Quoting: ExpandingManI guess I haven't been paying attention. The filesystem on SteamOS is read only by default? Why in the world would anyone do that? It seems so insane to me I'm not sure I'm reading it right.

So that it doesn't break.

The OS is on one (read-only) partition. When the OS gets updated, the new image goes to a second (read-only) partition. Next time you boot, you boot into that second partition; unless it doesn't work for whatever reason, in which case you boot into the first partition.

It's not a new idea - there have been several Linux distros (and other appliances) that work the same (or similar) way, as well as dual-BIOS motherboards and the like.

You can turn it off if you want to break things or just like to fiddle, but your changes will not be in the new OS image when you update.

Your games & settings, and anything you've installed through flatpak, are stored in your writable home partition.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library Guy2000 is a nice big number. But I still think they need to speed it up a tad, because it's still a drop in the bucket of all the Steam games, and it's still barely keeping up with the new games being released.
Plus I still think we need a fourth category, for games that actually, you know, don't work at all. One third of the games checked are listed as "unsupported", which looks kind of bad and as Liam notes probably doesn't reflect the reality of a lot of games--people will mostly look at "Unsupported" and assume it's not even worth trying.

It would be positive if they made games compatible even faster. But I believe that their current speed is already very impressive. I'd rather have the quality of their evaluations high than have them hurry up quickly.

Both things are true: they need to increase the quality of their testing, and they need to increase the rate of their testing. And the former is the more important of the two, as you say. Luckily, game testing is very parallelisable with sufficient funding.

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Quoting: AnzaThey fixed lot of issues later and while Safari is more of an open core project, the Webkit engine is usable outside Safari. It just isn't very popular, people are mostly building browsers based on Chromium instead.

Blink, the Chromium renderer, is a fork of WebKit.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeHaha, what? Besides, why couldn't you run pirated games on the Deck? Removing the copy protection generally makes it easier to run things.

Google translate [External Link]

Therefore, although G fat verbally supports Windows (it seems that he has not found the source), some people think that G fat has lofty goals and ambitions in all directions. But I think you Naive, the pattern is broken, and you don't understand the logic of capital. Think about it, selling a hardware that supports Windows 10 to a player who plays pirated games without making money or even losing money, what does he want, just a smile from Bojun? No capital is going to lose money and make a profit.

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Quoting: ElamanOpiskelijaAnother thing that it's a serious question from me and I still don't get is: what is this device offering that is so important, that a small laptop cannot? What is the use case?

These devices let you play games while you're just holding the device. Laptops (especially gaming laptops) don't: the operation of those is the same as the old luggables - you can move them from one static location to another, which is an advantage over a big desktop, but you can't just play on them wherever.

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Quoting: eldakingBut I must say I find these expensive devices kind of a dead end.

It's a question of scale. The price per unit is vastly different if you're buying a thousand compared to if you're buying ten million, multiplied out by every component in your device.

Of course the price that Microsoft will charge you for an OEM licence is also a lot different if you say, "actually, we're thinking of using Linux instead," so the visibility of SteamOS will help these companies even if they decide to stick with Windows as a differentiator from the Steam Deck.

Quoting: kit89I think a lot of these handheld game device manufacturers are ecstatic over how the Steam Deck has legitimised the PC handheld game space.

Not all of them: the GPD boss went on a public rant about how the Deck was terrible because it couldn't run pirated games. I think he was feeling rather threatened by it.

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Quoting: TheRiddickThe back-order is likely 6+ months at this stage........

And the rest.

People who put their reservations in within the first hour have still got 4-5 months to wait till they get theirs. Then there's an additional eight months of people making reservations in the queue ahead of anyone that's only getting round to making their reservation today.

"6+ months" is really understating it.

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Additionally, could we please stop slapping a launcher on everything?

That definitely gets my vote.

Unfortunately, Valve seem to feel that they need to woo the big publishers, so they're barely recommending against interstitial launchers at all, and are merely offering tools in the hopes that publishers will choose of their own volition to reduce the jank.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: adibuyonoWonder how many titles noted as unplayable?

775 [External Link].

Do we have means to filter these (or get counts) by reason of being Unsupported?

You can tell SteamDB's filter to exclude any that are VR-only (although you still end up with some VR games in the filtered list) which is the majority of the Unsupported ones. But of the remainder there's generally just a non-specific "Valve are working on it" as the reason.

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