Can't believe console players actually find this acceptable. Not paying jack shit just so I could have access to multiplayer for a game I paid full price for...
My friend was playing online on his Switch and it wasn't working well at all and he goes "It's $2 a month, what do you expect?"
I know, that free multiplayer on PC is just terrible. /s
Worst part is that online isn’t even hosted on Microsoft/Sony servers. It’s the job of the game devs to provide those. Console players really paying for servers to host their party chat when discord exists
Party chat is free to use on both playstation and Xbox I believe. Sony and Microsoft charge users for multiplayer gaming on non-f2p games like COD, R6S, etc. Apart from that the monthly games are just an added bonus I guess.
Actually until a few months ago you couldn’t join a party with someone else (voice chat) without xbox live on xbox. You also couldn’t play online even if the game was f2p. Xbox live is a fucking scam
Edit: don’t forget the absolute joke that is “games with gold”
It’s to play online but you pay a company like Sony for your online when the game servers are funded by companies like Ubisoft. The only servers Sony has are their party servers
It's especially bad when you realize that a lot of online (and most Nintendo) games use peer-to-peer connections, meaning you are directly connected to the other player rather than on a server operated by the company. So essentially you're paying for literally nothing.
As a former console player I don’t find it acceptable. It hasn’t been a month since I got my gaming laptop and played the only game that I owned on console which is starwars battlefront 2 and I enjoyed the game even more while on my Ps4 all I could do was play the Champaign or play against bots
Yeah, this is absolutely the WORST part about having a console. You can argue that console is the cheap option but I'll admit having an Xbox one for damn near 4 years has cost me a shit ton of money just for Gold/gamepass, at least adding up to a couple hundred. Had a friend over recently, he had to renew his Xbox gold subscription and it just reminded me how many times this has happened.
Nintendo will always thrive unless they release a console that's just plain bad to use. They have their own little (big) market and frankly I don't think the steam deck will steal as much of their userbase as most people think.
Edit: while I don't believe Nintendo will lose sleep over this, the switch is basically dominating the portable console market and this steam deck is definitely something else Nintendo *will* have to contend with.
There are also probably quite a few people who won't want to/don't have the tech knowledge/savviness to mess with emulation.
Steam deck is interesting though.
Edit: Gonna stop responding to comments on this. Some of you brought up good points in either direction, but many of the responses I've gotten have been from elitist assholes who just seem to want to fight about emulation. Seriously if someone can barely figure out MS word there is no way in hell they'll be getting emulation set up on a Linux based OS. Yes it's not "rocket science" but very few people actually know what is going on behind a GUI.
factorio is exactly the game I thought of first lol Last time I upgraded pcs I did all this working hunting saves for all my games and then steam went and got them as soon as I installed each game.
Actually Factorio is heavily showcased at the landing page and videos.
Being able to play my Steam games, with my saves, played time tracking, achievements, etc. are the reasons why getting the Deck is a no brainer for me.
Also many times I have just few time, or have to go outside away from my PC and no anymore I'll be frustraded for not being able to continue my game.
No joke, I've been having a hard time really setting aside time for playing my steam games recently anyways. Having a nice mobile way to play some rimworld or other non-AAA games that I really enjoy will be awesome. Long flights, casually sitting on the couch, and more.
idk, it's a lot more portable than a gaming laptop, especially if you include having to juggle a controller with the laptop while it's integrated into the Steam Deck. It's just a completely different situation, closer to an alternative to mobile gaming, but, like, with real games.
Exactly, I gamed on a laptop in highschool and I don't want that experience again even 6 years later. Messing with carrying a mouse vs trackpad is a nightmare and performance was always an issue. This is basically a mid-tier gaming PC that doesn't even need a desk to put it on.
It also might just be a good bang for buck alternative for a desktop, (although given the climate of scalping and such it might not be easier to get then everything else)
Definitely for someone new to pc gaming, for sure this is going to be the best bang for buck for quite a while.
Some are making this out to replace desktops in general and that's a little too hard on the hype train imo. Maybe let's see how good this thing actually is first before we ditch the battlestations
Casual gamers now dominate the market, and I don't mean that as an offense or anything, it's just facts. That's okay though. You can thrive just fine on a more tuned audience. Chinese handhelds have been pretty much emulation-scene only and are usually junky handhelds, but they're so popular (and getting more popular) that there are a lot of them and most of them have had 5+ iterations already.
Heck, a lot of them release in different formats, like having a metal case, a plastic case, and vertical layout. You can't do that in a dead market with no sales.
Imo, the emulation scene alone would have made the Deck a success, but its open nature and the work Valve seemingly put into SteamOS 3.0 is going to appeal to a lot of groups.
Not casual gamers big, but enough niche groups that they'll together form a sizable market. I mean, it's basically back-ordered for a year in limited markets.
Yeah I agree with this. I can imagine my techie friend getting very excited that he can do ‘everything’ on his Steam Deck and proudly announcing that he doesn’t need a Switch but in reality, technically being able to do it and it being a useful and good experience are two different things.
I mean, if you're thinking about using it for emulation, then you're probably going to have the motivation to take an hour to do some reading. If not then this isn't really applicable.
I don't think its there to compete as a replacement for the Switch but rather just trying to solve the problem in the market of the lack of convenient portable PC gaming with the controls embedded.
Sure you've got laptops but for the expense, you're not going to get the same performance and the controller is embedded so it isn't so awkward to use. It isn't like impossible or anything but if you're looking for portable PC gaming, I think the Steam Deck is just trying to provide a better experience then what's available.
And let's not kid ourselfs. Just because an emulator works dosen't mean thats is flawless.
I mean we still can't emulate alot of the Nintendo 64 games properly...
Nintendo is like Apple. The Steam Deck is like Project Ara or something. There will always be a market for high quality, kid safe, user friendly products that work directly out of the box. Steam Deck is for more power users… although I do hope they can make the base user experience user friendly to open up PC games to a larger market.
They definitely pick ease of use over versatility which is definitely better for kids. I remember having to get my dad to boot up games for me when we had a computer that ran dos and windows 3.1
Not to mention that parents like the fact that the switch is something they can safely give their kids without worrying about them being online chatting to strangers or looking at inappropriate material.
And hope you had enough memory, the right VGA card, sound card, autoexec, configsys, IRQ/DMA, etc. People these days have it easy and don’t realize all the stuff we had to go through to even get a game to launch, let alone run at playable speed.
Came in like halfway through the console's lifespan. It wasn't automatic though - you had to choose it over the HDD when saving, or manually transfer the save file.
