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Comment by johnflan | Hacker News Reader

It feels like this site is a marketing effort yet to reveal itself.

2022: Valve releases the Steam Deck -only slightly more expensive than the Nintendo Switch- allowing the user to play all past Nintendo games, using the power of Linux. Oh, and it has Steam support as well. Oh, and you can and may jailbreak/root it out of the box. Oh, and it runs SteamOS, based on Arch. Oh, and it doesn't have joy drift (OK, don't know about that one, we'll have to see).

That's my biggest concern with the Steam deck. It's too expensive to not replace the analog sticks and buttons from time to time but I haven't heard Valve commit to long term parts availability.

Valve do have a lot of experience with hardware at this point, if it was their first device I would be worried. Also they have committed to repairability with the tear down video if I remember correctly.

Then again, experience with hardware design didn't stop Nintendo releasing a critically flawed design for a ~25 year old invention.

You can't buy replacement components for the Steam Controller. You also can't buy replacement components for their VR controllers, including for the thousand dollar Valve Index, which by the way also suffers from *drumroll* analog stick drift.

Pros:

- based on Linux

- runs most Linux/Windows Steam games

Cons:

- based on Linux

- runs most Linux/Windows Steam games

Seriously: I think the Switch will still offer the better "out-of-the-box" experience because all Switch games have been, you know, developed for and tested on the Switch.

For the Nintendo specific stuff, for sure (though a Switch cannot handle all Nintendo stuff, can it?). For the Steam stuff: its a big plus which Switch wouldn't have (compare proprietary platform with the relatively open PC platform), as no other handheld in this price bracket can have access to so many games (requiring these resources). If the community takes off (and I got reason to believe it will) then this is going to be a gamechanger. Consider something like Lutris. Its not "out of the box" but its easy to work with.

If I can play any decent fraction of my Steam library on a Steam Deck then it will automatically have a better out-of-the-box experience than a Switch on which I'll be limited to a relatively small number of games, most of which will cost me an extra $69 each.

Valve knows this and built a compatibility review team https://youtu.be/_OAqvtlgfGA and rating system. Though of course it's still marketing material from the source you should trust the least - the maker.

If the Steam Deck crashes and burns, it won't be because of the out-of-the-box experience, I think. Besides, the Switch's out-of-the-box experience during launch wasn't exactly stellar either: https://youtu.be/Cb-srOfRqNc

I say all of this as someome who will probably buy a steam deck -

"allowing the user to play all past Nintendo games, using the power of Linux"

At least for most folks in the United States, it's illegal to do so. Personally I'd like to see all of the old Nintendo games free to play, but that's not how it works under the current laws.

As a child of the 90s, I grew up in the heyday of wide scale music/software piracy. Unfortunately, now I'm at a place in my life professionally where I'm unable to participate in any of those activities.

The beauty of the switch (and many of the other recent nintendo hardware platforms) is that it allows a legal, low friction, relatively cheap marketplace and device to download and play many of their older games.

It's far from perfect (not all games, reoccurring costs to access, no actual ownership, etc.), but for me, and many other "normal" people who aren't going to to set up emulators and download ROMs, it's not half bad. That's a huge value prop for the switch that the steam deck won't be able to match.

Thankfully other countries/legislations exist, then!

Agree! Hopefully one day we'll have more agreeable legislation here.

> allowing the user to play all past Nintendo games

As long as they are willing to ignore copyright law, which let's face it they totally are because copyright law is pretty stupid about this.

> using the power of Linux

Technically accurate but misleading statement. There's nothing particular about Linux that enables this.

> and you can and may jailbreak/root it out of the box

There is no need. It is not locked down so nothing need be broken. It's a PC with an OS and some software pre-installed on it.

I wish all marketing was like this then!

Whoever it is, it irks me that they seem to remove the previous months scans

And an amazing one at that.

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