Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming Moments in Years

Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by Melatonic on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @12:51PM (#34711851)

Honestly I hate to say it but I think the Switch was actually the big advance. It does not run PC games but it does run a fairly standard OS ( I believe a flavor of android ) and the old Nvidia processor from the Shield.

I guess what I am saying is it is sort of like the Steam Deck but based on a tablet instead - and can pretty easily be hacked into a tablet instead. The Steam Deck is much more locked down but they MUST have been hugely inspired by the success of the Switch when making the Steam Deck.

Personally I think I am excited for when we might get something a bit more of a hybrid of the two - if ARM does indeed take off on Windows and Linux more then we may end up with a device that can sometimes take a full ARM stack with all of its power advantages and then also run standard older OS processes as well.

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Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by monocasa on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @01:01PM (#34712014)

> It does not run PC games but it does run a fairly standard OS ( I believe a flavor of android )

No, it's a totally custom OS. Custom kernel, custom user space. They run the BSD network stack off on the side, but so did Windows up until Vista.

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Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by Melatonic on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @01:04PM (#34712070)

Got it. But the hardware is still tablet hardware so its perfectly hackable into Android mode. Not the same as the Steam Deck at all but I think my point still sort of works

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Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by ranger207 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @01:28PM (#34712461)

AIUI only old hardware where Nintendo forgot to burn some bootloader fuses are hackable. Newer ones are not

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Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by piperswe on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @01:37PM (#34712602)

Those are the only ones that are softmoddable, but there are modchips for newer ones.

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Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by monocasa on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @02:27PM (#34713468)

Following that, just about every game console of the past 25 years has been able to be hardware modded to run Linux. The switch isn't special here.

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Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by jerf on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @03:32PM (#34714567)

Yes. Nintendo intended it to be 100% fully locked down. They made a trivial mistake in the early versions, since corrected. But they absolutely do not intend for you to run anything other than their exact stuff on it. It could not hardly be more closed down and proprietary.

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Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by wbear on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @02:17PM (#34713283)

This Steam Deck is much less locked down. It's an x86 PC.

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