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.
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.
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 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.
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 still self host my TS3 for my nerd herd, and as an EvE online player (currently trying to win, but thats hard), you have to be fluent in all voip solutions as they all have different requirments and say a lot about your group.
Discord - small group, utilizing free services, may have an auth tool, used to keep in contact with people from old groups. Remember kids, if the product is free, you are the product
TS3 - mid-sized group (100-1000 players) requires a real IT team, will have an authentication system and generally will have their shit together. Ease of set up is handy, but admin user accounts can break servers.
Mumble - Welcome to the big leagues. (1K+ players) The resources you require now require resources in meat-space and are rather substantial. You need real IT security and people on a payroll. It will drive your admins nuts for about a week setting everything up, but once its done, you wont have to touch it again.
There is a difference between having it turn on and hardening it against DDOS attacks while haveing 500 nerds try to use it as coms for massive videogame fights (this has happened, its against the games rules, but it has happened). If you can do that in a day, please empart your wisdom.
Serious EVE players are something else. The mention about IT security isn’t a hyperbole, some EVE players take the espionage meta-game very seriously, and even though it’s not only against the rules but also illegal, that’s not gonna stop them. I mean, once they literally got someone to turn off electricity for a whole town just so they can win a fight (I tried to find a link to the article, because I’m 90% sure I did read about it somewhere, but I can’t manage to find it anywhere, if anyone has a link. Maybe it was just a rummor, or an unexecuted plan?)
Yah… That used to be me… I try to keep in touch, dip my toe in the pool every year or so, go to the conventions and such. Almost 10 years ago I wrote my alliances auth system in Ruby on Rails, included those identicons you see as the old default profile pictures on github as the avatars on the internal forum and you couldent change then. The reason for this was that the token for the icon was your name and the posters mashed together so if a screenshot leaked we could reverse lookup who said what.
We never actually caught any spies with that, but that was the level of paranoia and planning that went into a crappy mid-sized group, in the game of today there are actual armies of 10k angry nerds. They are much more casual about it though, which is healthier for the players.
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.
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.
DRM-free Windows games, but mostly older titles since the performance overhead is pretty large. Something like Fallout 3 or Oblivion will run at playable frame rates.
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.
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
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.
While I’m extremely envious of you, if I had the opportunity to choose one superpower, there are probably a million others I’d choose before that one haha
like a superpower that gives me exactly as much money as I need at any given moment anytime I need it.
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