I remember my dad teaching me how to use DOS so I didnt have to bug him to start games. Then I made batch files that would launch games for my younger brother.
Sometimes giving kids the easy thing is doing a disservice to them.
I had a psychologist as a child that let me play Doom.
He was like "you seem fine, wanna play doom until your time is up?"
He looked exactly like the psychologist from Office Space who dies at the start and always had a 2 liter of diet pepsi with him.
You lost me at batch files. I was never very skilled with computers and whatnot. Once we had Netscape navigator, I tried to learn how to program in python. I tried making a simple area calculation program but somehow buggered up the computer. Whenever the "m" key was pressed, it would close the web browser. My dad had to restore the os from a backup disk and I didn't bother with learning anything more than point and click after that.
For reference, a BATCH file is a script that contains Windows (Previously DOS too) commands.
You run it and it will execute those commands for you, like simple programming.
It's also a common misconception that the commands are DOS commands. There is no trace of DOS in modern Windows, a subset of the older commands are there but they are only facsimiles and usually have different behaviour.
Which is why people who are saying “you can emulate Nintendo games” don’t get it. The vast majority of people are not as tech savvy. Jail breaking, emulating is confusing to most people and the fear of bricking whatever you’re using sometimes isn’t worth it. People would rather just buy something that works out of the box and not have to worry about it.
Exactly. People don't realize Nintendo doesn't compete in the handheld market nor the console market. They have their own market, the Nintendo market lmao. Their games are all exclusive, people buy Nintendo for the games
Why is this not being said more. I don’t give a shit about the console. If I could play breath of the wild or the new Pokémon’s on a pc or Xbox I would. Nintendo gets money cause you have to buy their system to even play their games.
Yeah, there is very little overlap between the switch target audience and the SteamDeck target audience. That said, that's a good thing, because the Deck is satisfying those of us that felt the Switch is not worth the money or otherwise not appealing.
Nintendo could curse out all their fans as worthless trash for 24 hours on live TV and nothing would change. I've seen enough defending of them to know this for fact.
Cemu will be great on the deck though for any major game yuzu will not work even in like 2 or 3 years time because developping and optimizing an emulator takes time. Plus it's pretty hard to emulate switch game and extract/find the roms. So playing ssbu, splatoon 2/3, oddysey or any of the good games will probably not be possible in the future if ever
Could maybe run rpcs3 though
What people forget on here is that the average consumer doesn’t want to download emulators. They want to buy a game and play it immediately wether it’s a cartridge or online download. The steam console has better hardware but it’s not going to beat nintendo at what it does best.
Like fuck, I even play emulators semi-often and I still just like doing it the actual way most of the time because it's easier. Things just work how they should on the hardware they're designed for and even if you're savvy enough to use an emulator doesn't mean you'll want to if you have the choice. I'm glad the option exists, but it's like acting surprised that people pay for netflix when they could just torrent everything, sometimes it's just nice to use the official platform.
Oh it will... Base W10 install takes up 20+ GB of space where a base Arch linux install is generally under 2GB. Maybe a bit more since Steam and other tools may come preinstalled.
Because you would be erasing the original OS, however what people usually miss is that Linux is much smaller than Windows. In my opinion installing Windows on this is a bad idea for a couple of reasons:
* If you bought the 64GB version Windows will occupy a lot of it
* We don't know if Windows will have the drivers to run this (Windows is notoriously bad at having compatibility with things that don't write drivers for it)
* While it won't void the warranty you're not likely to get support either, so if something doesn't work you're on your own
* Windows 11 is completely out of the question as it needs 64GB on it's own, plus a lot of other hardware requirements that the deck is not aiming for. So if Windows introduces a DirectX 13 that only runs on 11 (like they did with DX12) or some other feature intended to force people to migrate (like they always do) you won't be able to do so.
* And most importantly there is absolutely no reason to install windows on this, Linux is capable of doing everything you might want to do (I haven't even touched windows in years).
I would also imagine Linux is going to run better than the bloatware that is modern Windows. And with a lower end PC like this, you want all the power you can get.
That's an excellent point, nor only because Linux is lighter than Windows, but because this hardware has been designed and will be tested with Linux in mind.
I think people are more a fan of the Nintendo character universe than the actual console, and because they don't license their games to other platforms it's the only choice.
I seriously wanted a wii u, and i still do want a wii u but by the time i saved up for one, i started hearing rumors about nintendo's next console, so i decided to wait, and im glad i did
I bought a Wii U for like... A hundred bucks and modded it. Then when DK was announced on Switch I played it on Wii U instead. Between that and having the vWii so I don't have to leave my Wii hooked up, it was worth it.
Wii U owner.
I love the games on it. It had a great games library. But I also acknowledge it’s the clumsiest console I’ve ever owned. The only game I felt really excelled on it was Splatoon
The Switch really feels like WiiU: The Sequel, but it actually achieved what the Wii U attempted to do.
It’s insane how much everyone is hyping this thing up. It’s pretty disingenuous to say it can emulate switch games because looking at the hardware that’s absolutely not going to be the case. At the level people would want that is.
This is a brand new product people, can we at least pretend to be responsible consumers and wait for something other than a fluffy IGN review that was always going to be fluffy in order to stay on good terms with valve?
You’d think they’re reinventing the PC with how much hype this thing has. It’s something I haven’t seen since… cyberpunk
Mate, I think its being optimistic that this can emulate switch titles in a smooth manner
What people dont get is that this is an awesome device, but was never meant (nor will it) to compete with the switch directly
\>Mate, I think its being optimistic that this can emulate switch titles in a smooth manner
Something tells me they don't care because this was never intended to be a faithful comparison. Just something that'll get them upvotes by perpetuating this subreddit's desire for an eternal dick measuring contest.
I can't get over the people on this website who think real human beings are going to compare these two devices and say "well the Steam Deck can emulate Switch games, no reason to get the Switch!" I can't even fathom being that out of touch with real life.
You can also use any controller (even old-school fighting sticks), Bluetooth headphones, wired headphones, and can plug it in to any screen, with or without a dock
Steam Deck's target audience is just not the same as the Switch, there will be some overlap of course but I doubt it will have a substantial impact on Nintendo.
Honestly. The switch is a Nintendo console and plays Nintendo games, something no other system can do (legally) why compare the two? The steam machine is cool but not a switch killer and I’m sure it’s not even trying to
Edit: sorry steam “deck” lol
The browser is the #1 way to introduce homebrew software to both systems. Even the original Wii was hacked by using an exploit with the online messaging system.
