Quoting: damarrinHeh, good point on covid vaccination... I was perhaps to general with the "general public" statement. It's probably more "Windows power users" who are proficient there and don't even consider anything other than Windows is to be used and particularly don't want to learn anything new. These are the people who go around on- and offline telling everyone who'll listen (insert "general public" here) Windows is the way to go. They are sizeable and very vocal and do MS's marketing for them.

Aye. Those people are there, and in absolute numbers there are quite a few of them. But really, an awful lot of computer users don't know what Windows is.
My wife of 25 years is an intelligent person but it was only a few years ago that there was a reason to have a conversation with her and really explain just what "Windows" is, what an operating system is, what the difference is between the operating system and a program running in the operating system, such as a browser . . . didn't help that this was in the context of her new Chromebook doing its best to muddle the distinction . . . The point is, she uses computers but doesn't normally think about them, she just clicks the icon that makes it do what she wants. She's older, but as far as I can tell the younger supposedly all tech-savvy generation is pretty much the same--they're just really comfortable clicking those icons, but they mostly don't look beneath that.

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Quoting: sub

Quoting: GuestWin 11 on Steam deck 64BG version...
No, no possible (ok its possible but no free space for any game left)

I mean there must be an option to attach some (yeah, rather slow) USB3 stick/HDD to it with a Steam collection anyhow.
64 Gb won't get you far even with a slim Linux distro.

Won't be playing Total War: Rome Remastered on that, that's for sure.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: MohandevirQ2 2022 for the top tier... They must have sold a lot of them.

Q2 2022 for the middle one, too, now.

Geeze. I guess Valve are gonna have to ramp up the manufacturing.
If you're gonna have a problem, that's the kind of problem you want.

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Quoting: Tom BI am a Linux gamer and I know exactly what sort of compatibility to expect. A general audience won't and valve seem to be marketing this with very high expectations. I think there will be a lot of complaints unfortunately because some games inevitably won't work.

Probably, yeah.
Although . . . I mean, if I were them I'd be doing a two-pronged approach. One would be pushing general Proton improvement + anti-cheat. The other would be a team going game by game, starting with the biggest seller on Steam and working their way down. If they could get the top 100 all to Platinum by launch, while the general team had pretty good coverage below that, it might be surprising how little of what people were wanting to play would fail.

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Quoting: dubigrasuI also hope that Steamos will have some unique attractive features that will discourage people even more to switch to a plain Windows. What exactly, I have no idea, but I'm sure Valve engineers can come up with something.
Gotta be something that will make users say: yeah, I could install Windows on it, but I'm gonna loose this cool feature, so I won't do it.

Well, one of the videos I watched was talking about the ability to seamlessly go from playing on your PC to continuing the same game on the Steam Deck and vice versa, by launch maybe without even saving first. That might be a feature that wouldn't work if you nuked SteamOS to put in Windows.

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Quoting: Guest

QuoteCould it be that Proton truly ends up being something developers directly target for supporting Linux? It gives a mostly stable base, with well-known APIs already used on Windows. It might also be an incentive for developers working all across Linux to get some more standards in place overall.

No, I don't believe so. Developers will target the Steam Deck, not Linux directly.
Linux desktop will always come second to a games developer, history has already proven that.

History rarely proves things, and I certainly don't think it's proved that. History may have given strong evidence that relatively few game developers will target a 1-2% market share (although that "relatively few" is still quite a big number these days). If Linux becomes a substantially larger market share than that, we are in a different situation from what the historical record can tell us about.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: GuestThat's a marketing video. It's supposed to make it look like the best thing since sliced bread. What's more, it's from IGN. So I really wouldn't trust what's being said.

Well, firstly I trust more in what's being shown than what's being said.
Then, they do mention critique points, e.g. about the buttons.
So I wonder... why do you say it's a marketing video?
Are there signs of IGN being paid for it?

More likely Valve only allowed IGN to look at it if everything reported was favourable, and in return IGN have seen a lot of traffic driven their way. That's not exactly an uncommon arrangement. A critique point is also another trick: it's a critique, but once tried oh everything is perfectly fine and the device is wonderful (you can trust us because we raised a critique). Seen that many, many times before.

Nothing shown was particularly impressive to me either. Portal2 isn't really the most power hungry of games, but it does explain why they put a Vulkan backend of sorts (adapted DXVK) into it: would make a massive difference on a handheld.

I know I'm sounding buzzkill. I've nothing against the device itself, more the hype that's trying to be generated which ultmiately will not live up to expectations.

I get what you mean. Mind you, I and others have said repeatedly over the years that if Valve want their next Steamboxy device to succeed, they're going to have to play the hype game a lot harder than last time. So right now I'm perversely hoping they load up the hype and marketing to the point it makes me gag.

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Quoting: GuestGood detailed video on it here, it's pretty big!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLtiRGTZvGM&t=48s

I generally try to avoid looking at Youtube comments . . . but they can be useful for sort of taking the pulse.
I notice the comments there are mostly framing it in terms of a war with the Switch . . . and although of course there's plenty of argument, they are on average pretty positive to the Steam Deck. Quite a lot of Valve saying hold my beer, and whatnot.
One notion that came up a few times is that in theory, this thing could emulate Nintendo games and play them faster than the Nintendo Switch itself does . . .

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Quoting: gradyvuckovicProton running on a handheld device like this has a lot of advantages that Proton doesn't have running on the average Linux desktop.

Every Linux desktop varies wildly and that makes trying to make Windows games run reliably on such wildly varying Linux environments is certainly a challenge. There are so many variables. What Linux kernel is the user running? What GPU? What driver? What driver version? What level of vulkan support is available? The exact fix for some machines may be a few command line options, other PCs might run the game out of the box without any help, other PCs might not be able to run the game at all.

But with the Steam Deck, here you have a rare opportunity: The only 'variable' is the game.

If Valve can get a game to run, via any means, on the Steam Deck, they can put out an update to Proton/SteamOS/etc, that ensures that game runs on every Steam Deck. Even if behind the scenes there are per game tweaks and other stuff happening, all that matters from the end users perspective is that they can hit play and the game runs. No fiddling involved.

This presents an enormous opportunity to increase the Linux player base on Steam, and puts a lot more pressure on game devs to ensure their games at least run well via Proton, if not natively on Linux.

Yeah, I haven't even really started to consider the implications of this device succeeding solidly. If it does, well, I guess it's the Steam Machine's potential all over again. Suddenly Linux becomes a real market games wise. If you add in these upcoming Chromebooks running Steam . . . well. This could be a very big turnaround for Linux gaming. Medium term, could even have some ripple effects on Linux desktop adoption, although that's a lot iffier.

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Quoting: mylkai think they should make it more clear, that they do not sell a WINDOWS PC and you may not be able to play some games and you wont be able to install windows software like you do on windows

Nobody expects a thing like a Nintendo Switch to be a Windows PC. I don't think they need to sweat that a whole lot.

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