.ign.com/articles/steam-deck-valve-faq-big-questi...
They added "All models use socketed 2230 m.2 modules (not intended for end-user replacement)"
Seems likely that internal storage may be unofficially supported.
I feel like I am in the middle of a desert of gaming content right now... I can see the mirage of BF2042 and AOE4 on the horizon, but who knows how that is going to play out once we get there.
Maybe Netflix (with the recent EA exec acquihire) can pick up some of the AAA gaming slack with their even more gigantic pool of cash and inclination to greenlight and fund everything that even remotely sounds interesting.
I'm totally cool with a role reversal if Valve execs feel the need to master all manner of hardware. Someone else will eventually fill that software role.
Sorry, just to check... Are you saying you are genuinely bored and have nothing to play right now?
I am envious beyond belief.... I feel there are literally hundreds of high quality brilliant games out there in a real and virtual backlog I'd love to play, but time is limited and I'll realistically never get to them :-/
I guess maybe in a world where every console controller isn't compatible with most PC games, cheaper than the valve controller and more ergonomically designed than the valve controller...maybe if Logitech, 8bitdo, Razer etc. didn't exist and didn't produce cheaper or better controllers it could have worked....
Even some games you'd think should work well with a controller don't really. Unepic's a 2d side scrolling action-adventure game, you'd think it'd be controller friendly, and there are console ports of it, but the PC version uses 10 hotkeys for various spells and abilities. I managed to map i think 4 or 5 of them to controller buttons, but it meant more going through the game menu and reassigning spells than it would have using a keyboard.
This is why I think the Deck has done it right: include all the standard buttons plus the extra stuff.
So presumably they are working on this
https://twitter.com/RobotBrush/status/1416150442841628677
which would appear to imply you can upgrade the 64GB eMMC with a NVMe SSD by yourself.
AMD APU
CPU: Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32)
GPU: 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.0-1.6GHz (up to 1.6 TFlops FP32)
BTW Somehow Sony didnt delist Control from PS store despite performance problems, their official reason for delisting Cyberpunk :)
Edit: IGN "hands on, but not really hands on" https://www.ign.com/articles/steam-deck-hands-on-impressions... Once again Control by Remedy in EVERY fricking shot of the screen. Even the shot where Valve employee is "casually" sitting with the Deck on his lap, the screen is facing the camera and you can see Control right there :D And the mystery is solved, Control is playable in mid to low settings at 800p with Ray Tracing turned off, something you cant do on PS4.
(I'm not sure if SteamOS v2 and below were already Arch-based, but it's interesting to know that v3 is, given that the Steam Linux Runtime is mostly Ubuntu-tested)
> For Deck, we're vastly improving Proton's game compatibility and support for anti-cheat solutions by working directly with the vendors.
Edit: I read further, it is a fully fledged PC. You can install or do whatever you want to it.
I am actually excited for what this would mean for Linux gaming
It could either be an amazing upgrade for mobile gaming or incredibly janky.
At least for me, I know when my Switch finally kicks the bucket (and maybe even before then) I'll seriously consider a Steam Deck instead. I've been using my Switch almost exclusively for indie games, and even though there is quite the selection of them for the Switch I could have played basically all of the indie games earlier (and then some) if would have had access to my Steam catalog. So unless you really want Nintendo's 1st party (expensive, never-dropping-in-price) games, this really looks to be a no brainer.
I would love to see more competition in portable land, but it will take a lot to pull me away from the Nintendo Switch.
I'm also wary as Valve hardware has had an up and down history.
Edit: Yes you can install Windows: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/faq This might be a good companion for an Oculus Quest headset. $299 for Quest plus $399 for this and you get access to the Steam library of PC VR games in addition to the Quest library.
IGN: Can I play VR off of it?
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.
IGN: So you can try it, but your mileage may vary.
Pierre-Loup Griffais: Yeah.
Curious to know how they map the buttons / pads / sticks to PC game inputs, or games have to manually provide input scheme for this system.
If I were into gaming, I'd definitely consider getting one of these.
I am in the market for a gaming laptop that can dual boot Linux as my work machine. If they did an Alienware or ROG style build I'd very likely buy that.
Btw if anyone has recommendations for me, I'm looking right now. Looking for a 15-17" heavy ass laptop with minimum 32gb ram, quality 4k or close display, and as much performance as I can find.
* 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.
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.
As for Valve hardware, the only clear flop was Steam Machines -- which weren't Valve hardware at all.
