I am really hoping some wizard makes Steam OS work on the Legion Go.
Don’t bazzite and chimera OS work on legion Go? They carry a lot of steamOS patches and features
Valve promised quite a while ago that they’d release a public version of SteamOS and they haven’t yet. Until they release it, the ball’s on their court.
The suspend feature is wildly important for me.
If I had to boot a game and shut it down each time, I’d only pickup the device when I had set aside time to game.
Since I can suspend and resume whenever, I pickup my steam deck all the time. I can play in the car and just suspend when we arrive or I can play for a few minutes while waiting for a meeting to start.
I can play while my wife gets ready.
Sometimes meets get canceled or there is traffic, so gaming sessions can really stretch out into a longer play time.
If I couldn’t suspend, I wouldn’t have played in those moments.
I used to like suspend. How is your battery life while suspended? If I left mine in suspend for more than a few hours, it’d die, or I’d pick it up and there wouldn’t be enough battery to continue playing without also charging.
Mine just lasts literally weeks, but I never tested it. It is so worry-free that I sometimes go multiple days without picking it up and when I finally do it has like 85% of battery and I don’t remember how much it had when I suspended it so I never even think about it. The TLDR is that the suspend in Linux works magically.
I feel like this really the killer feature.
I’ve seen a ton of digital ink spilled on all manner of positives, such as how amazingly-portable it is, or how it’s been doing wonders for the advancement of Linux gaming.
But, I’ve yet to see anybody—outside you—speak about how amazing the suspend/resume is. And, that for me, is the reason why I play on a SteamDeck almost exclusively these days—even though I have a small collection of games I can play on Mac. I have such small windows of opportunity, and appreciate I can still play a game, even for a little as a few minutes.
My experience with suspend has not been good - causing glitching and requiring shutting the game down and reloading from a previous save whenever I suspended in a cut scene. As a result I haven’t used it much due to those first couple of trials; maybe it’s better now.
I have noticed a slight reduction in framerates when loading back in from a suspended state but only on certain games. Namely High On Life
I was in the middle of Witcher 3 when I got my deck, and pausing during a cut scene (and some are feature film length, it fells like) caused the video to go slide-show and the audio to get choppy, and there was no recovering the game. I basically had to go back to the previous save and play back to that point. PITA. Something similar happened in one other game (can’t remember at the moment) and I just gave up suspend unless it was something simple / mindless like Yoku’s Island Express.
If you don’t use suspend mid game, what do you do? Do you shut the device down in between gaming sessions? Or do you just save and exit the game and suspend the OS level?
Yeah same, being able to stop playing immediately is huge for me. There are a lot of games I would struggle to play through without it.
Diablo 4 not playing nice with suspend (due to the always online requirement) was the main reason I couldn’t get into it and didn’t buy it after the free to play week ended.
As much as I love Valve I think it’d be weird for a 3rd party handheld to boot directly into the Steam UI. I get that there aren’t any viable alternatives atm, so I guess this is where we are. Wouldn’t hurt with a more store-neutral solution, in the end.
It would be better if I could boot up and chose my launcher just like I choose Netflix, HBO, or Hulu from my Roku home screen. Of course, that could be accomplished with a custom front end / explorer in Windows, but since MS is pushing more into the OSX “we own the experience” with tons overhead and reduced customizable UI, and none of the other launchers support Linux, it’s pretty much just a pipe dream.
That might happen if any other launcher chooses to natively support Linux. Right now Steam is the best option.
Yeah, Heroic or whatever just isn’t good enough. Joe Random doesn’t want that kind of jank on his gaming appliance.
If I am not mistaken, you /can/ have that be a thing, as I am fairly sure the actual SteamOS is open source and Valve would /probably?/ allow that to come stock on a potential alternate handheld…
But kind of their whole thing is it is optimized for the hardware set up they are using.
So… you could theoretically have an or multiple competing Not Valve but Yes SteamOS Decks, but from the standpoint of the economics of building a market viable gaming machine, Valve would still probably have a serious edge in that market for a while.
Almost like Valve actually understands the entire tech industry better than nearly any other tech company or something.
I’m fairly sure valve has openly said they plan for SteamOS to be used by other handhelds
I never considered one of the windows-based portables. In fact when I saw that the steamdeck was linux based and was well received, I jumped.
Once I saw how well it worked, I stopped dual-booting my laptop and get to live in linux all the time.
If the article is correct and the market is starting to push this way, that is great news for linux, linux-gaming, and everyone.
I’m glad that Linux is getting backing from a huge company in this way. However, at its core the steam deck is a Linux based device with a heavily tailored UI running on known hardware with 1st party drivers. Consumers have been using Linux in this way for years without realising it. Sure, this one gives you far more control than you normally get but (in my opinion) the problems with Linux desktop come from support for a wide range of scenarios and peripherals. That hasn’t improved enough for me to switch last time I tried.
Yeah I am baffled at this point anyone at all would consider a MSFT portable PC.
Linux has finally actually arrived, Proton works amazingly well compares to just a few years ago and honestly Valve as a manufacturer of gaming peripherals has a shockingly good track record for solid build quality, even if some of their devices are not super popular.
Oh right did anyone mention you can emulate basically anything other than current gen consoles on a Steam Deck, and the operating system is not going to fight you on that?
