I built a $2000 PC during the early pandemic days. Now I sit on my bed 5 feet away from that PC and play steam deck.
With Steam Link you can play on the Deck and have the quality and power of the $2,000 PC. Valve spoils us.
It’s so much more convenient to play locally though. Just press the button and you’re back where you left. No need to boot up the PC, start the game, establish the connection.
I know it’s basically impossible, but I wish practical suspend/resume game functionality would make it to Windows.
So do you want that feature on your PC? Because you can get that
Is the answer Linux? Because I feel like the answer is Linux.
Yeah actually, you can use bazzite
Edit: if you really want the same experience as on the steam deck
For real. I almost never turn my deck off. It just stays suspended right where I left off in my game. I push one button, and 3 seconds later I’m right where I left off.
I didn’t realize you could put the steam deck to sleep with a game still running. I had assumed it would cause game issues.
Nope. No issues at all. Uses up like 5% of the battery per day to be suspended like that, so if I’m playing through a game I can play the entire thing without ever seeing a boot screen or intro or having to worry about getting to a save point. Just right back into or out of the game within a couple seconds.
I love that feature so much. I have played through at least 20 backlog single player games with my deck. Amazing games that I could never finish before because it’s apparently too much to ask for my brain.
I often have issues with the sound though depending on the game after waking it up again, which is annoying. The sound is cracking and partially distorted.
I’ve had the audio desync in cutscenes after leaving a game open in sleep for a week or two. I think it’s an issue with how the game timers work. If they’re counting since the game started, any slightly inaccuracy will become more obvious as the game is left open, regardless of sleep.
I remember having that happen to me sometimes when I was playing borderlands quite a while back, but what I’ve been playing the past several months doesn’t have it happen, so I thought they fixed it. If they haven’t, I guess it must be game specific.
My man
Same, 2k laptop with a 3070 ti and I cant even remember what game is installed there
Real
My steam deck gets so much more play in the summer. My home office and desktop are in the hottest room in my house (because I’m dumb), so being able to hang out on the couch in my cool living room playing Fallout 1 has been a godsend
Got a backbone controller and ain’t been back to a console for anything other than watching streaming since.
I can’t bring my video card in bed with me.
Sorry, desktop PC, you’re just bad at snuggles while I can hug my Steam Deck.
You could play with Steam Link on the Deck.
But you can stream it. My phone is my poor man’s Deck.
Depending on the phone it could be stronger than the deck lol
One would have to hack their phone to get SteamOS or plain postmarket onto it though, very few phones run well with the mainline kernel.
I’m not sure where you’re going with that. I was just trying to say that phone’s are a solid contender and shouldn’t be counted out
I mean that even if phones are powerful, one can’t run PC games on them unless they get Proton on it somehow, which might require the things I mentioned.
Wine through Box64 is something you can already do on top of Android, either directly through Termux or something like Winlator. Lots of incompatibilities though… even installing Steam is only barely possible through hacks.
I knew there was bound to be something. Cool, what can you play on it despite incompatibilities?
You’ve just invented the market for a combo gaming-handheld/electric heating blanket.
You can use steam link, or even better sunshine/moonlight, and have the best of both worlds if your local network is strong.
I can play fully modded Skyrim/Fallout4/Cyberpunk/Starfield on any screen in the house.
I don’t even see the point of a steam Deck, I use a regular 10inch tablet with a kickstand running moonlight and an Xbox controller in bed.
ENORMOUS +1 for Sunshine + Moonlight. I’d play just about anything shy of a twitch shooter on it, if your network is nice and stable
or even better sunshine/moonlight
Thanks for the shoutout, this is my first time reading about Sunshine. Looks pretty awesome!
I love it. The kids cheap laptops with Ubuntu are now fully fledged gaming laptops! And a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and the cheap tablet is also a gaming computer.
Edit: also wireguard to connect from outside the house.The point is you don’t need to be at your house, or a place to set a tiny TV, or a kickstand, or a wall outlet. Also, if you’re using an Xbox controller, I can’t overstate how hard you are missing out on gyro controlled aiming on a steam deck. It works incredibly well.
The Steam Deck is just an absolute backlog slayer, in an increasingly busy life.
If only i can buy it directly through steam and not grey market. Shit is expensive from where i am. Bought it anyway though and yeay, my unit has bad shoulder button and the trackpad rattles on the left side. Bad luck i guess, seems like those two problem is common.
The problem with grey market is the warranty. Cant send it back to steam. Otherwise ill exchange it right away. Need to send to seller and repair it. Cant even exchange it. Had to send my deck three times before i call quit and sold it.
Maybe in future ill buy it again and see how’s the build quality. In the mean time ill just remote play my ps5 with my switch.
So true… maybe if I could haul the desktop to the bar but still
ROG Ally here, but same lol
RIP
I just could NOT do windows.
