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Quoting: TermyDoes anyone know what the hell they are including to make it that big? Even with several proton-versions preinstalled it shouldn't get up to 10GB, let alone 24.

Was wondering the same. I have a system next to me right now that is running a pretty standard, albeit minimal GNOME desktop, and it is using 5G of disk space.

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While 20G minimum for an installed Windows 10 system may be somewhat true-ish, in practical terms is complete nonsense. I had updates fail on Windows 10 because I only had 40G of free space. The thing needed at least 60G to successfully complete!

I am sure there will be people who will figure out how to cram Windows into Steam Deck, but that's not going to be standard practice, that I am sure of.

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It's easy to judge the 30% cut as "too much", but maintaining all the infrastructure is not free. Also Valve is financing a lot of development work in the Linux world: Mesa, Proton, kernel drivers, etc., which benefits people who don't even use Steam.

I am not saying that Valve is some sort of altruistic charity, they are still a for-profit business. But it's not like they are sitting on their pile of money either.

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Quoting: GuestReading the notes it seems to have improved mostly in visuals. Should i upgrade my headless pi-hole then, based on security concerns?

Debian 10 (Buster) is still supported, and is very stable and secure at this point. But I am not sure how closely Raspberry Pi follows security updates from Debian.

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There's at least a few guys at my work who pre-ordered a Steam Deck, and none are big on Linux, much less on Linux gaming. Actually they are more of console gamers, and are comparing the Steam Deck with the likes of Nintendo Switch.

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Hey Liam, maybe you should add a Steam Deck question, akin to the VR one, to the survey?

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Debian is not perfect, but lack of updates is not the reason why they switched. At least not the way you think.

Debian is, at it's core, a rolling distribution. It is interrupted every two years by a few months long freeze period when the release happens. But that is meant for servers and enterprise environments, where stability is paramount. If you want bleeding edge, you just keep on rolling. :happy:

The simple truth is that a lot of technology choices are quite arbitrary, and are very often based on personal preferences. We talk about the best tool for the job, and like to compare things to each other. But often they are not better or worse, just different.

Even though I am a Debian fanboy, I think what Valve is doing is very cool, and I will happily run SteamOS/Arch on my Steam Deck. Although I am going to replace KDE with GNOME, because of course you would. :grin:

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When I was watching the guy from Tested asking about Windows and complaining about third-party launchers and loading times due to shader compiling, I though to myself jeez, this guy doesn't really understand what Steam Deck is. But maybe that's exactly what the wider audience will see? And that got met worried.

Valve keeps repeating that "it's a PC", and it will run anything that a PC can run. And I guess that is technically correct, but is it sending the wrong message, and unintentionally promising more than it can deliver?

I really believe that the idea is that most Steam Decks will run SteamOS and not Windows. It would just not make sense to put so much effort into Linux if you would expect otherwise. But it is also going to be picked up by a lot of Windows gamers, who don't know or care about Linux.

Proton is a great piece of software, but it is not perfect. Even taking into account that they are working on support for popular anti-cheat schemes, and rumored to be working on the video codec problem, there are still games that simply do not work, be it due to esoteric DRM schemes, or something else.

Also there are quite a few Linux ports that perform badly, or are not compatible with Windows save games, or offer no cross-platform multiplayer. All of that would be very hard to navigate for somebody never exposed to Linux gaming before, and I am afraid it can backfire if expectations are not set properly.

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: LinasI wonder if they are ever going to officially support Media Foundation? There are so many games that work just fine, except missing video playback.

As I understand, part of what they're doing is some sort of re-encoding on Steam servers into a format Proton can work with. Don't quote me on it, but I'm sure I saw one of the people involved mentioning it. That, and they're telling developers to avoid it.

If true, that's very a interesting approach. In theory, they would only need a single Windows server (probably many more in practice) to run the re-encoding jobs without any license violations.

Although this would go against Valve's approach of solving the general problem. Identifying where and how videos are used in each game sounds like a lot of work. Just think of all those games that package the data files in some weird formats. It's not like there is any standard here.

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