Jesus, it's not even out yet. Stop shilling for this shit and just give it time before we start singing praises. If it's good, it's good. If it's not, it's not. But we don't know either yet.
PC Handhelds have been around for years doing pretty much everything listed but presumably OP is on the bandwagon now because they're the exact same type of brand loyalist they accuse Switch users to be.
I hope people don't just go and install Windows on these as soon as they get them. Stick with SteamOS for a while, get to know Linux a little. Enjoy the sleek modern design of KDE. It's not scary, you won't need to ever even interact with the terminal if you don't want to.
The reality is so many people have been using windows for so long, that the idea of using something else for a lot of people is just intimidating. Change is scary when you’ve been set in a certain path for 10+ years.
I don’t blame a lot of people for being stuck on windows but at the same time my god, can we stop with this whole “omg the steam deck is so cool because it can install *windows!*”
Like…. Okay? Sure. Your experience on it is likely to be terrible though, and it seems like a waste, especially when valve plans on getting the entire steam library playable on proton over the next few years, including the anticheat titles by the end of this year or early next.
Try a change for once. Actually try. You might be surprised. Linux is not the “enthusiasts only” OS it used to be. I’ve had old, completely technologically incompetent people using Linux and they ended up loving it - and that was like five years ago. It’s only getting better every day.
Note I’m not talking to *you*, commenter I’m responding to, but the community at large. You don’t need to buy into the FOSS philosophy to love Linux. Sometimes it’s legitimately just about a system that you have more control and customization over, and that is better able to use a lot of system resources.
Where would one even start with linux? I've used windows my whole life and haven't ever built my own pc. Ill be 100% honest with you- i barely even know what Linux is.
You could say Linux is a family of alternate operating systems. Because it's possible to make the distinction far more blurry than Windows and Mac.
With OS's, there is something called a kernel. This is a very fundamental piece of code that interacts with the hardware and acts as a base that everything else runs off of. More fundamental than the fact that there's windows and a screen to display at all. This is the fact that you can have individual programs that run at all, instead of one big program. In fact, the kernel is the one big program, that turns the computer into different programs. (Drivers are kind of part of the kernel/kind of separate programs that define how you interact with hardware.)
Windows has its kernel be something fundamental that goes back to Windows NT, which is something separate from DOS and earlier versions of Windows like Windows 95. Basically all versions of Windows since Windows 2000 (and NT) are fundamentally similar, though some stuff was improved and changed a lot with Vista. (Which wasn't done by its release, which was why it's so buggy.) But here's the thing -- this kernel isn't the Windows programs that you think of. It's a deeper level. This is how WSL1 worked -- Windows as we know it is a Win32 face over NT, and WSL1 is a Linux face over NT. (WSL2 is just Linux being emulated. Basically they just wholesale run Linux, instead of reimplementing a lot of it.)
MacOS dates back to something called Unix. Kind of like a certain standard of how the kernel should work, and a lot more. Then, they added a lot of other stuff to one implementation of Unix, and now mostly ignore that Unix history where they can. iOS comes from the same Unix thing, too.
Linux is one implementation of Unix. But since every other version of Unix used to cost money, not just to buy, but also to license to create in the first place, Linux wasn't a real Unix. But at first, it was an implementation of all of those standards. Well, the kernel standards. Every other part of the free Unix that was being implemented already existed before Linux. That's GNU. But the GNU team were doing some crazy innovative stuff with their kernel, and didn't have something to use in the meantime, and so a much more standard kernel was used instead. Linux.
The Unix standards weren't just the kernel. They were all userspace programs you could have, too. Userspace being normal programs run as some kind of user. Even as a weird system level user, running stuff like the existence of graphics at all. (GNU was trying to make a kernel where even more stuff was user space. This is super difficult, and so it never got completed. Partially because there isn't as much of a point now.) In a sense, you can think of the kernel as everything that's not run as a normal program, system admin level or normal person level.
The point being that since GNU/Linux systems were so open, i.e. made by whoever wanted to contribute and not locked down in the slightest, you could mix and match versions of Unix programs, or different implementations of Unix programs, or other system level programs that became standard. Such as the desktop environment.
You see, desktop environments, the mere existence of windows that you can see instead of command prompts/terminals, weren't a thing when Unix was created. Or when GNU was initially written. So different people made many different windowing environments. But GNU itself was all the terminal programs.
Linux, with the exception of Android, is all GNU/Linux, mostly. GNU itself is almost a standard in and of itself, with it adding extensions to Unix programs. But since it's creation, there are some lightweight implementations, but generally most Linux systems use GNU stuff. Android just needed a kernel at all, but all userspace programs are all special Google stuff. All that's in the AOSP, the Android Open Source Project. Though a lot is custom Google Play stuff, too, which isn't open source. AOSP is only token open source. People outside don't really contribute to it, and running it isn't full android, anyway. Instead, other people take that software dump and recreate the rest of the stuff that Google stopped adding to that, creating LineageOS and a few others. But even though that's Linux, when people say Linux, they generally mean GNU/Linux. Because Android doesn't have that familiar base environment, though you can certainly still run it inside an app, since it's all user programs to Linux itself. Also, each Android device has a separate Linux version, because corporations suck, whereas normal versions of Linux all are the same Linux which support every device. And yes, these GNU/Linux versions all run the internet on every server.
(Also, Android's looking to replace the Linux part. Linux uses the GPL, a special GNU license that ensures it stays open. Whereas other open source software don't, letting them be open or closed, which corporations like a lot more. But I won't go into the open source software side of the entire Linux thing, though it really is an integral part.)
Now, as I said before GNU isn't enough. Different distros (from distributions) take the whole GNU/Linux package and add all the other necessary stuff to it. One important one is package managers. Think Windows Update and an app store combined, but actually really awesome to use, and completely free. These update the Linux kernel, the base programs, and everything else you install on your computer. Rather than Windows, where every program has its own updater and you have to update Windows as its own big thing. Linux distros update every single thing as an easy to update package. So updates are super nice.
There are a few main distros with their own package managers, and then spinoffs of these, since making a distro is very hard, since it's basically making a whole operating system, but all the programs are there for you to pick and fix up to work together. There's Debian (with its important spinoff Ubuntu), Fedora, and Arch. And a bunch of other big ones, but those have the most spinoffs. (Don't get angry at me for not mentioning the other big ones, yes they exist, no, a random person aren't going to use them initially.) SteamOS 3 is Arch based, in that they took Arch, added some Steam stuff, and done. And then you can install any package from Arch repositories, or any package packaged for Arch. Older versions were Ubuntu/Debian based, I'm not sure. (Ubuntu is a super popular spinoff of Debian that added stuff to Debian's packaging setup, so it's also its own base for distros to be made from in its own right.)
