The temerity to repeat ‘soon’ for well over a year is one of Valve’s worst traits. One wonders if reflexively lying to customers is intentionally baked into their culture.
I think Valve has good intentions and wants a lot of things done soon, but they just don’t have enough people on their Steam Deck team to get things done at the speed they want.
Your guess has the right feel for me too. A lot of people were hungry for OLED and this is the trade off.
I’m just ready for Linux to grow. Maybe it is naive to think that one distro will carry us much further but with the proper solution I can easily imagine a lot of people dual booting their PCs soon.
This right here is why they do like one interview a year, lmao.
What he actually said was “We’re hoping [it will be] soon”, but for whatever reason people’s reading comprehension skills go out the window whenever there is a Valve interview.
The reading of his intention is plain; regardless my curiosity stems from a similar interview that was issued before the Deck launched and not this particular conversation.
Back then advising “not anytime soon” would have set a fair expectation but Valve chose to serve pablum and continues to do so regardless of the number of interviews/communications that have been released in the past year alone.
I spent a few minutes going over old interviews and didn’t find anything insinuating that would be “soon”. Most I could find was:
We actually want to work with them to make sure that, if they want to use SteamOS or offer a SteamOS based alternative, that can be done
Once it’s widely available, not only are we excited to see other manufacturers making their own handheld PC gaming devices, we’re excited to see people make their own SteamOS machines which could include small PCs that they put next to their TV
I think it’s pretty silly to expect Valve to release SteamOS when it doesn’t even have a (immutable) package manager, among many other missing features.
Honestly, what would you get out of SteamOS on PC anyway? Just install Linux, set up the drivers you need, launch Steam at startup, and default it to Big Picture Mode.
Boom, SteamOS.
I dunno but I tried that and it didn’t work at all. Had to go searching around online for how to even install a damn game. Then when I launched it, the game started running at like 2FPS.
The same game runs on the same PC on Windows at 144FPS.
And that’s the story of the time I tried to game on Linux.
I dunno but I tried that and it didn’t work at all. Had to go searching around online for how to even install a damn game.
Just for shits and giggles I fired up a VM and did a clean Steam installation from Flathub. This is the default:
Steam Play (=Proton) is on for supported Windows games. For unsupported games it’s off.
Had to go searching around online for how to even install a damn game.
Wait, you had so much trouble to look if the “Enable Steam Play” checkbox was ticked? 🙄
Installing games is same as Windows, download and launch via Steam. As for lack of FPS, willing to bet you had an Nvidia card but didn’t install the drivers for it.
SteamOS is a less flexible distribution of Arch Linux. You can do the same and even more with other distributions. Even on the Steam Deck.
In what way? Sure… If you compare just big picture mode to an entire OS, but that’s hardly what was meant.
My desktop with endeavour OS and SteamDeck can do all the same things… In fact doing some things on the deck is more tricky because it’s limited to installing flatpaks.
Right, and I never said it was only Big Picture. What can it do that Linux + Big Picture can’t?
Does it have more oomph? More chutzpah? More mileage? More HP? More pep in its step? More ability to go the distance? More firepower? More brass? More boldness? More flavor?