This article does a good job of talking about how poor the windows experience on a handheld is, and why SteamOS could dominate handheld devices if windows doesn’t start to make serious changes to improve it’s useability and performance.
To be clear, I don’t want to see windows succeed here, I would absolutely love to see SteamOS take over the handheld space and be a real linux ambassador to show people that they do have other choices than windows for their computers.
It’s testament to Microsoft’s incompetence that they still haven’t got an “Xbox handheld OS” so-to-speak, or at the very least offered a trimmed down windows with an Xbox UI frontend to handheld OEMs.
The Steam Deck is a success, there’s other handhelds on the market (a common review criticism often being how poor windows works on them), Sony is in discussions with AMD for hardware for a handheld (albeit it’s a long way off).
MS’s incompetence in gaming is staggering.
Something like their Surface tablets turned into a gaming machine would be interesting. But they probably wouldn’t be priced competitively.
I hope Microsoft does nothing.
Yes, they are way too corporate and out of touch.
we just have to spread through word-of-mouth how ridiculous it is to want to invest anymore into the Windows ecosystem to our non-tech inclined friends. the benefits of owning a steam deck is way too massive, and that’s not just counting the software (I CAN OPEN UP MY STEAM DECK AND DO WHATEVER I WANT TO IT!!!)
we have to start rejecting this premise that we are powerless when it comes to a company that dominates the market share (operating system wise, not gaming), but it comes down to changing the minds of those around us.
for me, ALL of these windows handhelds are all missing the point that steam deck has PROVEN to be a winning formula: affordable, feature packed, durable, very consumer friendly, sustainability and top tier support (miss you every day I turn on my computer, EVGA 😢)
hell, I upgraded to the OLED (I am a sucker for OLED anything, lol) and offset the cost of the OLED by selling my perfectly fine, upgraded LCD model (added 1tb ssd and hall-effect joysticks) to a family member. they were so blown away by the deck, that they are ready to sell the LCD model to another lucky gamer and upgrade to an OLED.
this reads like a massive steam deck dick riding ad, but I do not care because the deck really opened my eyes to how easy it will be for me to change operating systems the next time it’s time for me to upgrade my main rig. if the next deck has support for an eGPU enclosure, it’s going to be very easy for me to make the switch to linux gaming. I don’t CARE what games do not support the steam deck, as they will not get my money.
/rant
the fact that valve went and provided official support for a popular, third party, higher res display is pretty wild.
That’s exactly how I think. I don’t care about the games that are unsupported by some bullshit reason like anti-cheat. They just won’t see me as a customer, there’s a lot of other games out there.
Now that GPU companies and developers seem to be giving some focus to Linux, I don’t know what Microsoft can do.
Windows is bloated to shit and that’s how Microsoft seemingly wants it. Unless they start to offer a stripped down release then I don’t see how it could compete with a Linux based OS going forward. (For handheld consoles).
That’s actually brilliant, and if they offered a stripped down base system that end-users could customize downstream (vis a vis BlueBuild and Universal Blue), they could reclaim some of the market.
But they’d have to relinquish some of their control and that precious user telemetry, so I’m with you that it’s obviously how they want it.
MS seems to be more of a user data and subscription company now.
Still waiting for the latest steamOS iso to put in my desktop… switched to endeavourOS in preparation so I get used to the arch experience. Still eager to check it out when it does eventually release but this system has been fantastic for gaming.
I did something similar actually. My only experience with arch was using manjaro years ago, and I had a lot of instability and broken systems after updates. I swore off arch-based distros for years because of it.
After valve announced they would use arch as their base for steamOS, I was skeptical that arch would be a good base for a consumer product and decided to try it again. I picked Endeavour for easy install, and it was great. Turns out all the issues I had with Manjaro before were more of a Manjaro issue than an arch issue.
I’ve been using endeavour as my main OS ever since, and it’s been great.
Is steamOS usable on laptops/desktop computers?
No. Or rather, not yet. Valve has not released SteamOS 3 for anything other than the Steam Deck, but is planning to do so at some point in the future.
I honestly wouldn’t recommend SteamOS for anything other than a dedicated gaming device though. It excels at its use case of launching games via Steam, but for everything else it is quite cumbersome… I would much rather install a general purpose Linux distribution and run Steam on it.
No, right now it only works on the steam deck. Support for more handhelds is coming though, and eventually laptops.
Right now you can install Bazzite to a laptop, it’s very similar to steamOS and will work on most everything.
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+2 for bazzite. Been running it exclusively on my desktop and laptop since June. Have no complaints
The experience is poor even on desktop…anything windows based is just garbage. I side the game it’s fine provided you aren’t playing some AAAAA gashcrab trash tho
“Introducing Windows RT 2!” O _ •
They can’t even offer a linux native XBox XCloud client that launches directly from Steam. How hard can that possibly be?
Also looking at you Geforce Now.
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