WTF is Steamdeck?
With Valves announcement yesterday of the launch of their Steamdeck “console” (term is used loosely here).
There is an interesting time ahead, as we’ve had SteamOS, SteamBox’s, Steam Controllers, Valve Index and running Steam in Linux for ages now.
However this is quite interesting as they’ve changed the base of their SteamOS platform to Arch Linux (formerly it was based on Debian). This is an interesting turn of events, since it’s more in line with what users would expect from a Desktop OS, being somewhat on the bleeding edge of driver and library support.
This means better performance, and actually being able to move at the speed of software instead of having a 2 year delay of maintainers dragging their feet getting packages into their respective distributions.
Ultimately it sounds like the bootloader won’t be locked and you’ll be able to install whatever you want onto the platform, which is great news for anyone interested in portable computing.
This now brings to the forfront the incredible work that Valve and co, have been doing with their Proton, dxvk, vkd3d allowing running of Windows games, at even faster than native speeds in some cases.
A console without the Pain
No need to re-buy your games again (Nintendo is hilarious brutal for this). You get access to everything you already have on Steam.
I can’t even count how many platforms / times I’ve bought the likes of Darksouls, Skyrim, Slay the Spire, the Binding of Isaac etc.
That pain now disapears as I’ve already paid for them once (or more times in theory).
Conclusion
While I still think Native Linux games should be the end goal, I am a realist in still being able to see this as a great thing for consumers and users alike. Anything to move away from the stranglehold that Microsoft has on the PC market is a great thing in my books. Great work Valve, and I can’t to get my grubby hands on one of the units.
The Wait
Is it 10am PST yet??? That’s when the pre-orders/reservations drop.