Yeah I am baffled at this point anyone at all would consider a MSFT portable PC.
Gamepass is still amazing if you are primarily in the MS/Xbox ecosystem. And not all games work in Linux. And, increasingly, modding (for what few games “support” it) is dependent on third party applications that are rather annoying to set up under linux.
Oh right did anyone mention you can emulate basically anything other than current gen consoles on a Steam Deck, and the operating system is not going to fight you on that?
Does Windows “fight you on that” either? Also, it has been a minute, but I want to say that some of the better emulators are still “windows only” and best run through proton?
I love my steam deck and it (and the ever increasing stupidity of win10) was a big part of finally migrating my personal (gaming) computers over to fedora. But if I were even ten years younger and still cared about competitive gaming and all the bullshit out of Riot et al? It would still be a no go.
And now it has put me in a REAL weird position with stuff like the Yakuza/LAD games since I got into those on Gamepass but would love to grind on the go and… (although, apparently there are save decrypters for Kiwami 2 and 7… but still no good way to get HDR to my big display from my PC).
Linux gaming is (FINALLY!!!) viable. But it is still not perfect and depends on your interests.
You’re right, its not perfect, but the ball is now rolling down the mountain, picking up more and more snow.
The technical foundations are now clearly evidenced to be viable, all problems that remain more or less revolve around whether or not a developer decides to intentionally not support linux via a Windows Only AntiCheat that is actually a RootKit or not.
And thats up to momentum of overall users on linux, which is up to other kinds of games making the platform more relatively popular, which we already see happening but of course cannot predict everything about.
Maybe some kind of game developer who is a bit jaded with MSFT for various reasons will make a significantly popular Linux Exclusive game. Who knows?
But yes uh Windows does often fight you in ways when you try to emulate. Most of these ways can be overcome by reasonably competent Windows users, but its far more straightforward on say, a SteamDeck.
In this case it comes down to the experience of the noob user, who will be scared and confused by the experience of maybe i went to a bad website and downloaded a virus, windows is asking me to make sure i know what i am doing and i dont, wow this sure seems risky!
On SteamDeck and SteamOS its less confusing and scary.
Also, theres the whole Pluton thing which I am still baffled people do not know about. The latest gen of AMD and i believe now also Intel CPUs are designed with a basically below ring 0 bit of always active, network enabled microcode than runs below Windows, even below the BIOS/UEFI, and this is a physically seperate part of the CPU that is not possible to physically remove without destroying the CPU.
The whole point of this is advertised as being necessary for security, but it actually isnt. It interfaces with Windows in a way it /almost/ certainly cannot on Linux, and its capable of accessing literally everything on your computer.
It is highly likely that what it will actually be used for is DRM at a below the OS level.
Oh you wanna install known binary with know signature of latest release of an emulator? Nope, not allowed, no matter what you do.
It hasnt happened yet, but the security minded section of the linux community have basically already worked out that its entirely capable of doing this and its absolutely within MSFTs uh, philosophy or market strategy or whatever to do this.
Its also literally documented to have been developed as a result of MSFT not being able to figure out how stop XBoxes from being hard modded and softmodded to allow it to run emulators, amongst other things.
Anyway in regards to emulators on linux vs windows, so far in my experience ive had great luck using linux native emus, usually work better tham windows ones through proton in most cases for st least me personally.
I think a lot of people would be more interested in the SteamOS over windows on handhelds if they got to try SteamOS first and see how smooth it is. But without full knowledge on it, a lot of them either assume they’ll like windows more because they already know how to use it, or they assume it’s steam UI only with no desktop mode (even if people won’t actually use desktop mode much, they want it as an option).
I am shocked, shocked I tell you that MSFT using PC Gamers still have not realized they are MSFT fanboys basically exactly the same way you had console fanboys a decade ago.
But, but, they spent so much time learning how to do so much weird esoteric bullshit to make Windows actually run games well, and nearly none of that translates over to a Linux system!
You mean my decades of mastery of an increasingly enshittifying Operating System is… worthless?
That a better alternative exists if I would only take the time to do literally any work to learn something actually out of my comfort zone?
…
I think the modern equivalent of Socrates getting old and complaining about the youths being disrespectful and dancing too lewd of dances is basically people who styled themselves as early adopters and technologically savvy in their childhood and early adulthood, and then just entirely gave up on that while basically simultaneously still claiming to be tech savvy but also being inherently afraid and dismissive of any /actually/ useful new tech innovations.
I just realized something…
At some point, Valve will release a Steam Deck 2 - It will be slimmer and even better than the first. Maybe in a couple of years I am guessing
Then that will be it because other companies will be releasing cheaper devices with their Steam OS. Steam simply cannot compete with them on price, and the feature set (other than faster chips) will mostly be locked in.
In short, there will be now Steam Deck 3 - Gaben strikes again
Half Life 3 - Hybrid Action Shooter / Alternate Reality Game.
Is that random person you are walking past in AD 2038 a PMC guarding your local refugee camp after climate change has destroyed the world’s economy?
Now theyre a Civil Protection Officer!
Then the game instructs you to find a real life crowbar and present it to the Steam Deck 3 camera for verification.
HEV suit voice: You know what to do.