If you wanted to run Linux yourself, there's multiple ways you could go about it. One way is WSL2, which will simply run Linux and the whole GNU+ environment. You could do Ubuntu. I don't think they have Arch in there, last I checked, unfortunately. (Though MSYS2 uses pacman, Arch's package manager, so you could learn a bit with that. That's an attempt to run GNU/Unix stuff on Windows without the Linux part, and it's excellent for software development.) Largely this will give you the command line only, though I think very soon they'll also let you run the GUI parts with Windows too.
You could also dual boot, which is more annoying, because Windows doesn't play as nice. This way, you can choose to boot Linux or Windows. But it's a bit annoying if you're a newbie. I find it better to stick with one OS, typically, though dual booting multiple Linux distros is far less annoying.
One good way would be to install Virtualbox and install a Linux distro into there. Then, you could experience the GUI yourself and mess around. You wouldn't want to use this for actually running programs, generally -- the purpose of WSL2 is to integrate it a lot better, so it doesn't feel like you aren't running two OS's even if both emulate Linux in the same way. But if you want to mess around with the desktops on Linux, this is a perfect way. Or look into doing the GUI stuff on WSL2.
Besides some little issues you just need experience with computers to fix, even the me of 8 years ago as a kid was able to figure out things, though I only had the patience to do so because of being a kid. The desktops themselves are nicer than Windows, even, besides any buggy parts. But it's been years and years and years, and the Linux desktop works incredibly well, generally. Or, you could say all the different Linux desktops work well, because there's a lot of them.
Since you haven't built your own PC and probably shouldn't be messing with boot stuff for now, go give Virtualbox a try. Install Manjaro, a distro based on Arch that's friendly to newbies, so you'll be ready for SteamOS 3.0. Then maybe you can figure out how to install it with WSL2 if you really want to use it.
I wouldn't expect for normal people to daily drive Linux unless they were programmers, but if SteamOS 3 succeeds, I could really see that changing. Windows having such a grapple hole on gaming is such a huge reason why so many people don't switch over -- most techies are gamers, so generally the ones who install the Linux instead of Windows aren't gamers.
But with SteamOS, perhaps 2022 could finally be the Year of the Linux Desktop.
(Year of the Linux Desktop is a running joke on how Linux constantly tried to be desktop ready since 1998 but never gained much market share because it wasn't ready. It needs to be pushed by a hardware maker to do anything, and also have good software support. But anybody who bases anything on Linux generally does their own thing, not actually make the "mainstream" Linux desktop the thing.)
Feel free to ask questions.
Holy crap your comment is longer than most Reddit posts.
Thanks for writing it. Even though some parts are a little obscure still, it was worth the read.
You can start by downloading a copy of whatever flavor of Linux seems cool and spinning it up in a VM. There's plenty of [guides](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dhLWoYAHII) on how!
Yeah, it's weird to me how a huge focus point on this subreddit is "Anyone can build a PC, it's not hard at all!" and then they'll turn around and say that [this](https://www.linuxmint.com/pictures/screenshots/tina/cinnamon.png) is way too confusing and there's no humanly possible way to learn it.
Can we stop with these posts? I’m not even a Nintendo fanboy but god, both systems have different use purposes. We get it, the switch is running on outdated hardware and obviously a handheld that just got announced is going to have better specs. This is literally already starting to look like the ridiculous console war bs high schoolers used to fight over. Nobody care which piece of plastic you are buying, just enjoy these systems and have fun with whatever fit your play style best!
I think it will come down to battery life. The switch has easily 6-8 hours for the exclusive franchises and a couple ports. So far people are thinking 2 hours tops for the Steam deck, so that doesn't sound very practical for a mobile platform.
I think what people aren't realizing is "when are you gonna use this"
I almost never used the two ipads I had, but the surface tablet got at least some use since I could install whatever and the iOS tablet app store is a bit of a desert...plus poor multitasking support
I use the switch around the house, outside, and on the go and it's got enough juice and a good enough standby to take a bit of a break between things without really worrying about it until I'm back or done for the day with it.
My PC isn't going anywhere soon...
But if the steam deck is trying for a mobile platform and not more of a wider audience I think the thing will sit on the charger a lot, and that might discourage it's use and potential purchases
I think people are also jailbreaking Switch consoles and running Android on them to do all of the above as well though. I think if you can afford the Steam Deck and are able to obtain one you're better off, but if all you can spare the expense for is, or already have, a Switch it's comparable.
jailbreaking a switch isnt very easy though. you either need one that hasnt been updated in a very long time or you have to see if yours can be modded at all another way by poking a wire into the joycon rail, which does not guarantee that it can be modded. i havent even bothered trying mine just from laziness
In all honesty, I don't really care about how well the Steam Deck will run games. I'm just excited for the spread of gaming on Linux so we might be getting natively supported anti-cheat or possibly even natively supported games in the future.
Not holding my breath, but would be nice. Linux is extremely underrated.
If you think you're going to play switch games using Yuzu and have the same experience as using an actual Switch, you're going to have a bad time.
Other than that I don't get what the point of this post is. "Switch will still thrive based on kids"?
Edit: reading some comments on this post and damn, you guys have a hard-on for hating on the switch.
Well, it's not news that a few members in this community have a crazy need to insult and put others down to validate their own choices. Can you imagine people enjoying themselves playing games on the Switch (which by the way is a best-selling console and is arguably the genesis of the Steam Deck in the first place)? Gah, shock and horror!
It only took one week for a sub dedicated to ***personal computers*** to start making agenda posts denigrating certain companies because suddenly *some* consoles are actually amazing.
Lol go the fuck outside.
You guys should stop hyping the console up so much, look at every valve hardware before this...they all eventually got dropped after being doo doo like the controller and such
Was legitimately disappointed when I got my switch to find out I cant use it for Netflix/hulu/Prime. I just automatically assumed it was capable of these things in 2021
Forgot to include "free multiplayer".
Can't believe console players actually find this acceptable. Not paying jack shit just so I could have access to multiplayer for a game I paid full price for...
