Valve's popular handheld gaming PC recently passed 14,200 officially rated games, meaning there's never been a better time to own one.

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

  • gh0stcassette
    2·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      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.

      • gh0stcassette
        1·
        6 months ago

        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
        4·
        6 months ago

        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.

      • rotopenguin@infosec.pubEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        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.

      • gh0stcassette
        1·
        6 months ago

        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.