My Deck and Linux desktop regularly have shader cache updates every few days, but they’re generally tiny and finish near-instantly. I’ve never seen the behavior here of needing to download multiple gigabytes of shaders daily (and I’m thankful for it, with the frustrating data cap I have from my ISP).
I can see the use case for someone who wants a single OS install on the Steam Deck that does gaming just about as well as SteamOS does, but has a more fleshed out desktop experience (or even just a different one). The linked article goes into detail on various desktop-focused developments within Bazzite that wouldn’t really make sense for Valve to prioritize in SteamOS itself.
I expect this is simply a case of “Valve Time” on that effort. Perhaps there’s a long-term path towards more “official” SteamOS on these devices, but if there’s any area where HoloISO diverges technically from SteamOS in a way that’s not reconcilable, that’ll be problematic for offering users a “seamless upgrade”.
Long-term, I think it would be slightly more harmful to Valve’s efforts if more manufacturers started standardizing around HoloISO, so I expect that this might be a motivating factor to speed up their efforts to bring official SteamOS to third-party devices.
I am very interested in the success of this device. I have, use, and love my Steam Deck, but my biggest hopes for this form factor in the future is it using generational CPU improvements to create a more diverse set of devices, rather than just chasing higher performance.
I don’t actually play many games on my Deck that toe the line on its performance limits, I prefer to play 2D and lighter 3D games on it, while leaving the “spectacle” games for a more powerful system outputting to a much larger display at a higher resolution. I would love long-term to have a more smaller, lightweight device for portable PC gaming, and I hope that increased diversity in the market, running Linux-based systems (even if it’s all just SteamOS) will help drive towards that. I think that the pipedreams of running x86 games on Linux on ARM on a really power-efficient device, even as unrealistic as they are, are far more likely to occur if there’s a healthy market of Linux based systems, than they would on Windows handhelds given the state of Windows on ARM, and on these devices in general.
If Valve is working with Ayaneo to get SteamOS shipped on these devices, then I imagine Valve would have some level of involvement on at least the software support side, even for things specific to the device. If Ayaneo is just like shipping by using one of the existing 3rd party SteamOS installers and not working with Valve at all, then yeah I expect things to be not as smooth sailing as the Deck.
I love the DualShock 4 and DualSense controllers’ support on Linux, but I’m not a huge fan of the controllers themselves despite exclusively using the DS4 as my PC controller. I’m perfectly okay with the layout since I grew up on the PlayStation, and in fact prefer it to the mainstream Xbox/Nintendo options due to being the only controller to have a touchpad, and both gyro and analog triggers, but the abysmal battery life on the controllers has been a frustration for my couch PC gaming setup, my fairly old DS4 controllers barely last for more than 30 minutes on battery now. The biggest thing holding me back from buying a new DualSense to replace those controllers is the fact that it, too, has terrible battery life.
I’m hopeful that Valve’s desire to make a Steam Controller 2 pans out, as I expect that such a device will also provide stellar Linux support (or perhaps already does if it ends up reusing as much of the Steam Deck’s input setup as it can), and would hopefully offer much better battery life than Sony’s attempts.
In this case it’s referring to the fact that the OS is built upon the same containerization technology used on cloud platforms such as Kubernetes. As a marketing tool it’s a bit buzzwordy, but it’s not about running the core OS components outside of the physical machine here.
I’d probably pick something esoteric and then just stop programming, tbh. I enjoy being a polyglot programmer, and learning many languages and learning from many ecosystems is incredibly interesting to me, far more than hyper-specializing in a single language would be.
If I’m not literally touching the content I’m trying to scroll, I’ll stick to the default orientation (scrolling down moves content down). Wayland touchscreen input handling seems to handle this just fine and not couple touchscreen scroll direction to trackpad/mousewheel scroll direction.
Unfortunately, I think many of the Asypr/Feral ports from the early 2010s, like Civ V, Borderlands 2, etc. fall victim to this. Those ports were amazing for Linux gaming at the time, but due to the fact that they were held back by their macOS counterparts and Apple’s limitations on that platform, as well as the fact that they were third-party ports with far less post-release engagement from the original dev than the Windows versions, have left those versions to languish. It’s a huge shame because those companies did, and to a certain extent still do support Linux-native gaming quite well, but their earlier ports have not aged well and there’s not much that can be done given the opportunity costs for the many involved parties on those older games.
Civ V is a game I still play regularly to this day, and I basically have to run the Windows version under Proton to avoid crashes on modern hardware, maintain compatibility with popular mods, and play multiplayer with Windows users without terrible game desyncs.
It might be somewhat controversial of a take, but to me an awesome-performing Proton version of a game is far better than a Linux version that may be native, but has severe deficiencies and/or lags behind its Windows version.