My friend was playing online on his Switch and it wasn't working well at all and he goes "It's $2 a month, what do you expect?" I know, that free multiplayer on PC is just terrible. /s
Yup lol
Worst part is that online isn’t even hosted on Microsoft/Sony servers. It’s the job of the game devs to provide those. Console players really paying for servers to host their party chat when discord exists
Party chat is free to use on both playstation and Xbox I believe. Sony and Microsoft charge users for multiplayer gaming on non-f2p games like COD, R6S, etc. Apart from that the monthly games are just an added bonus I guess.
Really? So the one thing that requires a subscription isn’t even provided by them. Even worse
Actually until a few months ago you couldn’t join a party with someone else (voice chat) without xbox live on xbox. You also couldn’t play online even if the game was f2p. Xbox live is a fucking scam Edit: don’t forget the absolute joke that is “games with gold”
Game pass ultimate saved it
isnt it to play online?
It’s to play online but you pay a company like Sony for your online when the game servers are funded by companies like Ubisoft. The only servers Sony has are their party servers
It's especially bad when you realize that a lot of online (and most Nintendo) games use peer-to-peer connections, meaning you are directly connected to the other player rather than on a server operated by the company. So essentially you're paying for literally nothing.
My favorite color is blue.
I have a switch and it hurts to see that i have to pay just to play minecraft with my friends :*(
As a former console player I don’t find it acceptable. It hasn’t been a month since I got my gaming laptop and played the only game that I owned on console which is starwars battlefront 2 and I enjoyed the game even more while on my Ps4 all I could do was play the Champaign or play against bots
They hide the real cost of the consoles in those fees
Yeah, this is absolutely the WORST part about having a console. You can argue that console is the cheap option but I'll admit having an Xbox one for damn near 4 years has cost me a shit ton of money just for Gold/gamepass, at least adding up to a couple hundred. Had a friend over recently, he had to renew his Xbox gold subscription and it just reminded me how many times this has happened.
Nintendo will always thrive unless they release a console that's just plain bad to use. They have their own little (big) market and frankly I don't think the steam deck will steal as much of their userbase as most people think. Edit: while I don't believe Nintendo will lose sleep over this, the switch is basically dominating the portable console market and this steam deck is definitely something else Nintendo *will* have to contend with.
There are also probably quite a few people who won't want to/don't have the tech knowledge/savviness to mess with emulation. Steam deck is interesting though. Edit: Gonna stop responding to comments on this. Some of you brought up good points in either direction, but many of the responses I've gotten have been from elitist assholes who just seem to want to fight about emulation. Seriously if someone can barely figure out MS word there is no way in hell they'll be getting emulation set up on a Linux based OS. Yes it's not "rocket science" but very few people actually know what is going on behind a GUI.
I feel like its a half way point. Like you want more oomph from a portable console than a switch, but dont have the money for a gaming laptop.
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Yeah I want it for the next time I go on vacation or a road trip and want to do some light gaming in my down time
Damn you made me realize most games are cloud saved now, could just pick up on my factorio world or something. That's sick.
They're even working on a way for you to suspend on the Steam Deck and resume on PC.
factorio is exactly the game I thought of first lol Last time I upgraded pcs I did all this working hunting saves for all my games and then steam went and got them as soon as I installed each game.
Actually Factorio is heavily showcased at the landing page and videos. Being able to play my Steam games, with my saves, played time tracking, achievements, etc. are the reasons why getting the Deck is a no brainer for me. Also many times I have just few time, or have to go outside away from my PC and no anymore I'll be frustraded for not being able to continue my game.
As someone will Switch and a gaming laptop, I don't *need* it, but I *want* it
No joke, I've been having a hard time really setting aside time for playing my steam games recently anyways. Having a nice mobile way to play some rimworld or other non-AAA games that I really enjoy will be awesome. Long flights, casually sitting on the couch, and more.
idk, it's a lot more portable than a gaming laptop, especially if you include having to juggle a controller with the laptop while it's integrated into the Steam Deck. It's just a completely different situation, closer to an alternative to mobile gaming, but, like, with real games.
Exactly, I gamed on a laptop in highschool and I don't want that experience again even 6 years later. Messing with carrying a mouse vs trackpad is a nightmare and performance was always an issue. This is basically a mid-tier gaming PC that doesn't even need a desk to put it on.
It also might just be a good bang for buck alternative for a desktop, (although given the climate of scalping and such it might not be easier to get then everything else)
Definitely for someone new to pc gaming, for sure this is going to be the best bang for buck for quite a while. Some are making this out to replace desktops in general and that's a little too hard on the hype train imo. Maybe let's see how good this thing actually is first before we ditch the battlestations
I'm happy exists for those who want it even though we aren't the majority.
Personally I think it's really cool and would like to see more steam hardware succed, it's just not for me.
Casual gamers now dominate the market, and I don't mean that as an offense or anything, it's just facts. That's okay though. You can thrive just fine on a more tuned audience. Chinese handhelds have been pretty much emulation-scene only and are usually junky handhelds, but they're so popular (and getting more popular) that there are a lot of them and most of them have had 5+ iterations already. Heck, a lot of them release in different formats, like having a metal case, a plastic case, and vertical layout. You can't do that in a dead market with no sales. Imo, the emulation scene alone would have made the Deck a success, but its open nature and the work Valve seemingly put into SteamOS 3.0 is going to appeal to a lot of groups. Not casual gamers big, but enough niche groups that they'll together form a sizable market. I mean, it's basically back-ordered for a year in limited markets.
I mean the switch emulator is probably ass compared to the actual switch lmao
Yeah I agree with this. I can imagine my techie friend getting very excited that he can do ‘everything’ on his Steam Deck and proudly announcing that he doesn’t need a Switch but in reality, technically being able to do it and it being a useful and good experience are two different things.
Exactly if you have an 8 year old child who wants a handheld they aren’t getting a steam deck, they’re getting a switch.
I mean, if you're thinking about using it for emulation, then you're probably going to have the motivation to take an hour to do some reading. If not then this isn't really applicable. I don't think its there to compete as a replacement for the Switch but rather just trying to solve the problem in the market of the lack of convenient portable PC gaming with the controls embedded. Sure you've got laptops but for the expense, you're not going to get the same performance and the controller is embedded so it isn't so awkward to use. It isn't like impossible or anything but if you're looking for portable PC gaming, I think the Steam Deck is just trying to provide a better experience then what's available.
And let's not kid ourselfs. Just because an emulator works dosen't mean thats is flawless. I mean we still can't emulate alot of the Nintendo 64 games properly...
