Do you remember back in the early 2000’s/2010’s when steam machines for gaming tried to break into the market and there were laptops and gaming rigs you could get with steam os?
I’m asking because I wonder how that’s going to go. It wasn’t particularly successful back then, and given MS’s hold on the gaming market and people buying into that OS, it seems like offering a skew of handhelds like the steam deck in both Windows and Steam OS will cause sales to drop. If I walk into Best buy or Microcenter and want to purchase the steam OS version of the ROG Ally but they only have the Windows one, I’m going to be disappointed. Same would happen in reverse.
That’s what happenee back in the early aughts too. People didn’t buy the steam version because they wanted the Windows version and so both versions did poorly (probably more poorly than they might have done otherwise).
That was before proton and Linux gaming was a joke back then. Now the opposite is true.
I feel like the fact that steam OS wasn’t ready for prime time played a significant part but, still, it doesn’t speak to wanting one or the other OS and not having it readily available. Amazon and other online only retailers would be able to carry stock in both. But brick and mortar stores (even with their online component) don’t always have that option. Converting people to proton/steam is from windows is an ongoing struggle.
I only have anecdotal evidence here, but I know two people who have switched their main gaming computers and laptops to linux recently, and in both cases the Steam Deck played a big part.
I’ve tried convincing people to move over, but in these cases, it wasn’t until they owned the steamdeck for a while and wanted to do something like adding emulators or games from another source that they dropped into desktop mode on the SD and had that experience.
I need a better analogy, but right now I think the Steam Deck is an outstanding Trojan Horse for linux adoption. Many people won’t bother going out of their way to use it as a computer, just a console, but it’s there if they do.
The Steam machines were a similar idea but linux wasn’t useful for gaming until DXVK, several years after the Steam machines. I was dual booting when they came out simply because running games on Linux at that time was a nightmare
