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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

I don't play games almost ever, but I'm going to buy all the products Valve releases soon, just to support their OSS efforts. They seem to be the only vendor that's opening stuff up, rather than locking it down.

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I had barely played games for years, and got a steam deck just because it seemed like a cool linux device I could use both for gaming and tinkering. it has definitely gotten me back into gaming in a big way, the experience really is very nice.

Yes! The Deck is the closest I've gotten to getting into gaming. I especially loved the "press the power button and your game is immediately right there" aspect of it.

I ended up selling it to a friend because I enjoy making things much more, but the Deck is such a fantastic device.

It's a great device, I mainly use it for emulation. The fact that it's properly an open platform is amazing.

Same here! I actually stopped playing when I moved entirely to Linux, and have been running on laptops without a good GPU solution since then.

I bought the SteamDeck because it looked like a cool product and I liked the openness ("it's just running Linux"), and I love it. And it got me back into gaming :-).

I just wish my hands wouldn't cramp on hand-held devices. I've never been able to use handhelds for longer than thirty minutes.

Goes for console controllers too.

Maybe you need larger controllers ?

Also possible the touchpads are better for fatigue than joysticks

Apologies if you've already ruled this out, but hand pain is very often caused by strain/injury from further up the arms, the shoulders, or even the neck. You may find that pulling your shoulders back or relaxing them, or adjusting your arm posture, or straightening/relaxingyour neck gives you less pain while playing.

This is my experience. I played some Xbox here and there and every once in a while fell down the Factorio hole but I wasn’t gaming a ton. I got the steam deck somewhat cause it was cool, and somewhat as retail therapy but now I play it almost every night. I love playing smaller indie games on it, it’s a great device. Compare that to my Switch 2 and I’ve played it about 1/100th of the time I’ve played on the Deck. The Switch 2 is nice and all, just the Deck is way more flexible.

Replaying my favorite GBA/DS/etc games again on the Deck was so much fun. Huge screen for my (older) eyes, ability to speed up/rewind/save slots, and other tweaks if I wanted were all a blast. I played back through some of my favorites as a kid and enjoyment and nostalgia were both off the charts.

The steam deck, especially the low-spec variant, was sold at very low, likely negative margins. They make huge profit on their games, but if you don't buy the games...

They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear. If you subtract the GPU, you can get an comparable Beelink for ~$350. ~$500 would be the zero-margin price for a Steam Machine. It seems to me that the only people willing to pay an extra $150 for a mid-range GPU that's not good for AI would be gamers.

Not to mention that the Beelink comes with a Windows license, and the Steam Machine doesn't.

I do buy quite a few games, which usually end up unplayed. A few times I do binge one, so it's generally worth it for me. I'd like the Steam Machine for playing games in my living room with friends etc, even though it might end up unused, but the OSS support really swings the scale towards "take my money".

> They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear.

I can understand that, OTOH I have a $1500 gaming PC (probably worth far less now--I built it over a year ago) for explicitly that purpose. What I don't have is a modern, low-power living room HTPC with native/first-class Linux support on which to run Kodi (I have a custom one that's quite long in the tooth). If I could dock a steam deck in my living room and use it for Kodi 80% of the time with games for the remaining 20%, why should Valve care? I have already given Valve hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in game sales.

Anybody who has a gaming PC isn't the target market for the Steam Machine. They're going after the console market with the value add of "also it's a real computer that can do real computer stuff".

I assume Value is happy if you buy just 1 or 2 games for your Steam Deck or Steam Machine. It's the people that buy exactly 0 games that they claim to be worried about. IOW, not consumers, but companies buying work PC's.

Valve–Roku merger. Someone buys a Steam Machine that they keep in the living room for both general purpose computering and as an HTPC that never, ever runs a game purchased from the Steam store, but they still make money. Easy peasy.