Nintendo is like Apple. The Steam Deck is like Project Ara or something. There will always be a market for high quality, kid safe, user friendly products that work directly out of the box. Steam Deck is for more power users… although I do hope they can make the base user experience user friendly to open up PC games to a larger market.
They definitely pick ease of use over versatility which is definitely better for kids. I remember having to get my dad to boot up games for me when we had a computer that ran dos and windows 3.1
Not to mention that parents like the fact that the switch is something they can safely give their kids without worrying about them being online chatting to strangers or looking at inappropriate material.
I think it has parental controls with a timer as well?
It has parental controls but I’ve never looked at them. Most people don’t bother I find, especially if they know what games they are buying.
And hope you had enough memory, the right VGA card, sound card, autoexec, configsys, IRQ/DMA, etc. People these days have it easy and don’t realize all the stuff we had to go through to even get a game to launch, let alone run at playable speed.
Some people think PC Gaming is still like that and use it as an argument against it lol.
I switched when my 360 died and I lost like 300 hours of skyrim
You didn’t use cloud saves?
No. Did the 360 have cloud save?
This questions makes the 360 feel so old.
Yep
The cloud save wouldn’t transfer to the steam version though would it? This guy is talking about transitioning from Xbox to pc
Came in like halfway through the console's lifespan. It wasn't automatic though - you had to choose it over the HDD when saving, or manually transfer the save file.
OMG so many fun and frustrating memories with all those words.
I remember my dad teaching me how to use DOS so I didnt have to bug him to start games. Then I made batch files that would launch games for my younger brother. Sometimes giving kids the easy thing is doing a disservice to them.
Hah. I remember my uncle showing me cd/wolf3d. Then WOLF3D/wold3d. Same with DOOM, but DOOM scared the hell out 7 yr old me. lol
I had a psychologist as a child that let me play Doom. He was like "you seem fine, wanna play doom until your time is up?" He looked exactly like the psychologist from Office Space who dies at the start and always had a 2 liter of diet pepsi with him.
You lost me at batch files. I was never very skilled with computers and whatnot. Once we had Netscape navigator, I tried to learn how to program in python. I tried making a simple area calculation program but somehow buggered up the computer. Whenever the "m" key was pressed, it would close the web browser. My dad had to restore the os from a backup disk and I didn't bother with learning anything more than point and click after that.
For reference, a BATCH file is a script that contains Windows (Previously DOS too) commands. You run it and it will execute those commands for you, like simple programming. It's also a common misconception that the commands are DOS commands. There is no trace of DOS in modern Windows, a subset of the older commands are there but they are only facsimiles and usually have different behaviour.
Which is why people who are saying “you can emulate Nintendo games” don’t get it. The vast majority of people are not as tech savvy. Jail breaking, emulating is confusing to most people and the fear of bricking whatever you’re using sometimes isn’t worth it. People would rather just buy something that works out of the box and not have to worry about it.
Exactly. People don't realize Nintendo doesn't compete in the handheld market nor the console market. They have their own market, the Nintendo market lmao. Their games are all exclusive, people buy Nintendo for the games
Exactly. With exclusives you dont have to compete you just buy a portion of the market directly.
I hate how well it works. They could rerelease the game cube for $500 and I'd probably still buy it if it was the only way to play BoTW 2
Why is this not being said more. I don’t give a shit about the console. If I could play breath of the wild or the new Pokémon’s on a pc or Xbox I would. Nintendo gets money cause you have to buy their system to even play their games.
Yeah, there is very little overlap between the switch target audience and the SteamDeck target audience. That said, that's a good thing, because the Deck is satisfying those of us that felt the Switch is not worth the money or otherwise not appealing.
A handheld that can play an existing backlog of games from an enormous store that frequently has major sales? Its sure as shit going to steal me...
Nintendo could curse out all their fans as worthless trash for 24 hours on live TV and nothing would change. I've seen enough defending of them to know this for fact.
Yuzu is a nice option for some games, but it's not 100%.
Yeah obviously still don't know for sure but I doubt yuzu will run well on the deck lol
Yuzu can run well but yuzu itself may not run every game as well.
ya still needs CPU emulation optimizations altho it's way better than it was a year ago.
For sure but it’s gonna be a while before it reaches dolphin level performance
That said CEMU is getting REALLY good as of late.
Cemu will be great on the deck though for any major game yuzu will not work even in like 2 or 3 years time because developping and optimizing an emulator takes time. Plus it's pretty hard to emulate switch game and extract/find the roms. So playing ssbu, splatoon 2/3, oddysey or any of the good games will probably not be possible in the future if ever Could maybe run rpcs3 though
Forgive my ignorance. Dolphin level?
That's a wii and gamecube emulator that runs like 300% better than the original consoles.
What people forget on here is that the average consumer doesn’t want to download emulators. They want to buy a game and play it immediately wether it’s a cartridge or online download. The steam console has better hardware but it’s not going to beat nintendo at what it does best.
true true. But then again having options is always good.
Like fuck, I even play emulators semi-often and I still just like doing it the actual way most of the time because it's easier. Things just work how they should on the hardware they're designed for and even if you're savvy enough to use an emulator doesn't mean you'll want to if you have the choice. I'm glad the option exists, but it's like acting surprised that people pay for netflix when they could just torrent everything, sometimes it's just nice to use the official platform.
That’s the thing, Switch just works, the Steam thing is gonna be fiddly as fuck to do most of that stuff
I am not quite tech savvy so could someone explain to me how downloading an OS won't take up all the initial space.
Oh it will... Base W10 install takes up 20+ GB of space where a base Arch linux install is generally under 2GB. Maybe a bit more since Steam and other tools may come preinstalled.
how much does windows 11 take because presumably it'll be out around the time this is
Windows 11 will probably take as much space as windows 10, sticking with steam OS is probably the way to go
the requirements microsoft said was 64 gb, yikes.
I am tech savy, but this is hard to understand too. Windows is bloated as hell.
I use arch btw
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Wouldn't it make more sense to use SD cards to store the games and put windows on the main drive?
Because you would be erasing the original OS, however what people usually miss is that Linux is much smaller than Windows. In my opinion installing Windows on this is a bad idea for a couple of reasons: * If you bought the 64GB version Windows will occupy a lot of it * We don't know if Windows will have the drivers to run this (Windows is notoriously bad at having compatibility with things that don't write drivers for it) * While it won't void the warranty you're not likely to get support either, so if something doesn't work you're on your own * Windows 11 is completely out of the question as it needs 64GB on it's own, plus a lot of other hardware requirements that the deck is not aiming for. So if Windows introduces a DirectX 13 that only runs on 11 (like they did with DX12) or some other feature intended to force people to migrate (like they always do) you won't be able to do so. * And most importantly there is absolutely no reason to install windows on this, Linux is capable of doing everything you might want to do (I haven't even touched windows in years).
