This is just talking about games approved through Valve’s verification process. There are a lot of games that work that are “unverified”, not to mention the entire history of gaming available through emulation.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/21835717
I really hope to get one of these at some point
I’m tired of waiting for valve and soon will be getting one on the grey market.
Waiting for what?
The Deck is not sold in most parts of the world. This includes certain parts of Asia, Latin america, Australia, some European countries, and most of Africa. Essentially, if you’re not from the US, Canada, China or western Europe, buying a Deck directly from Valve is impossible. Import and distribution is also an impossibility. Region locking it still one of Valve’s biggest hurdles.
So, to acquire one I have to pay an overhead to a reseller willing to sell it to me, foot the import bill, the local tariff, pay the courier, and at the end of all the device will be under no guarantee, support or protection. I have to pay more for a device that Valve could decide to block, the only reason I’d still do it is because I trust they won’t. But they could if they wanted to.
They really couldn’t, it’s just a Linux PC. Worst case scenario you could format the drive and install regular arch Linux on it (SteamOS is arch based, and you can add the repos for all of the custom steam packages to a standard arch install). Unlike the switch, you have direct, firmware level control over the hardware, which is why I bought it. I want to encourage more manufacturers to not lock down their hardware
Hell, you could install Windows on the thing if you really wanted to.
If they were Ubisoft, Sony, Nintendo or any other shitty company they could block access to the Steam account or ban it outright, cutting me off a library with hundreds of games. Hopefully, Valve is not like that yet. So, yes. I trust they wouldn’t do anything fucky when they notice that I’m connecting my Steam account to a device, theoretically, blocked in my region. But there’s some really intrusive shit you could do to prevent access or force it to be a piracy only machine.
I mention it because I remember some friends tried to grey import a PS5 and the device soft locked them when the IP didn’t match the region they chose. And Nintendo has done way worse, up to outright destroying accounts.
True, but they at least can’t brick the hardware itself, and if you were concerned about your steam account there’s always VPNs.
@gh0stcassette @dustyData or Manjaro + KDE as they recommend for their dev environment.
I don’t like Manjaro very much, it’s Basically just EndeavorOS with extra hassle imo (delayed updates leading to AUR packages breaking), but you can 100% do this if you like Manjaro.
@gh0stcassette I have no experience with Manjaro, but usually stick with Ubuntu/ Debian or the Red Hat family.
@gh0stcassette @dustyData the only thing that concerns me is how long they will support the OS. Since they do not allow you to install another Linux distro. If that would even work with their hardware.
This is false. All of the device drivers for the steam deck hardware are open source and included in the Linux kernel, and you can Literally just boot directly from a live USB and install whatever distro you want, it’s just a very small laptop inside a console shell essentially. I think Valve even worked with Microsoft to get the hardware working correctly under windows because from what I’ve heard, the Steam Deck experience under windows is much better than at launch (I’m not 100% confident on that tho).
It’s literally just a PC.
They don’t allow you to install other OSes?
The worst thing that Valve has done is “the main kernel tree hasn’t gotten around to merging some of the Deck’s EC bits yet”. You could run Batocera or Bazzite on your deck today if you want. You probably don’t want to, those distros aren’t as good an experience as SteamOS yet.