I think it's odd to focus purely on the mass market success of Valve's actual hardware (Link, Controller, Index) since these can all be considered experiments by a company that can afford to fail, and since these have all been widely praised as the best-in-category. Clearly they know how to make great hardware; they just haven't done anything mass market yet. Who knows, maybe the disappointment with Nintendo will fuel sales for the Steam Deck.
If they keep trying, one day the stars are going to align and their hardware dream will hit, but today isn't the day. I give it 18 months to live, no chance at a v2.
I feel this device is too "on the nose" for what PC enthusiasts want. Its a Nomad, not an iPod. Its a Game Gear, not a Gameboy. Enthusiasts will just shrug at its lackluster performance and tiny screen vs just paying a bit more for a gaming laptop or desktop with several times the performance.
I also don't like the idea that if you want to play many popular games, especially those beholden to anti-cheat systems, you have to run Windows and now you have to go through the hassle of buying a Windows license and installing it on this machine. A lot of kids might be disappointed when their parents buy this and they find out they can only play stuff that works on Linux and that stuff may not include the big AAA shooters they want to play (mostly due to anti-cheat being windows only). Worse, Win10 costs $120, which is a pricey upgrade for a device that starts at $399.
I think its often in technology that the customer doesn't know what they actually want. They don't actually know how to ask to be surprised or what that surprise might be, afterall its a surprise! So they just ask for slightly better or tinier versions of the things they already own, which may or may not be the right answer.
Products that actually get successful tend to surprise and break expectations and introduce new concepts. This device just seems like its not doing any of that, but on paper its what PC enthusiasts claim they want, but I'm guessing won't actually buy. I don't know what its EOL will be, but its definitely going to be a super-super niche device, at bit like how Android tablets with things like full size USB slots were seen as potential iPad killers just a few years ago, but failed to get any real marketshare. You can still get an Android tablet, but its just a lackluster device compared to the competition and super-super niche. This device may also have a very long life as potential ammunition against Microsoft trying to seal off Windows from gaming again. It'll always be in production even as a loss because its so politically and economically important to Valve to be able to keep MS from locking them out with the MS store.
The Steam Controller with its one pad/one stick approach was...interesting but I just couldn't adapt to it for most games.
GPD Win Aya Neo Smach-z
The first two have actually shipped units. I own the first gen Win (underpowered, quality issues but an amazing first effort), and am awaiting my Neo.
Neo seems more powerful but bulkier and more expensive. I have great faith in Valve to produce hardware to last. The latest Gen GPD'S are looking great!
Any thoughts?
Too much of Steam's game library just wasn't designed to be used without a keyboard/mouse, and touchpads + mappable controller buttons aren't a great substitute, particularly when the game you're playing still thinks you're using a keyboard.
There's a certain level of polish expected from console gaming. People expect to be able to launch a game and have it just work; they don't want to be futzing with controller mappings and adjusting graphics settings for 15 minutes before they can start playing.
To be clear, I think these are surmountable problems. From what I've read though I'm not sure if Valve has done anything to address them. There's a lot of talk on the website about having access to "your entire Steam library", and a mention of how the touchpad lets you play games designed with a mouse in mind. But again, based on my experience with Steam Link, it's not really that simple.
Bummer the charging port is on top. That's inconvenient if you're playing and charging at the same time.
Still, an exciting device!
I'd argue it's the opposite. I always struggle with my switch as the cable get in the way or smushes into my belly. Top port is the way to go!
It is a Nintendo Switch for the PC crowd, but that comes with inherent compromises and nothing in the way of exclusive software.
I personally do not think I could justify spending money on this over a new laptop instead, but I hope it is a really great little niche product for some people.
The lowest SKU is probably selling at a loss, and will never really sell units on the scale of xbox/ps5/switch in order to make a profit. This is pretty enthusiast stuff, probably in line with the Index or Steam controller.
Touchpad, Touch Screen, Stick, D-Pad..
Maybe Valve is going about this the right way. Focus on Proton now, and if it takes off, game devs will make the effort to do a native port.
I don't know about their investors, but I assume they aren't pushing for an IPO because Valve works well and is profitable as it is.
They have a very loyal consumer base which trusts them and which is keeping them afloat, they don't want to blow that trust
> On Steam Deck, your games run on a different operating system than the one on your desktop PC. It's a new version of SteamOS, built with Steam Deck in mind and optimized for a handheld gaming experience. It comes with Proton, a compatibility layer that makes it possible to run your games without any porting work needed from developers. For Deck, we're vastly improving Proton's game compatibility and support for anti-cheat solutions by working directly with the vendors.
