The Steam Deck has been surpassed – by a fork of Valve's own experience | Hacker News Reader

The Steam Deck has been surpassed – by a fork of Valve's own experience

theverge.com

9 pointsxrd7 comments

I'm really excited about Bazzite. I see a variety of devices that are varying levels of compatibility. All are about $500 on eBay. Has anyone found a less expensive device on Alibaba that can go lower than that?

Or, is this worth experimenting with using a different type of hardware entirely, say a touchscreen laptop, etc?

The Verge keeps talking about how Bazzite did a 1:1 clone of the Steam OS UI. I don't think they understand that Bazzite is just running Steam in Big Picture mode, and that you can do the same on any Windows, macOS, or Linux device.

It's not the same, though I wouldn't call what Bazzite is doing a clone either. The thing that differentiates Steam Deck's Big Picture mode from what's on Windows or MacOS is that it integrates with a Gamescope, a micro-compositor that runs instead of (rather than on top of) a traditional desktop window compositor. It's in large part what makes it feel console-like.

Nah, Steam Big Picture Mode itself is what makes it feel console-like for the most part: it runs fullscreen, has controller support, and if you set it to autostart on logon (and enable automatic logon for your user account), you pretty much get a console-like experience.

Of course, Gamescope adds to that experience by providing an optimised compositor dedicated to gaming (basically adds features like FSR and HDR), but it really is Big Picture Mode that is the star of the show here.

Disagree. If it were that simple then everyone would be using Windows on their Steam Decks running Big Picture mode on startup. But even given the significant advantages, like broader game compatibility, they don't.

Gamescope is the key. It what allows someone to use Steam Deck without dealing with all that desktop PC stuff and the kludgy fixes. Without the need to deal with Windows suddenly deciding to throw you through the user setup wizard again or dropping to desktop to download the new graphics driver. Games starting in windowed mode, games not handling task switching properly, games not handling sleep properly. It's a fixer for all of those, unless you specifically want to tinker you never have to drop to a desktop GUI with a Steam Deck.

Big Picture on Windows is simply another shell on top of a traditional keyboard and mouse driven interface. But combined with gamescope on Linux, it turns a handheld PC into a handheld console.

> If it were that simple

It is actually that simple. I do that on my GPD Win Mini, which is dual-booting between Linux (CachyOS) and Windows 11. Both boot directly to Steam Big Picture Mode. I've also got Bazzite installed on the same machine, and the user is xperience is identical. Of course, Bazzite has other magic like integrating OS updates into the Steam interface and a bunch of other conveniences, but none of them are really dependent on gamescope.

> everyone would be using Windows on their Steam Deck

There are many reasons to avoid Windows on the Deck, or any gaming machine for that matter - like bloatware, telemetry/spyware etc. And with a gaming optimised Linux distro, you can even get better FPS. There's a lot more to a gaming distro than just tacking on gamescope.

All the other issues you've mentioned are Windows-specific issues, simply running Linux can alleviate all of those. Nothing to do with Gamescope. Same with handling sleep issues - on my GPD Win Mini 2024, running CachyOS and KDE, sleep and resume works perfectly during gaming, without needing gamescope.

Gamescope isn't what is turning the PC into a console, it's Steam Big Picture Mode, which is made better by running it on Linux, which doesn't have all the annoyances of Windows, making for an ideal distraction-free experience.

Don't get me wrong, I still think gamescope is cool - especially for enabling FSR scaling for games which don't support it - but it isn't as essential to the console experience as you make it out to be.

If you gave someone who's only frame of reference was a PS4 or Switch a PC handheld running a dual boot setup with Windows and a desktop-oriented Linux distribution, it would baffle them to the point where it would end up left in a drawer. You're not looking at the market from outside of your own perspective, the friction points for others aren't going to be the same as they are for you. We're talking about people who don't know what a partition is, who don't understand what drivers are. Not that I don't sympathize, when I want to play games I don't want to deal with that shit either.

Bazzite has gamescope-session, I'm fairly sure CachyOS does too, so they have most of the same UX advantages when used that way. How does KDE Plasma smooth over bumps like games running in Windows mode? You can just alt+enter right? Well, provided you know the shortcut key to open the onscreen keyboard, and know the shortcut key, or even know any of that is possible in the first place. Even a small thing like that ends up being a problem if you aren't knowledgable about gaming on a PC. Then you get weird edge case games like Katamari Damacy Reroll which starts in Windowed mode and won't even let you change it until you play the tutorial, it's kind of a shitshow... on everything but gamescope-session.

The goal of Steam Deck and SteamOS in general is to provide a user experience as streamlined and seamless as a console. It mostly succeeds and a big part of that is that there's no need to deal with a PC UI. I mean, I like KDE Plasma just fine, if I have a keyboard and mouse, I'm using it right now, but if I'm holding a handheld gaming machine I simply don't want to deal with that, I want to select my games and have them play with minimal jank. I know from experience, from doing this handheld PC gaming thing since I bought an OG GPD Win, all of the problems.

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