I've played half a dozen games on the original Go, and I don't think I've used more than one rear button. In Half Life, it's more comfortable to hold for crouch. In one of the Spider Man games, it expected a trackpad click, which was easier to perform with a rear button.
Since games have been designed to be playable with only the face buttons, there's not always obvious utility for extras. Maybe as premium controllers become more popular, this will change. For now, I can definitely see the argument that 4 buttons are superfluous (except for standardization).
Even for emulators, they're great for binding all kinds of extra functions.
Using the right trackpad also means I can free up the right joystick for other stuff, and there's always enough other stuff I want to access regularly enough.
Rollercoaster Tycoon, FTL, point and click games are games the trackpad has vastly improved for me.
This reads like "I never play mouse driven games"
Like how ds4windows is used to translate Playstation controllers gryo and touchpad. Even the Steam controller requires Steam. I don't think oems are investing in the software to do the same.
It is how i got to play the original System Shock 2 on my Steam Deck even though the game was designed with a keyboard and mouse in place.
This is something to watch : we'll see how much Valve actually cares about Linux (and libre software/hardware in general) compared to just using it to get rid of Windows : will they make their new controller API SteamOS exclusive ?
(How well do Steam Link and Steam Controller work without Steam ?)
I'd love to see them dip a toe in with an ~$700 NUC-style steam machine with higher specs than the Deck but still very affordable for most people. If that sells well then increasingly look at more premium models, though it may be in their best interest to facilitate custom builds at that point. They could possibly even sell the parts or a kit or something!
They want you to be able to play (and buy) games from Steam. I doubt they're fussed about whether you're using their official image or a homebrew enthusiast build.
In fact, my Legion Go counts as a Steam Deck in my Steam Replay stats.
(I guess the actual funny bit is that they make assumptions that a general-purpose UI is only used on their hardware…)
Why? I mean you can pretty much just boot directly into Steam’s full screen mode and almost never interact with Windows already.
You need a Radeon card though
I never even use my phone as a phone. I certainly don't make calls while I'm out and about. The thing pointlessly enables spying on me when I don't even want it. But a pocket computer with wifi, enough storage for my entire music collection + wikipedia + maps, and ability to take phone-quality pictures? Running an actual Linux distribution so I don't run into stupid issues like how Android doesn't let you use NFS so they can push you into their cloud services? Awesome.
At that point I didn't even own any Steam games and hadn't played a game in well over a decade, and had no interest in doing so. I'm a sucker for open hardware though. Forward a few years and I've been really happy with it. With games so easily accessible I have bought quite a few over the years now.
Adding cameras would be awesome! Though were I in charge of product for it, I'd want to think very carefully before doing so. It is a general purpose portable computer, but it's important to remember that the vast majority of the market doesn't buy it for that, and a camera and associated software may get in the way of it's primary purpose... Though, it could enable some pretty slick live video chat during multiplayer, which could be pretty awesome for people that play those kinds of games.
See Librem or PinePhone/tablet for instance.
I've been using Jovian-NixOS as a placeholder for SteamOS, and have been disappointed at how mouse-and-keyboard-centric Linux UIs still are.
All it's really doing is pulling a LineageOS image, then dropping in the waydroid "drivers/firmware" that make it work with wayland using a series of patch files people have contributed. It all then gets run in a container which you "remotely" access for the GUI parts. Starting and stopping the container is like turning your phone on and off. If you set it up as a systemd service then you can just make this lockstep with your actual boot sequence.
It's primarily "marketed" as a tool to run android apps on Linux, which means the documentation kind of guides you down this path of running individual apps as their own window in Gnome or something. This doesn't work very well and apps tend to crash when you try to resize them. However, if you run it via `waydroid show-full-ui` it works perfectly in my experience and operates just like a phone/tablet.
I currently use it with a 2-in-1 x1 Thinkpad (meaning it has a touchscreen + pen), primarily for reading comics, books and watching movies when I connect it to my TV. I have it "wrapped" in Hyprland, so I can easily switch workspaces to return to the "host" if I want to, but I usually just do everything entirely within waydroid, and lazily use JuiceSSH for most host operations.
My laptops camera is a bit special and lacks linux support, but my understanding is a properly supported camera would work fine with waydroid. It doesn't support screen rotation or wifi configuration though, so those parts still need to be handled by the host system. I have my laptop auto rotate via hyprland since it was the easiest but I think it would be trivial to just add a patch for support as well.
It uses a pretty old LineageOS image, but I rebuilt it with some community patches so I could use the latest image, so you aren't even restricted to just LineageOS. I also didn't quite like how my stylus was being treated by android, so made a custom idc file for it and plopped it into the overlay filesystem waydroid has, saving me the effort of having to rebuild the image again.
