Valve’s Steam Deck makes a brilliant case against walled gardens | Hacker News Reader

Valve’s Steam Deck makes a brilliant case against walled gardens

fastcompany.com

98 pointsjeppester31 comments

I submitted this because it describes very well why I'm myself overjoyed with the Steam Deck. And on top of that it's an interesting case to bring into the ongoing discussion about walled gardens - and for instance especially Apple's resistance towards opening up.

I'm in awe of how powerful and versatile the Steam Deck is.

First of all most modern games, and especially indies, run perfectly well on the device.

Then it can emulate almost anything with very little setup (using emudeck). Wanna play couch coop PSX games? Connect two controllers and your TV, change the controller order and that's it. It just works!

There is also a bunch of streaming options available for cloud gaming and streaming from PC/PS4/5. I've been using Chiaki for PS5 remote play, and it's great.

The cherry on top is that even if Steam Deck fails. It's still an awesome handheld PC that I'm sure will have a passionate community for a long time.

Had it been a walled garden, it would have lost almost all of its appeal. I also own a Switch and it feels so limiting and boring in comparison.

Personally I am really excited for what comes next - if the Steamdeck is at all popular (which it seems like it really will be) we are going to see Nvidia and AMD finally really start to duke it out for a proper mobile GPU. Up until now we have been dealing with hand me down chips and side project afterthoughts.

The Steam Deck APU is a custom APU most definitely not a hand me down chip.

Imagine smartphones had good OS. The technological potential we threw away in favor of candy crush operating systems. Not as a gaming platform perhaps, but as multitools.

Really hope steam is successful here, will maybe buy it myself at some point.

The PinePhone is a thing, can run postmarketOS, Arch, Ubuntu Touch, etc. It's still pretty rough, however.

Everyone likes to joke about "the year of the Linux Desktop", but I would argue the Steam Deck has come closer to actually achieving that goal than any device before it.

Want proof? Go have a look at the reviews on the Discover Center, KDE's Flatpak UI. Almost every review now, by a very wide margin, is posted by someone with the default "Steam Deck User" name.

Its true - Steamdeck finally made it JUST easy enough for the somewhat motivated and JUST worth the time investment to learn. Who would have thought that gaming would be the thing that finally made Linux more mainstream?

> Who would have thought that gaming would be the thing that finally made Linux more mainstream?

Probably a lot of people considering that gaming was the elephant in the room for why a lot of people were still using Windows.

Yeah, I get the sentiment but for my moderately technical to highly technical friends, it's clear that gaming is the biggest thing that has kept them on Windows (either solely, or dual-booting) at home for the past ~10 years at least.

It's the various multiplayer fads that really pose an issue. When an important part of your social life is trying the game of the day with a bunch of your friends, incompatibilities, delayed releases, and all of that really suck.

I'm ditching windows finally in favor of steam OS 3.0 on my desktop

Is it finally out yet?

The year was when proton came out for me. These days I have Linux on my gaming PC and can play virtually everything flawlessly. I don’t even notice it’s running on a compatibility layer. It all just works.

I don't think it really counts as a desktop. Although it does lead to better software support for, and exposure to, linux on the desktop.

I see it more as separate device segment that linux could very well take over, like it has for phones and servers.

My next PC will almost certainly be a Steam Deck. Already been using Linux for decades now, but that portable form factor is just the perfect size for my own needs/wants. Been wanting something inbetween a smartphone/tablet and a laptop for a long time now, but netbooks were still a shade too large (and underpowered). Steam Deck fills that wish perfectly. Now we just gotta hope Valve don't "kick it to the curb" like they did the Steam Controller (best game controller I've ever owned).

As long as all the packages you need are available as a flatpak, then you should be good. My current issue blocking me from using the deck as a full fledge PC is that package availability is limited, ex: installing docker right now would require me to disable the read only system and possibly have the next system upgrade remove docker.

I have done some light programming on the deck and it's a pretty fun experience, but I personally won't switch just yet. For playing video games though, I'm all in.

I assume you use it with a USB-C hub and keyboard/mouse/HDMI plugged in? Because its touch keyboard is crap, and ssh is super slow on it for some reason.

Yes, touch is indeed crap. I used a Bluetooth keyboard and USB C monitor. For mouse, I used the deck's right trackpad.

I think it unlikely that the deck will get cancelled as a product. The Steam Controller was a commercial failure, interesting as it was technically.

But Valve can't make the deck fast enough, they've got a months-long waiting list. I think they've got a hit on their hands, at least if they can catch up with demand.

I also suspect the platform will find lots of uses other than gaming. It's just a really handy form factor, with lots of controls. Not that this does Valve any favors -- as the article says, there's likely little margin in the hardware.

20+ years of hard work by the Wine team has paid off!

A lot of work on Wine was done by Codeweavers and as far as I know, Valve subcontracted Proton development to them. Both wine and proton are open source and patches flow both ways with a lot of the same people working on both.

I'm not an expert on the topic, and I might be wrong, but nothing I've ever seen suggests there is any animosity between any of the people working on these projects. This is easily a 'everyone wins' story :).

indeed it is. It's fantastic even.

I wonder who is suggesting this animosity.

My only issue with protonis that too many folks are referring to proton without knowing about wine, which has caused some misunderstandings and misapplication of credit.

I'd like to see it mentioned somewhere prominently that proton relies on wine.

As a Linux user, this makes me very happy.

Steam deck hasn't hit Indian shores so there is a chance it would be here by the time deck 2 is released but oh boy, linux is in business now.

How likely is it that success leads to SteamOS being another Android that drifts further and further from being open?

huh? what do you mean by this?

We have to get a bit in the weeds here. Does the name Linux refers to just the kernel, or does it also include the GNU userland and the rest of everything on top that desktop distros are made up of (Gnome/KDE/etc). Because Android uses the Linux kernel, as does ChromeOS, but calling them Linux doesn't exactly mean what people are trying to say when they say "it's the year of the Linux desktop".

So the worry is that the Steam Deck is also going to be its own weird fork of Linux desktop, and fixes can't be used to improve Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch/etc.

Android started off being its own thing, except for the kernel. The Steam Deck is built on desktop Linux tech, so they would have to start over if they wanted to move away from that. That doesn't make their path guaranteed to be the same in the future, but it does make what you describe less likely.

They may be bought by someone bigger and then shutdown to protect the existing wild gardens. There are many analogies. Astrid[0][1] and Wunderlist[2] come to my mind.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrid_(application)

[1] https://github.com/tasks/tasks

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist

Valve is a privately held company (owned by its employees) that makes ridiculous amounts of money, has no real incentive to sell, and Gabe Newell has publicly stated many times in the past that Valve selling out is extremely unlikely, and some kind of hostile takeover is virtually impossible.

Newell said that there was a better chance that Valve would “disintegrate,” its independent-minded workers scattering, than that it would ever be sold.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/technology/valve-a-video-...

The difference here between Valve and most all of the infamous tech buyouts of history is Valve has no VCs looking to cash out who get final say, or public investors looking to maximize returns.

I agree but Gabe is not gonna live forever....

Android never used the Linux userspace. Steam Deck is using KDE. I'm optimistic.

Any news on the rollout?

When will it come to new territories and are there any plans to ramp up production?

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