To me, my favorite native Linux games would be ones that do things on Linux that are not possible on other platforms. Generally, this would be an “unfair” advantage, as games should strive for feature parity on all platforms within reason, but so often we end up being on the wrong side of that equation that seeing some of the perks of the platform is nice.
To my knowledge, the only major game I can think of that does this to a certain extent is Factorio, which enables non-blocking game saves on Linux and macOS and not Windows. It’s not a Linux-exclusive feature, but it’s nice that the developers went through the effort to implement the feature on Linux even though it’s not possible on Windows.
The reality is that the number of games, even AAA ones, that are releasing at that high a “minimum” performance requirement is incredibly small compared to other games that do release with more modest system requirements. Games that are “just good enough” graphically to go along with their gameplay tend to be the norm, I think, with the few games that really go for pushing visual fidelity being respectable in their own right but not frequent enough to fret about. What will matter the most is what games you want to play and what their requirements are, and that’s basically impossible to project out 1, 3, 5 years out or however long you expect the hardware to last.
For what it’s worth, I have a Steam Deck and spend a lot of time playing on it, but pretty much every “AAA, big budget => big graphics” game I want to play I’d exclusively do so on my gaming desktop (or remote play on Deck if I want to play it there at all), while sticking to 2D and lighter 3D games on the portable device directly. This is mostly due to what kinds of games I enjoy playing on what form factor, as for example my decision on what to play docked vs portable on the Switch is much the same way, and for about a year after buying the Deck, my desktop hardware was so out of date it was getting generally worse performance than the Deck yet I’d still use the desktop for “spectacle” games, but the necessary graphical quality to go along with that tends to correlate well.
Additionally, it’s devices like these, that have proven successful in the market, that incentivize Valve to continue Proton’s development. It’s hard to see given the already insane trajectory Proton’s development was on before the Steam Deck, but now that getting games running on Linux (in at least some form) is desirable by many game developers in order to gain Steam Deck support, Proton compatibility guarantees, and the corresponding development to make that happen, have shifted to before the releases of many major AAA games, and that compatibility work has cascading effects for many other games as well.
The reason this is known is because this supposed device is using the same AMD APU used in the Steam Deck. It’s unlikely that a standalone controller would have a dedicated APU like that without becoming a full-on portable gaming device of its own.
I haven’t adopted this kind of setup, mainly because Proton just does such a good job I have almost zero need for Windows, but my plan for eventually doing something like this was to also maintain a passthrough Linux VM for any GPU-intensive work on that side.
When I realized that the practical end-state of my system would mean I’d just be running things from within the Linux VM 98% of the time (games that can run on Linux) I kind of dropped the idea.
For me it’s always been after I tried to resize a partition.
I recommend using whatever is the “least hands-on” option for your boot drive, a.k.a your distro default (ext4 for Debian). In my admittedly incompetent experience, the most likely cause for filesystem corruption is trying to mess with things, like resizing partitions. If you use your distro installer to set up your boot drive and then don’t mess with it, I think you’ll be fine with whatever the default is. You should still take backups through whatever medium(s) and format(s) make sense for your use case, as random mishaps are still a thing no matter what filesystem you use.
Are you planning on dualbooting Windows for games? I use https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs to mount a shared BTRFS drive that contains my Proton-based Steam library in case I need to run one of those games on Windows for whatever reason. I’ve personally experienced BTRFS corruption a few times due to the aforementioned incompetence, but I try to avoid keeping anything important on my games drive to limit the fallout when that does occur. Additionally if you’re looking to keep non-game content on the storage drive (likely if you’re doing 3D modeling work) this may not be as safe.
Sure, modding the device will always have a niche interest, and people doing it just because they can, but if the price point of such a device is comparable to a Switch (easily hackable) or even a Steam Deck (outright open for you to do whatever with no barriers in place), would this device have any practical benefit for that kind of stuff over the alternatives?
I think it will continue to have some niche benefit, especially if modding the device still retains its presumably “first party, easy” path to streaming games from a local PlayStation, and for people who would want to keep the presumably better-quality and 1080p display over what’s found in the Switch and Steam Deck, but I think someone looking to get something to primarily use with Steam Link or other such services have better (incl. first-party) options for that use case.
I was referring to the niche-but-growing segment of handheld game devices primarily designed for cloud/streaming services, like the Logitech G Cloud or more “traditional” handheld gaming devices like the Switch or Steam Deck, not necessarily all generic-tablet Android devices.
I think their original intent back when Proton originally launched was to just show generic Linux compatibility on any titles if it worked with Proton and was approved by Valve. I’m not sure why they stopped doing that.