Of course, it doesn't magically make every Win 10 game run on Linux without issue. Your favorite games may not even work, but it does make most games playable. More info: https://www.protondb.com/
Half-life was supposed to be a demo for GoldSrc. It never took off and I can’t name a single 3rd party GoldSrc game. Likewise, Half-life 2 was supposed to be a demo to sell the Source engine but I’ve yet to see a successful Source title that wasn’t Valve-based.
They tried with the Steam console (the name of which escapes me) and I don’t know anyone who owns one (despite the excellent controller). Now we’re at them trying their hand at a Nintendo Switch competitor. Based on their past failures, I don’t see this being any more of a success.
Steam itself is their biggest success of course, though that is not hardware. I do believe Steam took good perseverance and good execution to achieve the success that it's seen. (Re: perseverance, remember that when Steam first came out, people really hated the idea!)
Source has Titanfall as well as its spiritual successor, Apex Legends, which use a modified Source engine.
Have only given the specs a cursory look so far but seems the GPU is (understandably) significantly less powerful than, say, a laptop GPU from a few years back.
Companies like Apple, Valve, and Microsoft build out ecosystems and take massive risks doing so, only to have someone who made millions if not billions of dollars off of these systems to come knocking.
Epic made millions if not billions off these platforms. Nintendo is locked to their store. So is Xbox and PS. Not sure why anyone else that designed it that way would be any different. If it's a closed ecosystem, it's just not for you.
If Ram pickup trucks sold door chimes on the dash's touchscreen, Epic Games would be suing for access for their alternative marketplace.
May as well shut it all down. Everyone else gets to completely freeload off of your multi-year, if not multi-decade, multi-million dollar investment.
Form factor is another consideration. You'd probably still want a dock and mouse/keyboard. I'm not sure how well that game would play on a controller.
I hope that controls on this device will be decent and the games are playable.
Beyond that, it's not clear to me what this will support. If I can play Fallout, any of them, I will seriously consider buying this.
In other words: your wireless XBox controller (or whatever) should work fine and you can play Fallout whatever as long as it is supported by Proton or you put Windows on the thing.
Might still order one to my home in Germany, but probably will wait for further news on proper international availability first.
In any case, I hope this will create a fire under Nintendo's ass to release a proper Switch Pro. They've had the handheld market to themselves for far too long, and the lackluster upgrades are showing it.
Then you have games like Hyrule Warriors where it just feels actively bad.
Lots of Switch Games actually run a lot better under even a very mild overclock (Nintendo even officially lets the CPU get OC'd during loading screens for limited periods of time, to great effect).
This is beating the Switch on most aspects outside of first-party Nintendo library.
I've definitely had issues with 1st party titles, but after going into the settings and forcing 720p, some did go away. At the end of the day I mostly play my Switch in docked mode with an mClassic, so the forced 720p doesn't typically detract from the experience.
However, many 3rd party titles on the Switch are just actively bad ports. Omensight, for example, which is an otherwise good game has the most atrocious port I've ever seen on a console. I would agree with you that the thread parent is off-the-mark in saying that Valve will do worse here -- PC settings are notoriously better than what you get from traditional consoles since you can actively choose to optimize them to your environment, instead of hoping some developer took the time to even try.
I have a pretty extensive Switch library and can definitely say that performance of ports is really hit or miss.
This is also missing that PC games are already designed with a broad range of hardware in mind and nearly every game for PC has extensive settings to control graphical quality vs performance.
Sure, maybe a device like this might have performance issues but I don't think the Switch completely trumps this in terms delivering playable experiences.
Playing in handheld mode, there should be no input lag at all.
[0]: https://www.resetera.com/threads/hollow-knight-switchs-input...
OFDMA really has the potential to decrease the lag of cloud gaming when playing wirelessly.
2 why would you just let the microsd card dangle in the breeze like that?!? It's a necessity at the storage sizes provided and ruining that slot will make the whole device a big hassle to use.
I see the same things that I didn’t like about the Steam controller here. Cramped layout, tiny buttons, and no clear goal of what it wants to be except “everything”. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.
The hardware doesn't seem to be apt for the latest AAA games, but that's maybe fine - the majority of Steam games aren't really that taxing in terms of hardware.
However, if they ramp up investment and actually make Proton viable for the majority of titles, this is very bad news for Microsoft / Windows.
The achievement here is nothing short of astounding.
For what it's worth, I no longer have a Windows install. If a game doesn't have a Linux version and doesn't work on Wine/Proton, I just live without that game.
I will say that I give Valve major kudos for their work on Proton even with its limitations. It's one of the primary reasons that I continue to use Steam and haven't done much with GOG or other sources (despite GOG's admirable stance on DRM)
Protondb[1], which collects user reports, says:
18,811 games reported
15,261 games work
IIRC most problems with proton arise due to various hardware issues or incompatibilities.