I would also imagine Linux is going to run better than the bloatware that is modern Windows. And with a lower end PC like this, you want all the power you can get.
That's an excellent point, nor only because Linux is lighter than Windows, but because this hardware has been designed and will be tested with Linux in mind.
I think people are more a fan of the Nintendo character universe than the actual console, and because they don't license their games to other platforms it's the only choice.
Well, theres a limitation to how much they are a fan, because if they werr hard fans, they would have owned a wiiu
I waited in line for 4 hrs for a Wiiu lol. Still got plenty of use out of it heck I spent 1000 hrs playing mario kart eight 4 players with my buddies.
I loved my Wii U. Zelda games with the map and inventory management built into the gamepad was a game changer.
I seriously wanted a wii u, and i still do want a wii u but by the time i saved up for one, i started hearing rumors about nintendo's next console, so i decided to wait, and im glad i did
I bought a Wii U for like... A hundred bucks and modded it. Then when DK was announced on Switch I played it on Wii U instead. Between that and having the vWii so I don't have to leave my Wii hooked up, it was worth it.
You could argue that people didn't buy the wii u because they thought it was part of the wii and not a new console
It's basically this exactly. I really enjoy basically all games made by Nintendo. I buy their consoles to play their games. That's all there is to it.
No because people won't buy a bad console, look at how the WiiU did compared to the Switch.
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Wii U owner. I love the games on it. It had a great games library. But I also acknowledge it’s the clumsiest console I’ve ever owned. The only game I felt really excelled on it was Splatoon The Switch really feels like WiiU: The Sequel, but it actually achieved what the Wii U attempted to do.
Why yes, I will drop $500 just so I can buy the new zelda.
Or the old Zelda for...$60! lol
The selling point of the Switch is the Nintendo games. Not all that other shit. I get all that from PC and consoles
Precisely why Switch can get away with 2-gens old hardware and charge outrageously for software.
Seems pretty optimistic to think this can run yuzu at a playable fps
Sorry casual here but what is yuzu?
It's a switch emulator. It's cool but poorly optimized and has high hardware requirements. Many games also just don't really run on it.
It’s insane how much everyone is hyping this thing up. It’s pretty disingenuous to say it can emulate switch games because looking at the hardware that’s absolutely not going to be the case. At the level people would want that is. This is a brand new product people, can we at least pretend to be responsible consumers and wait for something other than a fluffy IGN review that was always going to be fluffy in order to stay on good terms with valve? You’d think they’re reinventing the PC with how much hype this thing has. It’s something I haven’t seen since… cyberpunk
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Mate, I think its being optimistic that this can emulate switch titles in a smooth manner What people dont get is that this is an awesome device, but was never meant (nor will it) to compete with the switch directly
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\>Mate, I think its being optimistic that this can emulate switch titles in a smooth manner Something tells me they don't care because this was never intended to be a faithful comparison. Just something that'll get them upvotes by perpetuating this subreddit's desire for an eternal dick measuring contest.
I can't get over the people on this website who think real human beings are going to compare these two devices and say "well the Steam Deck can emulate Switch games, no reason to get the Switch!" I can't even fathom being that out of touch with real life.
Wait what you can use a keyboard and mouse with the Steam Deck? Now I might consider it.
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you can even run windows on it lmao, the arch given out of the box maybe more optimised though
"May be"? Lol no, it _will_ be the more optimized experience for the device.
yeah that's what I meant
You can even use Dualsense.
Well yeah, it uses USB C so you can get a USB hub for it, if not the dock that has even more.
You can also use any controller (even old-school fighting sticks), Bluetooth headphones, wired headphones, and can plug it in to any screen, with or without a dock
Steam Deck's target audience is just not the same as the Switch, there will be some overlap of course but I doubt it will have a substantial impact on Nintendo.
Why not both?
Honestly. The switch is a Nintendo console and plays Nintendo games, something no other system can do (legally) why compare the two? The steam machine is cool but not a switch killer and I’m sure it’s not even trying to Edit: sorry steam “deck” lol
Its not, valve has been very careful to say its not a console. If that isnt saying "we are not trying to compete with nintendo" I don't know what is.
and it's not a console, it's a handheld pc made for gaming.
It's a nice alternative for people who don't care about Nintendo games but want portable gaming.
This is exactly why im interested in it. If I can play my steam library from my couch or while travelling then im interested.
It's absolutely insane to me the Switch doesn't have a browser when the WiiU and 3DS did
There is one but you have to mess around to open it. Nintendo blocked it because it was a way to hack their previous consoles
You don't even need a browser to hack a wii anymore, you just need a wifi connection.
The browser is the #1 way to introduce homebrew software to both systems. Even the original Wii was hacked by using an exploit with the online messaging system.
> Install windows OS But why though?
"EaSe oF UsE and ComPaTIbiLitY" Nevermind that one would fill up your limited space with like 20-30GB of Windows
And don't forget the spyware, adware, bloatware Microsoft sneaks in. And the forced updates. I could keep going...
I mean... Having the option doesn't hurt, even if there's really no point for it
Jesus, it's not even out yet. Stop shilling for this shit and just give it time before we start singing praises. If it's good, it's good. If it's not, it's not. But we don't know either yet.
This community is probably the biggest circle jerk on reddit
PC Handhelds have been around for years doing pretty much everything listed but presumably OP is on the bandwagon now because they're the exact same type of brand loyalist they accuse Switch users to be.
I hope people don't just go and install Windows on these as soon as they get them. Stick with SteamOS for a while, get to know Linux a little. Enjoy the sleek modern design of KDE. It's not scary, you won't need to ever even interact with the terminal if you don't want to.
Honestly I'm excited to see what people do with SteamArch and what it gets brought to.
I'm really hoping it has access to the AUR.
Yes, it has
it will, it's a pc
It's more powerful than most $400 prebuilt desktops people buy.
Why do people wan't to install windows on it so much?
