People will put more effort in installing Windows on the Steam Deck than learning how to use Linux

Shower Thoughts@kbin.social – 0 points – 1 years ago

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Isn't it pretty easy to get windows on a steam deck? I'm familiar with Linux so I haven't looked into it but I thought you could just boot it from an SD card.

It is relatively easy, and I've done it from an SD card too. But it does kinda suck and its even easier to just leave SteamOS (edit: leave SteamOS in place instead of replacing it with Windows). Windows runs terribly slow from the SD card and just generally is not optimized for the form factor.

You can use Steam Big Picture mode to make most games work, untill you want to do anything outside Steam. Then it became a mess of installing compatibility programs, drivers, UWP hooks for Game Pass games, etc... It was a generally unpleasant experience.

That's really not true.

The vast, VAST majority of Deck owners will never install another OS on it, and the number of people who will go through the trials and tribulations of turning it into a dedicated Windows PC is practically negligible. It's the same problem that Linux has on desktop, but now the script is flipped.

On top of that, I follow a number of mainstream gaming forums and podcasts, and I'm constantly shocked by the amount of Linux ecosystem talk I've been hearing since the launch of the deck. All the sudden we have non-computer/linux geeks talking about things like Arch, KDE plasma, flatpak, systemd, etc. Sure, they aren't like experts or power users or anything, but most of them were never Windows experts either, nor should they need to be.

Finally, when you look at a lot of the failures of the disaster that is the Asus ROG Ally, I think it's pretty clear that using Windows on a device like this is neither ideal, nor is it actually a big driver of sales. (From what I can tell, the Deck has greatly outsold the Ally, hardware problems aside.)

I really do hope that dev jam project to create a streaming "gaming installation" of Windows takes off and gets picked up by Microsoft. There is very clearly a market for it.

That being said I also think the number of games not supported is really really low and that makes it kind of a non issue. Still, with Microsoft and their ever increasing interest in the gaming division, I don't feel too unsafe having high hopes. It just feels like something they could pull off easily enough, why wouldn't they? One more vector for a license sale.

Well I'm biased as a Linux geek, but it'd definitely be a good idea to make Windows better for handheld gaming. Then again, Microsoft have never been very good at adapting, which is why they fell so far behind in the mobile space. I wonder if they wouldn't rather make an Xbox handheld?

Still, I don't think Valve could have made the Deck what it is without leveraging the Linux/FOSS ecosystem. Not only did they straight up use open source software (like KDE Plasma desktop) and existing repositories (Arch Linux), but they also wrote a custom window compositor (Gamescope) and even put patches into the Linux kernel itself. Creating the Steam Deck was a "full stack" job, to borrow a phrase. Valve really put a lot of work into the OS at various levels, and I think the results speak for themselves in that sense.