Given many new handhelds coming on the scene and general disinterest of Microsoft to support the market, do you think SteamOS will take place of default OS the same way Android did on phones some time ago?
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Most of the SteamOS features are also available on Windows by launching Steam in big picture mode. I use this on my desktop.
You CAN put HoloISO on these handhelds, but no companies are shipping SteamOS out of the box. The Ally comes with Windows. The Ayaneo 2 come with Windows. The AYN consoles run on Android. ONEXPLAYER ships with Windows.
While SteamOS is great and the remaining compatibility problems are mostly caused by stupid DRM bullshit, you still can't play COD or Halo on SteamOS. Linux also doesn't support new technologies like Direct Storage at the moment. Shipping Windows is a competitive advantage right now.
Of course, there are options. For example, a dual boot configuration with Windows on one partition, SteamOS on a second partition, and an NTFS volume for storing games on could work. A small sync tool would be all you need to make it possible to boot into either OS on the fly.
Or, even better, there's nothing preventing vendors from running SteamOS in a VM and passing through the hardware. You could do it the other way around, but such virtual machines get detected by the same shitty DRM that breaks games on Linux in the first place.
Every negative review of the Ally emphasized windows (and Asus armory crate) as some of the main negatives of the device. Windows gives a worse UI experience, has much higher passive power usage (which prevents you from getting actually good battery life times on low power games like Stardew), and makes things like the deck's suspend mid game impossible to implement reliability.
You also mentioned that Big Picture mode having most of the features, but it's missing the QAM and all the nice tools included with that. Asus Armory Crate is supposed to cover some of those, but has had a lot of negative feedback online for not working correctly or having significant downsides like massive deadzones. There's also a ton of nice features available through decky plugins that are very convenient to use mid game through steamOS.
Not to mention that having windows at all adds to the cost of the device. Average windows license cost for hardware manufacturers is around $50 if I remember right, and they charge more for more powerful hardware. That would be a huge price increase for something like the $400 Steam Deck.
I think SteamOS has a lot to offer, and the only downside (anticheat compatibility) will become a non-issue if steamOS becomes popular enough and companies start targeting it. I really hope to see it available on other devices.
Windows has terrible sleep issues (on every platform, because of shitty drivers) and has had this problem ever since S3 sleep was getting deprecated.
The Ally has shitty software but the AYANEO has a much better overlay. Asus and software just doesn't seem to go well together.
However, all of the proper features SteamOS provides rely heavily on good drivers. Power consumption and sleep issues have plagued the Deck as well, Valve just fixed them in time before most people ran into them.
Do you expect Asus to put as much effort into patching their AMD drivers if they can't even get their device to sleep properly on Linux? I'm willing to bet that if they went with SteamOS, they'd release with terrible drivers, an outdated kernel, very few kernel updates if any at all, and of course some minor modifications that will never be upstreamed to the Linux kernel.
Asus sells devices running Linux and they're not exactly known for running the latest and greatest Linux kernel. The Zenphone 9 runs on Linux 5.10 and will probably never get an update to 5.15, let alone 6.1. I can't find much about their routers, but from what I can tell they're running a version of Linux 4. They also make liberal use of proprietary modules and kernel forks, of course, making life much harder for themselves if they care about upgrading the kernel in the long time.
The Steam Deck is great mostly because Valve is working hard at making the kernel and underlying OS work right. If a vendor can't do that on Windows, they're definitely not going to pull it off on Linux.
Rog Ally is a good portable space heater.
Note: You can actually play Halo on a Steam Deck. I've played it with friends over the internet and two of us were on a Steak Deck and Linux desktop. The other two were on Windows. It worked well.
(But, yeah, there still are a few other games that don't have anti-cheat enabled, such as Fortnite and Destiny 2.)
That's good to know, I'm glad they patched Halo. Maybe I'll give it another go some time.
Last I knew playing Halo MCC in coop still requires manually syncing your ucrtbase.dll files.
I made a guide for it on reddit, I'll probably repost it here sometime.
No they aren't. They're vertically integrated. I don't think you understand what the SteamOS features actually are. It's more than just a GUI.
I mean the features end users care about. You get the console interface, the button remapping, the save game sync, and even the FPS overlay. You've got a usable desktop environment through Windows (that'll also work better for most people despite Microsoft's attempts to make Windows worse) with things like eGPU support.
You probably don't get the performance sliders, but every handheld has their own little overlay bound to a special button that'll offer the same options anyway.
If you install Steam on your Linux distribution of choice because you dislike Windows, you get all the Proton tricks for free as well. You may even get the performance sliders if you're on an AMD handheld and the kernel packs the right drivers.
Of course SteamOS has a lot of features hidden from the user (A/B boot setup for seamless updates, a custom Wayland server dedicated to playing games) but those only matter to diehard Linux users.
People buying a Steam Deck just want to play video games.
Yes that's what I was also talking about.
direct storage is from directx lol, obviously it isn't gonna work,, and vulkan has an alternative tho