But to each his/her own. For some that may be completely sufficient if they’re not playing AAA games.
800p resolution is a bit disappointing, but I guess that's the only way to get a good frame rate without a massive power-hungry GPU.
it's a trade off
the main selling point here is it's portable, let's not forget that
If it can't do at least 1080p on a bigger screen, it would be a deal breaker for me, to be honest. I'm considering reserving one but it would see plenty of big screen use.
I am extremely happy to be wrong! Sure this is great for gaming, but it will also bring Linux to a lot more people too.
Btw Looking at their link for developers and they accidentally a word here:
> This site is a resource for Steam developers - here you can about developing for Steam Deck, developer kits, and more.
I also wonder if this device will lead to more games targeting Linux as a first class platform.
"Steam Deck is focused, of course, for running Steam but also advertised as an "open PC" that can run other software too."
"That said, Steam Deck is a PC so you can install third party software and operating systems."
I wonder if one could run a custom Linux distro on it? It looks like a sweet device, but I'm not enough of a gamer to spend that kind of money on a device I can only play games on.
also I like that this may actually upset the mobile game space which frankly is a stain on the gaming industry imo
They will monetize UI skins for this as well it seems.
PC games that don’t need a keyboard/aren’t designed with a keyboard as a core input are already available on most consoles (e.g. many Steam games with controller support are already on the Switch).
Not saying this won’t work out — I think it will likely do fine.
But I don’t think this was meant for the more hardcore PC gamer, and a lot of controller-only gamers are likely fine with consoles (and for their portable fix, the Switch). So there’s a pretty niche set of gamers this will attract.
In fact, Zen 2 is not the name of a CPU at all, but the name of a technology family of CPUs that are, as you pointed out, x86.
But you'd be stuck playing p2w RTS games and gachas.
All those things still stand, but I'd love to see Apple silicon on non-Apple hardware. It's a quantum leap over anything else on the market.
Everything else looks really strong though.
ARM-based Deck possible?
"Steam Deck runs SteamOS 3.0, and thanks to Proton, your build will likely work right out of the box."
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.
Might also see if I can just wipe Linux entirely and go only Windows.
Not in performance of course. But the form factor and the experience.
I mean, 1.6TFlops is still far from an RTX 2080 (10.1 TFlops), by a factor of 10, but still…
0.12345679012345678
Assuming ideal scaling with resolution, this should be similar (or better) in terms of performance as playing in 4k on 2080
> I wonder what this might mean for the Valve Index.
-> Could this somehow lead to a standalone Valve VR headset at least just as good as the Vive?
The Index has a 1440 x 1600 resolution per eye, at 120Hz.
By your own calculation, that means
>>> 1440 * 1600 * 2 / (3840 / 2160)
0.55
So, if I follow correctly, 10x less performance for half the number of pixels, meaning 5x worse than playing in 4k on a 2080?
Which means that embedding this specific hardware in an Index absolutely wouldn’t do the job.
Correct?
My question was "Could this lead to some improvements on the best experience I’ve had so far in VR?"
Not "What does this mean for devices I have never cared for?"
But I definitely see your point; it’s just not what I am interested in ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's smart.
Any recommendations?
For decent handheld controls, simply pair a PS4 or PS5 controller (or even an Xbox Series X controller) with your phone/tablet over bluetooth.
All you need now is a phone mount for the controller and you are set. For example, google: "PS5 controller phone mount" for a big selection of options available for sale.
The only downside to this type of gaming is the latency. Some people don't mind the latency from streaming games, but it really bothers me.
That’s listed separate from the track pads. The sticks have capacitive touch?
I can see these being stacked like bricks to make a house when valve has to stop supporting them because it's too expensive. There's a reason an iphone or switch has a sizeable profit margin - you pay that back in RMA, returns, and general support.
But could something like this run Cyberpunk 2077 decently?
Also i hope it is very modular, and components can individually be upgraded rather than having to buy a new one every X years
A real shame it's not available in Australia at lunch.
It's a real shame, because this is some neat hardware I wouldn't mind splurging on.
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!
Battery life doesn't seem too good.
Though the performance may get a lot worse if you're using it on battery power, or the device gets hot enough to get throttled.
Edit: I mean, a linux you could control, ssh into it, install stuff etc...
Edit 2: Wow! Apparently, you can do all of this out of the box.
