This is good, the Steam Deck has been performing great in spite of a whole slew of competitors and copycat devices. Valve has made a really smart choice; instead of chasing the latest bleeding edge performance or features, they focused on getting the Deck to be a super well integrated system. They have tweaked and tuned the OS, drivers, Proton, and hardware to squeeze more and more performance out of what they have.

The Deck has reached a place now where it is a very streamlined experience for both casual users and handheld enthusiasts. It became clear pretty quickly that Valve betting on and embracing Linux as their handheld OS was an incredibly smart move. Almost all the other handhelds on the market came with Windows, and Windows is terrible for low power devices, especially handhelds. Plus, Microsoft has very little interest in tuning Windows for that use case, so it was up to the device manufactures to try working around Microsoft to get the performance where it needed to be.

Valve using Linux, specifically their own Arch Linux spin, ensured they could actually build and shape the development of the OS itself and tune things at a far deeper level than you could with Windows. This was confirmed by Valve and the Arch team forming a partnership a few weeks ago to continue making gaming on Linux better, especially for the Deck.

Also, valve embracing the 3rd party market for parts, replacements, upgrades, and customizations has been great for adoption too. They could have locked down mods and 3rd party parts sellers if they wanted, but keeping it open and relatively easy to repair/mod is awesome.

Valve waiting for the right time to make sure that the Steam Deck 2 is a huge upgrade to their current model is a great strategy, and I'm sure that all the time they've spent carefully tuning and optimizing their Linux spin for the current model will make the next gen's performance that much better.

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I play this very often, such a great game. I love that the FOSS community can take something so old and not only keep it alive, but make it thrive!

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What an absolutely beautiful looking game!

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: legluondunetThe gap between today's consoles and working emulators is narrowing. We had never known an emulator that emulates a console still on sale. I don't think it's ethical to publicly release an emulator of a console that's still on sale, in my view, developers should at least wait for the end of life of a console. Nintendo is an innovative company and produces user-friendly games, switch emulators must be costing them a lot of money.

Nice try, but I can't really feel sorry for a 50 billion-dollar company with a long history of anti-consumer behavior.

Completely agree, Nintendo is a truly nasty corporation with some of the worst anti-consumer practices in the business.

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Quoting: GuestHow can people commenting here and even this site owner not realize that a platform without developers is destined to die? The ability to run other OSes applications is not enough to make a platform survive, it never was: look at OS/2, or if you prefer a story where Microsoft loses, Windows Phone: nobody was developing for it, Microsoft even had a project to allow WP to run Android apps (it was called Astoria). They realized the hopelessness of it and they killed it, preferring to abandon that market instead. Developers make a platform's fortunes, and Proton is shouting to developers "keep developing for windows".

Developers that want their games to work well with Proton have to engage with Linux at some level, especially with the Steam Deck. I had 2 different Windows phones back in the day. Everything about them was great...except for the lack of android apps. I am sure they would have had far more success if on launch they had a way to seamlessly run even the top 100 most popular Android apps. That's what MS promised btw, that within some amount of time right after launch, the top 100 most popular android apps would be fully supported on Windows phones. it never happened though.

Proton is already in a far FAR better place than that with the Steam Deck, and the sales numbers so far seem to indicate that.

People keep talking about Linux native gaming being "killed" by Proton, but the hard truth is Linux native gaming has never been alive. Unless you played a super specific set of games that were released as Linux native titles, you were screwed. Sorry, but Super Tux Kart and all the plethora of Quake/UT clones don't count as a thriving gaming community, and that's coming from somebody who enjoys and plays those games native on Linux.

Native Linux gaming has existed for 20+ years and there have never been a large number of devs/studios interested in creating games for it. I wish there were, and I think Proton is the only hope for that. It actually gets Linux gaming in the hands of people to see what all the fuss is about. It actually can start having streamers and content creators that are more in the general world of gaming instead of deep within Linux/FOSS communities.

Seeing that Linux is viable for high-end AAA gaming will attract more devs and studios, especially if over that next several years Linux gains a few more percent of the market share. Then the platform looks better and better for devs to spend their time on.

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This makes me sad, but I'm sure they will fix it soon. I've already got over 10 hours of Linux playtime on Apex, such a fun game that I've missed a lot.

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