It all sounds kind of complicated, but you can get most of this up and running right out of the box, complete with google play services too (requires you get a token from google, but they have guides for this). It's just once you notice something bugging you, you can actually do something about it, in an afternoon even, instead of just dealing with it forever. Something I personally appreciate.
That said, I'm using it as a tablet, for a phone there will be some gaps that need still need filling, such as:
- You would need to somehow get a small touchscreen device and install linux on it
- GPS: You would need to make sure this device exposes the GPS interface in some way and integrate it with waydroid. Since waydroid works via the same path OEMs take, there are probably some guides for this.
- LTE: Same as GPS, though so long as you can get internet on the host, waydroid will inherit that automatically.
- ARM Apps: Waydroid has some stuff that should allow you to run ARM apps but I've never bothered to set it up, not sure how well it works.
What should work out of the box, assuming they support linux:
- Cameras
- All touch interactions
- All stylus interactions
- Keyboard + Mouse
- HW rendering, works perfectly
- Network access (only configurable on host though)
- Direct USB access (out-of-the box in the sense you need to enable this in the waydroid config since it's not always desirable)
- Google play services (with token)
- All android apps built for x86_64, which is surprisingly supported by nearly all apps I've tried other than doodle jump.
- Storage, doesn't require a custom partition or anything and you can use bind mounts to get host files, though I find SFTP to be easier in practice. I have in the past bind mounted an SSHFS mount which worked fine. In theory you could utilize this to expose an NFS which is otherwise not possible on Android.
On the surface level it looks it bit like the half-assed Linux efforts for the Steam Machines and EEE PCs.
This time the software - if it works as well as on the Steam Deck - is arguably more user friendly than Windows.
So it would have been nice for linux to also be a "premium" option.
On the other hand the Go S with Steam OS has a real chance to compare well against its more expensive Windows version.
After I got everything set up (which wasn't hard), the amount of maintenance I've had to do on there is zero. SteamOS managed to make desktop Linux accessible to basically anyone; it was easy to build my own game console that I enjoy considerably more than my Xbox One that I never bother with.
Valve has made desktop Linux a lot more viable than I ever thought would happen.
You must have used NixOS before, or had hardware that worked perfectly with a default config.
In a market that's getting more crowded by the day, where so many of their competitors are using the same SoC and come in at roughly the same price point, it's a rational decision to control costs as much as possible. Not to mention, they also need to compete against the Deck itself, which Valve is subsidizing to hit its pricepoint. The alternative would be to innovate and differentiate your product offering from your competitors (like the original Legion Go, which had detachable controllers and a fancy pseudo-mouse). The fact that this machine didn't carry those features forward is a strong signal that the bottom of the market is where the early wins will be.
Keep in mind also that Microsoft is planning their own handheld xbox experience. Speculation: MS' effort will look a lot like Valve's, with Xbox games coming day-and-date to OEM-built handhelds, as well as a first party reference implementation that's intended as a benchmark for devs. I imagine that most OEMs are using the cheaper steamOS pricing as a hedge against future gouging from MS; if there's an "Xbox certification process" that proves to be too cumbersome, a vendor that's already shipping cheap(er) devices en masse with SteamOS has the option of simply dropping windows support altogether.
On one hand you have the shitty and/or DRM-plagued stores, on another you have DRM-free ones like GoG, Humble Bundle, Itch.io... which in my experience Just Work (tm) in a few clicks thanks to the likes of Lutris launcher/Proton/Wine.
(And in the middle, Steam(OS) to rule them all.)
P.S.: I've heard that Battle.net games also work easily and well, but I don't know how long this will last with Microsoft buying Activision-Blizzard and Valve ramping up their fight against Windows...
Lets be real, with SteamOS having a Windows ecosytem, it is about saving Windows licenses mostly, and not really fostering a GNU/Linux gaming ecosystem.
The day they decide it has been long enough, like they did with XP licence that ended up wiping EEE PC, Valve would have wished to have fostered a native GNU/Linux ecosystem instead.
> fostered a native GNU/Linux
Wouldn’t that require a stable ABI and such? Making Linux binary/proprietary software friendly seems like a much harder task than [potentially] fighting MS over the right to reimplement their APIs.
> ...the world’s first officially licensed handheld powered by SteamOS™.
https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-legi...
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/593110/view/52983491...
Both in the context of the handhelds themselves (do they meet the steam deck's high bar for reliability and longevity) as well as how the companies handle things like open source contributions or vetting games.
It takes more than just the OS to replicate the steam deck's success (even though SteamOS itself is very well executed)
Wine is way more than a DirectX implementation.
And original Lenovo press link is https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-legi...
Too bad they couldn’t get a more up to date chipset in, but I suppose there will be a bunch of little tweaks to power management, compositing, etc.