Last time I did this with Centos 8 and the AMD proprietary drivers, it looked like this
sudo yum update -y (reboot)
sudo yum install -y kernel-headers-`uname -r` kernel-devel-`uname -r`
sudo dnf -y install --nogpgcheck https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.... https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/el/rpmfusion-free-relea... https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/el/rpmfusion-nonfree...
sudo dnf config-manager --enable PowerTools sudo yum -y install dkms sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo=https://negativo17.org/repos/fedora-steam.repo sudo dnf -y install steam kernel-modules-extra libva-intel-driver
(reboot)
( https://www.amd.com/en/support, grabbing the RX580 driver)
tar -Jxvf amdgpu-pro-19.50-967956-rhel-8.1.tar.xz cd amdgpu-pro-19.50-967956-rhel-8.1/ ./amdgpu-pro-install -y
(reboot)
Mind you, you don't need the AMD propriety drivers. I'm also still trying to figure out what my long term home will be for my workstation once Centos 8 becomes Centos Streams.... so will be seeing if Rocky or one of the others becomes my long term home.
ARM for desktop and server x86 for handheld
i love it
Maybe they have solutions lined up for the problems that will come with low/slow storage, but we'll see!
The Switch also tops out at 64GB with the new OLED model, whereas that's the starting point for the Steam Deck. There is also a history of consoles being offered with a wide variety of different storage sizes (Xbox 360), and I don't remember that causing any serious problems for them (if you ignore the humongous size of the Xbox dashboard at the end of its lifetime, which is an avoidable problem).
They will just use an SD card. Yeah it's not as fast as SSD but it's the low end device.
The Nintendo Switch it the largest console market > 50% and mobile is the biggest market in gaming. So going with that model but with gaming selection of Steam is a smart timed move.
The size of gaming markets are mobile first as the biggest, then PC, then console in terms of gamers with revenues about split in thirds equally across mobile, PC and console -- including handheld the biggest part[1]. Mobile has a bit more than the others and when handheld it not included in console then it is the top. Mobile has 2.2 billion gamers, PC has 750 million, console has just a bit less than PC around 700 million [1]. Though each stationary console has had less than the last in total players, most players are still growing on mobile and even PC [1]. There are also more game developer on PC by 2 to 1 over other platforms, mobile second then console. Developing for console is costly and time consuming.
Consoles that go handheld are smart, even better if they are more open and allow game studios of all sizes to launch on it, games will be better at the high end, even if there are more bad games.
Since consoles like Microsoft Xbox, Sony Playstation and Nintendo are so locked down and hard to enter for indies/small/medium players, PC going handheld/mobile is going to be great for indies/small/medium game developers extending the PC player base. Mobile opened up stores for everyone in 2008-2012, Steam opened up 2012+ and game markets should be more open, especially console as you want to sell hardware and the more games the better.
The first iteration of the handheld hardware may or may not hit, even the WiiU failed initially, but the beauty of Steam is there are no games you can or can't play on specific consoles. They don't need launch titles. Steam Deck gen 1, 2, 3 will all have the same games. Steam has a competitive advantage here on selection due to their openness.
Consoles and PCs are stationary and that is why mobile does so well, you can play anywhere. Handheld does well as well because you can take it with you and can game at a desk or on the couch or at work. Game streaming changes this a bit allowing you to game on your devices on the go, but having a beefier device that can play all types of games is surely going to have at least some market. Lots of times I am working on my PC and shutting all down to game seems too tasking but you could play Steam games on the Deck while keeping work open or allow gaming to fit in your day more when you aren't at your PC.
Very, very excited for the larger potential market for PC games on a handheld console! This massively helps indie/small/medium players get more gamers and handheld is a unique new market for PC games.
nice
Ended up giving up after two months and went back to either GeForce Now or my Windows partition, depending on the game.
Brought to you by the maniacs at Valve who lost their minds somewhere around Portal 2.
Just listen to that mobile AMD64 go hnnnnnngggggg
Edit: LR 4 and 5? what monster was this designed for?
I’m glad to see Valve attempting to be creative again. But this is an idea we all drew in our 8th grade composition notebooks.
and? Consider this is HN, which is largely populated by people with the disposable income that this doesn't much matter.
> with the attractiveness and weight of the Sega Nomad
... which competed with the Gameboy
> Complimented by the extensive Linux gaming library.
First, this is much larger than you might expect.
Second, it's only limited _on the device_. I see this being used as a thin client into a desktop gaming PC that you already own, which presumably will be running Windows.
Consider this is the gaming community which already owns PCs and consoles that either outperform or have larger, richer libraries than this thing.
> ... which competed with the Gameboy
You mean the more successful, lighter competitor with a better library?
> First, this is much larger than you might expect.