The steamdeck experience is amazing because of how just… clean it all is.
I’ve seen the handhelds running windows. I can’t plug my nose hard enough to stomach that.
I had the opposite problem which is why I gifted my Steam Deck and got an Ally. The Deck was solid for games that ran right off Steam but a tiresome drag whenever a third party launcher was involved or I just wanted to reclaim some memory from shader caches for games that weren’t even installed anymore (thank the gods for Cryobyt33). If you’re new to Pc I guess windows can be rough but all I do is run Steam and when it goes into big picture mode everything’s cake from there.
I mean its more than Windows just ‘being rough’. Its windows being a toxic bane, and its the unique smoothness that the steamdeck native experience allows for.
Honesty, if Valve can focus on their driver game, I’d way rather have a the ROC hardware: its objectively far superior.
There just isn’t a planet on which I would run Windows on… on frankly anything at this point. I really hope valve goes this way because I truly think they’ve solved maybe the #1 issue of linux which is ‘it just works’.
If they can extend that to other hardware; it just makes so much sense. Its not like they are really making money on the deck. Their business is still selling games. Its a loss leader to sell more game and grow the PC gaming market. Why not set people up to put it on other hardware?
I look forward to a day where a handheld is basically a drop in form factor replacement for a laptop. Maybe we can get some ARM chips similar to the M series that can really pump the performance. The future just seems so bright.
if Valve can focus on their driver game
Why? They do contribute to the kernel driver, and I was under the impression it is polished?
For SteamOS to become the defacto OS for this form factor, they’ll need much more driver support across hardware configurations is my thinking. SteamOS has focused explicitly on the deck and they’ve done a great job with it. If they can extend this to other hardware configurations and convince other hardware manufacturers to go with SteamOS, I see an opportunity here for Valve, which frankly the size of which hasn’t existed since the earliest days of smart phones*. The windows experience that I’ve seen in this form factor is a joke (on top of how bad windows is just out of the box). Its night and day with SteamOS. However, what windows does have going for it is the driver support for all the wacky and wild hardware combinations companies are sticking in these handhelds. Its very much the wild west, which maybe puts Valve in a weaker position.
I would be interested to know how/if people are trying SteamOS on these other handhelds.
*In terms of the opportunity, I’m looking at ARM based chips like the M4, and seeing a direct path towards an actual, top tier or at least upper mid tier / next gen gaming experience coming from a handheld. The steamdeck sure AF ain’t that. But I see a technical path towards ‘something’ like that, where you have one of these hyper efficient ARM based chipsets in a handheld, and its performance competitive with some of the current (as in the meme this post is about) hardware like the mid to high tier (comparable to say a 4080). Like, before the deck, the only meaningful handheld with any market penetration was the switch, and that things so anemic, I think my toaster has a higher FPS. And the deck really isn’t even that great. The ROG ally is way better in terms of raw horse power, but the problem comes back to Windows. If you have to run windows on these things, its basically a non-starter, at least in terms of penetrability.
Oh, I get what you mean now. In an ideal world, hardware manufacturers would all contribute and write them like they do for Windows. We should strive for this type of first party support, and popularity might do the trick. Meawhile, I think it’s good enough that we have pretty wide support and growing.
I think it’s about convincing them Linux is not Valve’s the same way Windows is Microsoft’s, and most of the work is already done. Since we are talking about x86 hardware they can always support Windows too if the customer desires, not like we haven’t been doing this for years on laptops.
You should try looking into Bazzite then. I have it setup for dual boot on my desktop but they have dedicated distros for a the Ally and Legion Go as well
This looks great! How do you use it with your setup?
I got a couple extra drives in my desktop so I installed onto one of those. It works great as an alternative desktop, anybody that just uses their pc to browse the web, email and play a decent chunk of games wouldn’t know the difference from Windows. The problem is of course compatibility, proton gets you a nice chunk of the way just like it does on the deck but easy anti cheat as an issue like always and a few games just seem to run choppy (at least with an nvidia card). I did try it on my ROG Ally as well and the controller setup worked great, they set the system to recognize the ally’s buttons as a play station controller which was super cleaver. By doing it that way gyro is supported and the back buttons can be mapped to the touch pad presses so it all works without Asus’s software. In the end though the Ally wasn’t as fast and simple to swap between OS’s so the handheld is just running windows.
“Handheld gaming is handheld gaming” meme
For real bro, the console wars thing is lame already without people trying to recreate it in the pc space
Funny I was just thinking about getting the 4080 super. Kinda on the fence, but I need something for the living room TV.
50 series is soon enough i’d say wait for that to.come out and get that or get a discounted 4080 super when the 50 is out.
Yeah… Just a little longer I suppose.
I have neither and still find the Steam Deck more appealing for me.