They could offer a $X steam credits with their steam hardware for a win win.

they're already effectively doing this by selling the deck at a loss

> Not to mention that the Beelink comes with a Windows license, and the Steam Machine doesn't.

That's a mark against the Beelink for many :)

I was looking at buying a Beelink NAS and paying for a Windows license when I'm just going to install proxmox on it (I think) definitely counts against it.

I wouldn't worry about it. The cost OEMs pay for those Windows licenses is negligible for a "low-end" device like a simple NAS box.

How much do you think Beelink pay?

I'm expecting say ~£20, which is significant.

The price for Win 11 home on https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/d/windows-11-home/dg7gmgf0kr... is £120.

It's a somewhat justified fear - the box screams 'home server' to me. Then again a Mac Mini is just $600

The steam machine is a $350 server + a $300 GPU + a $200 controller. A good deal for $500-$700, but only if you want the GPU and controller.

The Steam Machine doesn't come with the Steam controller, though, as far as I know.

Two options with controller and without. Two options for memory 512gb and 2tb. 4 skews.

Ahh OK, thanks.

Something else worth considering in comparison to consoles is that the games you buy on the Steam machine can be played on other devices and they'll be available long after the games you bought on console this generation EOL.

I've wasted $1000+ on console games over the years that I don't have access to anymore, yet I can still install the first Steam game I bought decades ago.

There’s probably a better way to sponsor Valve than to buy physical products you won’t use. That has pretty low monetary efficiency for the purpose.

But maybe I'll use them!

Well, you did state “just to support their OSS efforts”. ;)

The pleasurable after the useful!

Steam gift cards

That’s what happens when you don’t need to please the shareholders.

That's very true, and I didn't realize it until you just said it.

Google has contributed more to open source than Valve while being a public company. It's not just Valve who sponsor open source work.

I'd like to see that comparison tracking the number of devs and how much open source software each company uses.

They seem to be skimping out on their contributions to FFmpeg.

Google has contributed many patches to ffmpeg. Valve has contributed 0 as far as I am aware.

They aren't. Sometimes headlines are misleading.

Valve employs like <400 people

But what percentage of what Google has produced has been Free Software vs what percentage of what Valve has produced? Google may have produced more Free Software, but Google also produces way more things.

I don't think this very practical or relevant here, but I expect Google to have a higher percentage. Valve employees are focused on Valve's proprietary software: Steam, SteamVR, their games, etc. Valve more often pays contractorsto work on open source software than work on it themselves.

My comment was more to prove that it possible to do open source while having share holders. My claim that Google does more is auxiliary to it.

If you think publicly-held companies are bad, wait until you see what private equity gets up to.

Okay, but have you heard about the monarchy?

I'm staring at the EOL of Windows 10, which I use on my game machine. I'll happily get one of the cubes for my next box. I'd like this to be the end of my Windows usage.

I game exclusively on my Linux desktop (for the few games I play). Everything works flawlessly with Proton.

You did say "I'd like this to be the end of my Windows usage." Even so, if you're not ready to move tomorrow, you can give up some privacy for the next year and continue to get patches by logging in to Microsoft. Windows 10 LTSC is a possibility if you somehow qualify for a license, although there's no guarantee the latest Nvidia drivers will work on it, some version of them will, or you can punt and run Linux on your current PC until the steam cube comes out. Pick a Linux distribution you like and run Steam, or go down the rabbit hole of running native Steam OS.

I personally preferred Fedora for this but mostly because my employer is a redhat shop. It's not otherwise (as far as I know) any better or worse than any other distro for gaming.

I’d wait to see if they open source the Machine, Controller, and Frame before assuming buying their products supports open source that matters for everyone. Right now the Steam Deck is the only product that open source and supports that vision.

Even this article it is not clear how beneficial some of their open source work is for everyone except Valve.

What do you mean by "open source the Machine"? Valve has stated its a regular open PC. The whole driver stack is open.

The hardware, like they did with the Steam Deck.

I guess you mean the CAD files for the shell? I'm not sure that is the most important part but it would be nice.