Really not that big considering the demands of actual gamers. Especially compared to already established platforms
>I see this being used as a thin client into a desktop gaming PC that you already own
$400 thin client
Now valve, for the love of god, PUSH NATIVE LINUX GAMING, proton only as a way to supplement the library..
Reduce your steam tax for the companies that provide a native linux build
I will not buy this if your main selling point is "proton"
As for the price, 419€.. very bad marketing, 399€ would have been perfect... you got greedy for 20€, that'll hurt sales
Edit: Just looked up the conversion rate, right now 399 USD is 288 GBP? Weird. The mid tier is 529 USD, so something like 382 GBP. Upper tier is 649 USD, or 468 GBP.
That we're getting overcharged on this side of the Atlantic isn't new though, but happens with basically everything.
I don't however know how much the import duty is, it seems to be a number that is very difficult to find :).
The idea that this would move the needle seems like wishcasting. Ten percent less of 0.89% of the Steam hardware survey is a couch-cushions rounding error. Meanwhile, Proton is a really good way to get hold of that rounding error as-is and works with surprisingly few problems across most games I've tried; For the amount of noise that 0.89% of the audience makes, Valve's spent quite a lot of time-and-effort to come up with something that works quite well.
i can't play most multiplayer games, yay
i can't play most AAA titles because of DRMs, yay
proton is a waste of time
most of the time you have to fiddle with weird settings, portable console appeal more to casual people, majority of them are tech illiterates, if something bug or doesn't work properly and requires tweaks, it'll backfire at both the devs (they bought the game after all), and valve (they bought the console)
if they don't push native builds, it'll flop due to lack of proper NATIVE ecosystem
"daddy, why this game doesn't work, this console sucks"
this only asks for a proper windows based machine, if XBOX releases their XBOX portable, it's game over for valve
> i can't play most multiplayer games, yay
> i can't play most AAA titles because of DRMs, yay
That's on the developers and publishers.
> proton is a waste of time
It works well enough for a lot of people.
> most of the time you have to fiddle with weird settings, portable console appeal more to casual people, majority of them are tech illiterates, if something bug or doesn't work properly and requires tweaks, it'll backfire at both the devs (they bought the game after all), and valve (they bought the console)
That sounds like PC gaming in general. If you're talking about Proton messing up, there's lots of warnings that things might not work right.
> if they don't push native builds, it'll flop due to lack of proper NATIVE ecosystem
Way to miss my point. There's lots of games with native Linux versions: https://store.steampowered.com/search/?&os=linux <-- AFAIK, Steam's "os=linux" means without Proton.
with that new console however it can change
valve has to make it compelling for them, by lowering their tax for example
Even assuming wild success on this products part, that would only drive that number up a few percent since I don't see production for these running particularly high.
It might make more sense to encourage developers to provide proton support for anti cheat (like what Valve are actually doing leading up to this device's launch) rather than asking AAA developers to invest additional time on support that is arguably a waste of resources and certainly something of low priority.
Aside from that, my own experiences with Proton are far more positive than yours. I've hardly ever had to tweak things for it to work. Occasionally, I need to use an older proton version for a game but that's hardly a chore.
- supporting a platform
and
- hopping everything is compatible
will they hook and reimplement EVERY WINDOWS APIs?, what about Windows 11? what about DX 12 and DX 12.1?
Oh, now imagine that windows 11 now requires X security features that are impossible to emulate with proton, how will that work?
native vs non-native
that's the difference
i'm not against Proton, i think it is a very nice idea to SUPPLEMENT my library
nothing can beat native games, built for the device and its constrains
and and an other WORSE thing
CONTROLLER SUPPORT in steam
valve never encouraged people to support controllers, WORSE, 99% of games expect you to use XBOX controller, as a result XBOX controller are displayed even if you use a DUALSHOCK one
valve could have provided APIs so they can feed games with proper icons etc etc, but nothing
so many wrong things, including the focus on proton as main selling point
that's part of the reason why you'll see majority of people install Windows instead, and "the year of linux on the desktop" will yet again be killed due to poor decisions
i'm kind of tired of trying to provide arguments, i reply to that kind of comment on a daily basis, it's painful to see linux people stuck with their WINE, it's WRONG, it's BAD, it's COUNTER PRODUCTIVE
microsoft helped a lot to drive linux adoption up with their crappy Vista/Win8/10 releases, but yeah, let's focus on emulating a bloated OS instead!
you don't come up with such a device over night, they had years to think about that, they focused on emulation
we will see who was right in the end, i think i am
valve never encouraged people to support controllers, WORSE, 99% of games expect you to use XBOX controller, as a result XBOX controller are displayed even if you use a DUALSHOCK one
valve could have provided APIs so they can feed games with proper icons etc etc, but nothin"
Out of all of your rather dubious points against Valve's plans, this is by far the most absurd. Have you heard of a little thing called Steam Input? Valve in fact have provided an API that does everything you've listed including feeding the "proper icons". It's up to the developers to use it. That would not change even if the game was 100% native because xinput is still the industry standard. Controller support on Steam is second to none.