Whiiiich, lends me to the next question, is the Steam Deck an inferior product compared to all the other existing PC handhelds? I mean we all know we have seen the Steam Deck basically created this new sector (inspired by the Switch), but I have seen lots of hate, or lots of praise towards it, by different users and I can’t exactly pinpoint which is the truth (it seems like the console wars of nowadays lol), at the point that all the praise the Steam Deck gets is a meme (I see this behavior on YT especially where this handhelds really show).
I still think the Steam Deck has the best price, but at the time I have enough income for getting one (and putting aside they don’t ship to Mexico) I think the market will have newer alternatives lol.
It’s very similar to the raspberry pi in that other products have better on paper specs but the deck is the cultural hub and will have the longest support.
Huh, TIL the Pi had competition.
and will have the longest support.
I thought Valve wasn’t known for a long support for handheld, at least that is one comment a friend of mine said (that the Deck would be forgotten as the Steam controller).
I think steam deck is a pretty good choice from that perspective.
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There is little vendor lock in, you could upgrade from a deck to a competitor and so long as it uses steam you won’t really be missing out on anything
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Valve has gone in pretty hard on repairability. so while it may become obsolete (and I don’t think it will for a while, Moores law isn’t what it used to be) it should still be able to run very far down the line.
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The steam controller and ecosystem planned around it was a financial failure. While there were a hunch of enthusiasts into the steam controller (myself included) it never gained mainstream appeal. The steam machine that it was meant to synergize with did even worse. Otoh the valve index did pretty well and still is quite a popular pick if you wanna get into vr today despite being 5 yrs old, while vr wasnt as successful as i think some wanted (I blame meta for that!) It did carve out a niche for valve that helos there long term plans. The steam deck has been a run away success and also brings a big boost to a lot of valves long term strategies (decoupling from windows, competing with consoles, giving people a reason to stay on steam), and its already seen a refresh. I would be very surprised to not see a steamdeck 2, although it may be a while (valve has stated as much, because they want to make it easy for devs to target steam deck for recommended specs)
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If it’s official or not, the deck has tons of third party support through companies like Jsaux and their colab with iFixit. On the software side you have Camera, Bazzite and a wealth of options should steam OS disappear. I don’t think Valve will drop the deck tbh and them not being known for long support of the handheld this is their first one, your friend might be talking about the steam controller but even that is still supported just not for sale and was very much a cult product rather than a successful one.
your friend might be talking about the steam controller
And the steam link. And the steam vr headset. Valve has a terrible record with regards to hardware.
steam vr headset
What’s happened with the Index? They’re still selling it right now.
Just saying, Steam controller is great and works amazingly still, made only better by the ongoing updates to steam input.
I’m not sure what else they’d need to do. Other than still produce it, I suppose 😅
I’m not sure what else they’d need to do. Other than still produce it, I suppose 😅
Yeah this is the part I’d be worried about if I get a Steam Deck and it has no successor 😅
the steam deck is less powerful than other handhelds, but is currently the best user experience and battery life on the handheld pc market. Even so the performance is often a non-issue, it can even play cyberpunk at a decent framerate.
It’s weaker but Windows is so astonishingly terrible on handhelds that it ends up being a far better experience
It’s a little like comparing a top of the line gaming laptop to a middle of the road efficient laptop. Sure the games will run a bit better on the powerful laptop, but you’re trading that for battery life. The Steam Deck is insanely efficient, and they made a few hard tradeoffs like the 1280x800 display resolution (which is great for battery, and honestly plenty sharp for the screen size).
I’m still a little blown away it runs Balder’s Gate 3 and Cyberlunk 2077 at all.
but Windows is so astonishingly terrible on handhelds
The way you are telling me this reminds me of the old HP windows laptops I used to use that their battery life did not even last 2 hours lol (I eventually got a MacBook Pro and that was a massive upgrade).
I still don’t picture windows doing that great with laptops (as in optimization), but I don’t know, I have seen very good laptops with good specs very recently that it could maybe make up for Windows being not optimized for anything.
Not all, but almost all of them. 1 (one) megapixel display, wider than my laptop, heavier than an extra phone with the best gamepad on earth mounted to it. Steam Deck has a long way forward to even match my classroom gaming experience from 2014, let alone surpass it. Aya Neo Air, GPD Win 4, there’s so much better hardware out there it hurts.
Other more powerful devices frankly often have worse frame pacing and battery life especially compared to the OLED model.
And no I don’t own or plan to own a deck but if I wanted a hand held right now that would be my choice.
often have worse frame pacing and battery life especially compared to the OLED model.
Yeah, honestly the fact that the Deck with less raw power leaves similar results is a huge positive point I guess, I honestly haven’t seen anyone complaining that much because of the performance issues.
And yeah, better battery life is always good in my book, I think other handhelds have a joke of battery life.
