It’s a decent piece of hardware designed for ease of use similar to consoles while also allowing people as much control as a normal PC. How well it works depends completely on what kind of games one wants to play.

I tend to play mostly indie and older titles, both PC and console ones, and Deck works great for that. The few AAA games I tried worked without issues but your experience might vary based on when they were released, whether they use third party launchers, DRM etc.

Deck was a bit of an impulse buy for me but I can’t say I regret it. It’s a neat device and a great way to get into PC gaming, well worth the asking price in my opinion.

Finally came back to Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery - a sci-fi tactical RPG. Really fun, with interesting story so far. Can be pretty challenging at times (especially on higher difficulties when trying to complete all optional goals on your first try) but that’s kind of what you’d want from a title like this, isn’t it?

It plays great on both desktop, with mouse and keyboard, as well as on the Deck so I tend to jump between the two depending on the situation. Thankfully game has no problem with that.

Finished Drakengard 3 last week and switched to Pokemon Crystal for some more casual fun. Besides that I also hop between Puzzle Quest and Tetris DX if I’m short on time.

Which is funny because he’s fully aware Linux players would be happy without any support beyond “enable EAC to work for us” but he’d rather try to spin it as a difficult decision he really doesn’t want to make. Just enable it Tim, I’m sure Valve devs would put in the work to make Fortnite work well on the Deck.

I can see how my initial reply could be read as a random rant by a Valve fanboy since, well, these people exist. I do hope I’m wrong and this turns into another major player pushing Linux to the forefront as well. Time will tell.

I was mostly thinking about ones that can play PC games as Android ones are kind of their own thing. Box86 seems like an interesting project but I’m wondering how feasible it is for a project like this - do you have any experience with it and if so, is there any noticeable performance hit when playing?

I’m certainly interested in the possible power efficiency improvements coming from such project so I hope my initial response turns out to be just an unreasonable wariness when this thing comes out. All we can do is wait for now, I guess.

As another user already mentioned, you only need desktop mode to install/add them as non-steam game.

Other that that yeah, it IS nitpicky and I agree Valve needs competition. It’s just… if your pitch starts with misrepresenting said competition (“Steam Deck is locked to Valveverse”), promising improbable (“Fortnite on linux” when we know the Tim Sweeney hates it and already said supporting linux would be too much work), stealing content to show a proof of concept (Witcher 3 video) and have someone like McCaster as one of the members just doesn’t instill confidence in me.

I really hope I’m being too cautious and cynical about this but it’s on them to ease those worries, not on me to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Ah, thanks for correcting me. I’ve seen Steam OS being described as immutable but never dug into it to confirm. Lesson learned.

It kind of feels like they’re just throwing out various buzzwords to catch everyone - “it’ll be like the Nintendo approach but they really want input from power users”, “it’ll work on anything and everything” etc. Maybe I’m just being a bit too cynical… ╮( ˘ ､ ˘ )╭

I’ve got some points about this one.

• they pitch a “deck that could actually play Fortnite” - game from a company who’s CEO actively hates linux for whatever reason (maybe it kicked his dog, I dunno)
• they talk how games bought on stores other than Steam will be “first-class citizens” which… you can already do on Steam Deck
• they promote being free of hackers/cheaters because of immutable file system… something Steam Deck also has (though they do mention some additional digital signatures)
• they want to be not only on handhelds but everywhere (laptops, tablets, phones, TV, cars…) - pretty ambitious for a company that didn’t deliver anything yet
• it’ll be running on an ARM processor - we’ll see how this works out (has anyone tried making a handheld like this?)
• already mentioned no desktop mode - why is this mentioned as a positive exactly?
• they want help from linux power users (feature requests, contribute code) but they don’t know how open-source they want to be
• they stole Witcher 3 video from some dude on YouTube

I’d like to think these are just screw ups/growing pains but nothing I’ve seen so far gives me any good vibes about it. We definitely need more choice and competition - this however does not look like an honest attempt at that. Let’s hope I’m wrong.

Edit: Ah, how could I forget! Kirt McMaster, CEO of Playtron and the man responsible for killing CyanogenMod. Sounds great…