"you don't come up with such a device over night, they had years to think about that, they focused on emulation
we will see who was right in the end, i think i am"
No, I think it's safe to conclude that you are wrong even from this date. You're asking Valve to compete with a platform that has all the games available. You're also assuming that native is always better than non-native but as I've already seen, a crappy native port is often beaten in both performance and feature set by Proton. Instead of asking developers to gamble away valuable time on the OS of a device that could be a flop, it makes a lot more sense to release the device with the games currently available in the market in mind and then give developers an incentive to add special support for a device that is actually out in the wild in the hands of paying customers.
You also really do not need to implement every Windows API, you only need to translate draw calls to Vulkan and then a small subset of API's that actually relate to games such as sound. Your example doesn't make a lot of sense, the only way a security API would matter for Proton is if the game is from the Windows store but most people do not in fact use the Windows Store even on Windows so games tend to get released on Steam as well - including even many Microsoft titles.
At the end of the day though, Valve's approach has made it so that I already do not miss Windows for gaming even with the current non-ideal situation with anti-cheat. If they adopted your approach, we would have likely had a small increase in the number of native games but most of the industry would have probably ignored such a call. It would also be very unlikely to magically make desktop Linux a real competitor. I think we need to stop chasing that dream because frankly, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The only way you would be able to compete with Windows and Mac is by having a similar marketing and UX budget and by removing or downplaying many of the attributes of desktop Linux that likely drew us towards it in the first place - package management, hyper-extensibility, the terminal, GPL licensing, etc.
I do not think it's worth it frankly. There is nothing wrong with being "niche".
I _assume_ it's linux, but that must limit the games to protondb and linux compatible games which, speaking from a lot of experience, misses quite a few.
What? So they ditched Debian?
>1280 x 800px (16:10 aspect ratio)
Yeah... that's like 2000s.
Seriously who what this? For those who can spend fortune for the PC games, they have better options. Those who can't spend that much, Nintendo switch is probably better for the gaming.
What an uninspiring name! (with unfortunate mispronunciations). Looks very interesting though, price point (starting at £349) seems very competitive.
Ah, the rallying cry of EDH/Commander players everywhere.
https://hackaday.com/tag/cyberdeck/
The reason why the switch is popular is the same reason why a long line of absolutely craptastic Nintendo hardware is popular: exclusive Nintendo software, which this platform will obviously not have.
Of course this is ultimately a definitional issue, but there is IMHO clearly a difference. I think rather than "mobile" the distinction might be "touchscreen only" gaming; contra some of the wild predictions I recall on HN about a decade ago, "touchscreen only" has failed to displace all other input mechanisms, because it's honestly not all that good. It works, and can be better than nothing, but I think it's hard for touchscreen to ever attain that transparent "flow" state where controls just disappear, and is table stakes for being a 'core gaming' platform.
The numbers are 13 million lite vs 85 million non-lite sales.
The mobile part is a meme, it's subsidized by the people who just want play Nintendo games (and the switch is the only/best way to do it)
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/10/nintendo_gamers_pr...
Which could just as easily be fulfilled with a tablet or a phone.
And in the case of valve deck, it even has to compete with the switch in the mobile space. It's a miserable position right out the gate.
Someone better go tell the rest of the game industry they're really misallocating their resources.
Dunno about Octopath Traveller, but I have no idea why your kids are playing Captain Toad without the controller, unless you just don't trust them with the controller or something. Camera controls are clearly better with the controllers. Deemo or something like that would be a better example, but it's also clearly an exception.
I can't take your post seriously, but just for posterity:
- The lifetime-to-date sales figure now stands at 84.59 million Switch units shipped worldwide since its launch in 2017
- Game sales for the year also spiked by 37 percent, selling 230.88 million units compared to 168.72 million units in the previous fiscal year
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/6/22422451/nintendo-annual-e...
The switch sells well because its where you have to go to play Nintendo games, but you just go on about sales figures. If it had no exclusives, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now.
This is a portable PC with a built-in screen and game controls. It's much closer to a laptop than a "gaming thing".
It doesn't appear to be set up to work without logging in to Steam first. That really reduces the portability.
Now that Nintendo depends on a single portable console, is there a risk that they'll go the way of Sega?
