Comment by rpigab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rpigab | Hacker News Reader

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I love mine, I'm not sure why anyone would play verified AAA games on it though, they drain battery, cause heat and fan noise, when I can play thousands of indie games for hours, emulators (with EmuDeck, with the convenience of speeding up most of them so I can skip through slow & grind-heavy parts), use it as a media center, or connect it to a KB, mouse and monitor in desktop mode.

I'd never install Windows on it, in fact, I've uninstalled Windows months ago from my gaming desktop that has a RTX 2080 S on it, and installed Debian + KDE (on Xorg for now because Wayland + Nvidia is... complicated). It's probably mainly thanks to the efforts of Valve with Proton (but also all projects that they rely on, like WINE, DXVK, etc.) that I can now play 90% of my games on Linux, some with tinkering in launch options. Please let there be more Linux in competitors, even though Valve's is fine, we need developers to understand that MS Windows is not the only target anymore.

>I'm not sure why anyone would play verified AAA games on it though

Because people like different things.

>I'd never install Windows on it,

It's ok to love your steamdeck with linux - I don't have windows on mine either, but everyone has different things they like and that they find are ok. Lots of people have tons of free games off the epic game store or through game pass and thats ok.

>we need developers to understand that MS Windows is not the only target anymore.

Well there's an official steamdeck verification program - thats clear. It just doesn't matter to the overwhelming majority of pc gamers.

Of course, that's ok to like different things, but what I'm referring to is the people who bought a Steam Deck expecting "Verified" games to play well, when they eat through battery way too fast to play confortably in the way Valve advertised.

When I tell people I love my Steam Deck, I also warn them that it's not for everyone and that there are downsides and you have to find compromises. I know that my software developer background helps a lot with the tinkering, so the value I get is different from what non-technical people would get.

I also have an extensive Epic Game Library, mostly from free games grabbed in one click every week, and using the third-party launcher Heroic that supports Epic and GoG, I can play them on SteamOS on the Deck, sometimes with tinkering too (solved with winetricks / protontricks mostly).

And I feel that the industry as a whole would benefit from giving players a true choice in the operating system they want, and not just between GNU/Linux and Windows.

With the OLED model the lowest you'll get is maybe 1.5h on heavy games. That seems .. okay to me. It's not super great, but it's more than enough to play a more demanding game during a break or something.

I played nontrivial portions of the Dead Space and Resident Evil IV remakes on the Deck over the past year and I didn't mind it, once I got used to the low frame rates, anyway. BG3 was similarly fine until act 3, though it admittedly falls apart then.

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