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Comment by jbombadil | Hacker News Reader

This is amazing news. I wonder if this means we’re going to see a TV/home console with Steam OS soon.

I am currently borrowing a friend’s Steam Deck to try it out. It’s absolutely amazing, particularly around starting and stopping gaming sessions.

The only thing holding be back from buying it is that the processing power is a couple of years outdated at this point. It still works fine for older AAA games (or newer lighter games), but it can’t keep up with new AAA.

Having the option of newer hardware with the Steam OS experience is amazing!

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> I wonder if this means we’re going to see a TV/home console with Steam OS soon.

They existed, and they didn't really take off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer). But it was 10 years ago, things are different today

Notably the Steam Machines didn't have any equivalent to Proton, they could only run native Linux games out of the box. Needless to say that didn't work out.

Proton is a wrapped/enhanced version of Wine, which has been a thing forever. A large chunk of the Steam library worked perfectly fine on Linux before Proton.

... for modest values of "fine". Compatibility, stability and performance have improved immensely the last couple of years, for a large part thanks to Valve!

Yeah, WINE may have been around forever but its development was massively accelerated by Valve dumping truckloads of money on CodeWeavers to have them work on fixing games full-time. Plus neither of the two most popular anti-cheat solutions worked in WINE at all until Valve lobbied them to support it.

It wasn't nearly as streamlined though. Average person wants to just click play on Steam, which is the biggest thing proton brought to the table.

>A large chunk of the Steam library worked perfectly fine on Linux before Proton.

Source? My recollection was that it didn't. Wine had awful direct x translation, I'm not sure if it could do dx11 at all when the steam machine came out. DXVK is a proton project and without it few games could actually run at all.

> Wine had awful direct x translation

That's not fair. Vulkan didn't exist when the original Steam Machines launched. Wine's Direct3D implementation also had different goals than the DXVK project, such as supporting macOS, older hardware, and non-gaming DirectX uses.

Sure, but GP's claim was that the statement "Notably the Steam Machines didn't have any equivalent to Proton" is false.

It doesn't matter what's fair. It's whether it worked or not that counts. It didn't, now it does. That's an awesome positive step.

I don't think it's good to be rude about other peoples' work without a really good reason :)

The steam deck is a steam machine.

I think the performance thing isn't that big of a deal with the deck yet.. gaming at 720p 30 or 40 fps still works quite well on the device even for recent AAA titles ... You can always install Steam OS clones on Lenovo Legion Go/Asus rog ally etc.. and get a decent experience.

Where it is slightly annoying is the anti cheat/the recent Sony shenanigans about their overlay not running in Linux/such issues.

But with such huge PC gaming library...i don't think I'll run out of new games to try on the deck any time soon...

Seems like the hardware upgrade for the Steamdeck will be very soon...

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-introduces-ryzen-z2-series-c...

Edit: although some people say the slide meant that the processor was coming for "devices like the SteamDeck", not literally the SteamDeck

https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/ryzen-z2-extreme-announced

> some people say the slide meant that the processor was coming for "devices like the SteamDeck", not literally the SteamDeck

"Some people" being Pierre-Loup Griffais, who works on the Steam Deck at Valve.

https://bsky.app/profile/plagman.bsky.social/post/3lf36y66gg...

> Seems like the hardware upgrade for the Steamdeck will be very soon

I doubt it, the Lenovo Steam-OS option is utilizing Ryzen R2 Go, which has the same RNDA architecture as Valve's handheld and pretty similar (though slightly better) specs.

There's newer architectures but they chose the same as OG Steam deck for... compatibility? Ease of OS support? Something else? I doubt Vavle would help Lenovo with support on a device they'd shortly eclipse with better specs.

> I doubt Vavle would help Lenovo with support on a device they'd shortly eclipse with better specs.

Why wouldn’t they? It more or less locks the user into the Steam store where Valve gets a cut of every sale. That’s their primary income stream.

> I wonder if this means we’re going to see a TV/home console with Steam OS soon.

You can build one yourself pretty easily and just install Bazzite [1], basically SteamOS for generic PCs on it.

You can select "Do you want Steam Gaming Mode?" "Yes" on the download and it will automatically start into gamescope & Steam Big Picture Mode.

1: https://bazzite.gg/

This is very achievable today with off-the-shelf hardware paired with ChimeraOS or Bazzite.

Not really the same plug and play experience as a Steam Deck offers though.

I personally wish that Framework works with Valve to release a version of Steam OS for their motherboards, so one can retrofit an old Framework laptop motherboard as a TV console.

Well, yes, you need to know how to boot up an installer and go through a typical Linux distribution installation process. After it first boots though, it can be handled solely via the Steam UI.

I just discovered Bazzite and am excited to try it. Just built a PC for my kid and Windows hates it. Can’t run for 10 minutes without a blue screen. I’d wanted to try an Atomic Desktop originally but thought the gaming support was too weak. Hoping Bazzite gives me stability and the gaming ecosystem…

If you are running into BSODs right off the bat, that sounds like you could have faulty hardware (bad memory, sketchy PSU, etc).

Agreed, it’s worth cleaning contacts and reseating the memory modules to start with.

I recommend SteamFork which is a bit closer to upstream SteamOS. It's an install and forget kind of experience.

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