[0] https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/newzoo-games-market-num...
Raw spec peeping is something enthusiasts like to do, but I think they're a small chunk of the market.
But my mom bought a Wii back in the days. For herself. My mom doesn't usually play video games. And she is most certainly not at all interested in playing Doom or Hades (just because they're shown prominently on the webpage). But she liked Wii Fit and bought a Wii.
I honstly think the subset of people who would buy a Steam Deck to avoid buying a switch is so small, it would not put a significant dent in nintendo's bottom line.
Valve could try to create games that are more appealing to the typical Nintendo enthusiast, but I suspect the respective cultures are too different.
The switch is for everyone else - way cheaper, unique games you won't find on a PC, etc. Plus, co-op. I recently spent 6+ hours at my friends house playing Super Mario 3D World Deluxe. They got one joycon, I got the other. In my college dorm, we have a switch dock attached to a monitor in the dorm lounge. Split the joycons, and 4 people can play smash or mario kart. I don't see the deck supporting these use cases.
> 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.
https://www.steamdeck.com/en/hardware
But you can run emulators on all sorts of things. Hell, I first played through BoTW on a WiiU emulator on my PC. I still ended up buying a Switch and one of the first things I did with it was play BoTW again.
In this case, Nintendo has a large and dedicated fanbase, hardware that they (IIRC) sell at a profit, and a truly enormous warchest. They’ll be fine.
This thing has many things working against it..
1. Games were designed for Windows, but are now running Linux--some are buggy or don't work
2. If they have controller support it isn't always 100%
3. That SSD will fill up in no time
4. With Switch you can get split screen multiplayer, not many PC games bother with that.
So does the Switch's. That's why you get a fat microSD (which the Deck also supports.)
The switch internal storage is only moderately faster than loading off of cartridge or micro SD, which are both very close in read speed; ~100MB/s.
Taken holistically the Switch storage limitations mean games on the platform are basically targeting the micro SD specs.
The Steam deck's primary value proposition is playing your existing Steam(PC) library on a handheld. Games on PC have been targeting SSD speeds for a long time now. People will be used to SATA SSD or m.2 NVMe speeds. Customers buying the base model are NOT going to have a great experience with the terrible eMMC storage. Customers trying to run modern games off 120-160MB/s micro SD are NOT going to have a great experience either. Selling a PC gaming machine in 2021 with 2008 storage speeds is a recipe for disappointment.
The Steam Deck will be a great complement to traditional PCs for people who are already bought into that ecosystem. For people who aren't, the console offerings from Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft are similarly priced and have obvious advantages.
So no, I would disagree with that assessment.
The Steam Controller was a work of technical art (albeit without the centuries of experience in ergonomics its competitors had).
The Steam Link was a few years ahead of its competitors.
And the Steam Vive's Lighthouses were a literal light-speed ahead of the Oculus for a while.
Fully agree however that you're right that they're too small to support a hardware long past its release when the market share is too small.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/its-time-to-declare-v...
I have the Steam Controller: it's fantastic, so versatile, and everything it claimed it would be. I have the Steam Link: works great, brings my desktop to any TV in the house. I haven't used their VR equipment but from those that have, seems like basically the reason get Oculus instead of Valve is because of Oculus exclusives.
I've been dying for this form-factor for years, since long before the Switch came out. Valve has been losing tons of money from me in the form of purchases, because games in their library haven't been in the right form factor, so I've bought them for mobile and for Switch, when really I'd rather have bought them in Steam with a mobile-play option.
I've explored the mobile-phone-with-controllers-streaming-from-a-desktop option, and it's just not what I'm looking for. I've been looking for a feasible option in this space since the Razer Edge came out in 2013, and there just hasn't been a good one...not with phones-with-controllers-attached (have to stream), not with mini-laptops (bad ergonomics and performance), etc. I've looked into a number of homebrew efforts to try and get Steam games onto my Switch (streamed or otherwise) but it's just not worth the commitment of time and effort when I could spend the same $10 for that indie game I want on Switch instead of on Steam.
I reluctantly got a Switch two years ago. I was reluctant because although I've been wanting this form factor for years, I also wanted a device that was compatible with my Steam library. Since buying the Switch, I've only bought Switch games (and not a single Steam game) mostly because being able to play on that form-factor is worth the price-premium to me.
It's Valve's excellent record of delivery on hardware that makes this a pre-order for me. Super excited about this.
Granted, I agree that Valve did a genuinely poor job with the Steam Controller and Steam machines but in the former case, it was because even Valve themselves didn't quite understand what they had just made and in the latter, things were complicated by having to deal with multiple third parties.