Sorry my point is that the Steam Deck is the only product of theirs that really supports beneficial open source in software and hardware. If you don’t think fossing the case is enough then you’re making my point for me that buying the machine, frame, or controller doesn’t do anything for foss.

It’d be like donating to Mozilla and expecting the money to go to Firefox development.

Valve paying for the development of KDE, Wine and adjacent projects is beneficial for FOSS.

Adjacent projects to those have if anything only eroded the credit is where credits due. Ask any non-technically inclined Steam Deck owner who contributed to Linux to make it desktop useable and people will tell you desktop computing wasn’t possible until Valve did something. Valve does a very good job scrubbing the OS to look like Steam OS and not Wine, KDE, or Arch.

So while their adjacent projects have moved users to Linux, it is not the reason the desktop is a good experience.

Again Valve’s contributions have been mainly beneficial for Valve. They are perfectly comfortable taking money from Windows and Linux users and claiming to fight some sort of freedom of technology war, but the benefits for wider non-entertainment computing remain to be seen.

Steam Deck is not free software, is it?

The repo[0] is basically an issue tracker and the hardware is not open either (but they're repair-friendly which is already an improvement over... everything else.)

[0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS

They run their own Gitlab instance with many more steamos projects:

https://gitlab.steamos.cloud

For a few years before I eventually got a Steam Deck, I played a lot of games that I bought outside of Steam, and over the past decade, the experience of doing this on Linux has massively improved. Plenty of their improvements get upstreamed to Wine, and there's nothing stopping you from obtain proton (or even one of the various unofficial tweaks of it) to run games that you don't buy through Steam to get the benefits that aren't upstreamed (or haven't been yet). The article itself mentions that they've implemented a driver for Mesa that has equal or better performance on ARM than the proprietary one from Qualcomm.

It's not clear to me what you're attempting to convey by saying the Steam Deck being the only product they have that supports the open source vision. The Steam Deck is the only new hardware product they've had since 2019, when they released their original first party VR headset that presumably is being replaced by the new one. Other than that, the only other hardware products they've ever worked on were earlier headsets made by other manufacturers or the previous iterations of the other two products announced alongside the new headset. From that standpoint, you could make a credible argument that the only product they even have right now that benefits from the open source work they've done in the past six years they did is the exact one you say supports this vision.

Exactly they have no track record so the benefits remain to be seen how gaming improvements to Linux are advantageous to people who use FOSS beyond paying Valve for Steam DRM’d games without requiring a Windows license.

I'm not sure what you're reading into what I said, but to reiterate: I've been seeing benefits personally from their work for years playing games that were not obtained via Steam. It's unclear to me why you think this is "exactly" the point you're making, because it's quite literally the opposite.

Because games are entertainment and this technology is not necessary for the betterment of humanity or enabling some kind of real technological progress, therefor it only really benefits who? Valve and really only in the short term. Once the contributions back are good enough, people will start to use the stack to cut Valve out. There for Valve only has incentive to contribute things that make their products great. If you enjoy playing older games on Linux because of Valve, that is only a side effect of the current efforts.

Do you understand now what I'm reading?

No, I still don't have any idea what you're trying to say honestly. At first I thought you were trying to say that they didn't contribute to open source in a way that actually helped anyone outside of themselves. I stated that it definitively helped me do something I already had tried to do sometimes but would sometimes have issues with, and no longer do in large part because of their work. As best as I can tell, you're essentially arguing now some combination of an assertion that it's impossible by definition for a company's open source contributions to benefit anyone else in the long run (which feels pretty reductive, like the economics arguments that everyone always acts purely rationally, despite the fact that plenty of people quite often don't do that) and that because it's only software that helps running video games, it can't possibly be beneficial to humanity in general (which independent of whether it's accurate feels kind of irrelevant given that the original proposition from the parent comment was that they did care about that and therefore wanted to support it financially).

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