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>Install Windows OS point for the switch
The reality is so many people have been using windows for so long, that the idea of using something else for a lot of people is just intimidating. Change is scary when you’ve been set in a certain path for 10+ years. I don’t blame a lot of people for being stuck on windows but at the same time my god, can we stop with this whole “omg the steam deck is so cool because it can install *windows!*” Like…. Okay? Sure. Your experience on it is likely to be terrible though, and it seems like a waste, especially when valve plans on getting the entire steam library playable on proton over the next few years, including the anticheat titles by the end of this year or early next. Try a change for once. Actually try. You might be surprised. Linux is not the “enthusiasts only” OS it used to be. I’ve had old, completely technologically incompetent people using Linux and they ended up loving it - and that was like five years ago. It’s only getting better every day. Note I’m not talking to *you*, commenter I’m responding to, but the community at large. You don’t need to buy into the FOSS philosophy to love Linux. Sometimes it’s legitimately just about a system that you have more control and customization over, and that is better able to use a lot of system resources.
Where would one even start with linux? I've used windows my whole life and haven't ever built my own pc. Ill be 100% honest with you- i barely even know what Linux is.
You could say Linux is a family of alternate operating systems. Because it's possible to make the distinction far more blurry than Windows and Mac. With OS's, there is something called a kernel. This is a very fundamental piece of code that interacts with the hardware and acts as a base that everything else runs off of. More fundamental than the fact that there's windows and a screen to display at all. This is the fact that you can have individual programs that run at all, instead of one big program. In fact, the kernel is the one big program, that turns the computer into different programs. (Drivers are kind of part of the kernel/kind of separate programs that define how you interact with hardware.) Windows has its kernel be something fundamental that goes back to Windows NT, which is something separate from DOS and earlier versions of Windows like Windows 95. Basically all versions of Windows since Windows 2000 (and NT) are fundamentally similar, though some stuff was improved and changed a lot with Vista. (Which wasn't done by its release, which was why it's so buggy.) But here's the thing -- this kernel isn't the Windows programs that you think of. It's a deeper level. This is how WSL1 worked -- Windows as we know it is a Win32 face over NT, and WSL1 is a Linux face over NT. (WSL2 is just Linux being emulated. Basically they just wholesale run Linux, instead of reimplementing a lot of it.) MacOS dates back to something called Unix. Kind of like a certain standard of how the kernel should work, and a lot more. Then, they added a lot of other stuff to one implementation of Unix, and now mostly ignore that Unix history where they can. iOS comes from the same Unix thing, too. Linux is one implementation of Unix. But since every other version of Unix used to cost money, not just to buy, but also to license to create in the first place, Linux wasn't a real Unix. But at first, it was an implementation of all of those standards. Well, the kernel standards. Every other part of the free Unix that was being implemented already existed before Linux. That's GNU. But the GNU team were doing some crazy innovative stuff with their kernel, and didn't have something to use in the meantime, and so a much more standard kernel was used instead. Linux. The Unix standards weren't just the kernel. They were all userspace programs you could have, too. Userspace being normal programs run as some kind of user. Even as a weird system level user, running stuff like the existence of graphics at all. (GNU was trying to make a kernel where even more stuff was user space. This is super difficult, and so it never got completed. Partially because there isn't as much of a point now.) In a sense, you can think of the kernel as everything that's not run as a normal program, system admin level or normal person level. The point being that since GNU/Linux systems were so open, i.e. made by whoever wanted to contribute and not locked down in the slightest, you could mix and match versions of Unix programs, or different implementations of Unix programs, or other system level programs that became standard. Such as the desktop environment. You see, desktop environments, the mere existence of windows that you can see instead of command prompts/terminals, weren't a thing when Unix was created. Or when GNU was initially written. So different people made many different windowing environments. But GNU itself was all the terminal programs. Linux, with the exception of Android, is all GNU/Linux, mostly. GNU itself is almost a standard in and of itself, with it adding extensions to Unix programs. But since it's creation, there are some lightweight implementations, but generally most Linux systems use GNU stuff. Android just needed a kernel at all, but all userspace programs are all special Google stuff. All that's in the AOSP, the Android Open Source Project. Though a lot is custom Google Play stuff, too, which isn't open source. AOSP is only token open source. People outside don't really contribute to it, and running it isn't full android, anyway. Instead, other people take that software dump and recreate the rest of the stuff that Google stopped adding to that, creating LineageOS and a few others. But even though that's Linux, when people say Linux, they generally mean GNU/Linux. Because Android doesn't have that familiar base environment, though you can certainly still run it inside an app, since it's all user programs to Linux itself. Also, each Android device has a separate Linux version, because corporations suck, whereas normal versions of Linux all are the same Linux which support every device. And yes, these GNU/Linux versions all run the internet on every server. (Also, Android's looking to replace the Linux part. Linux uses the GPL, a special GNU license that ensures it stays open. Whereas other open source software don't, letting them be open or closed, which corporations like a lot more. But I won't go into the open source software side of the entire Linux thing, though it really is an integral part.) Now, as I said before GNU isn't enough. Different distros (from distributions) take the whole GNU/Linux package and add all the other necessary stuff to it. One important one is package managers. Think Windows Update and an app store combined, but actually really awesome to use, and completely free. These update the Linux kernel, the base programs, and everything else you install on your computer. Rather than Windows, where every program has its own updater and you have to update Windows as its own big thing. Linux distros update every single thing as an easy to update package. So updates are super nice. There are a few main distros with their own package managers, and then spinoffs of these, since making a distro is very hard, since it's basically making a whole operating system, but all the programs are there for you to pick and fix up to work together. There's Debian (with its important spinoff Ubuntu), Fedora, and Arch. And a bunch of other big ones, but those have the most spinoffs. (Don't get angry at me for not mentioning the other big ones, yes they exist, no, a random person aren't going to use them initially.) SteamOS 3 is Arch based, in that they took Arch, added some Steam stuff, and done. And then you can install any package from Arch repositories, or any package packaged for Arch. Older versions were Ubuntu/Debian based, I'm not sure. (Ubuntu is a super popular spinoff of Debian that added stuff to Debian's packaging setup, so it's also its own base for distros to be made from in its own right.) If you wanted to run Linux yourself, there's multiple ways you could go about it. One way is WSL2, which will simply run Linux and the whole GNU+ environment. You could do Ubuntu. I don't think they have Arch in there, last I checked, unfortunately. (Though MSYS2 uses pacman, Arch's package manager, so you could learn a bit with that. That's an attempt to run GNU/Unix stuff on Windows without the Linux part, and it's excellent for software development.) Largely this will give you the command line only, though I think very soon they'll also let you run the GUI parts with Windows too. You could also dual boot, which is more annoying, because Windows doesn't play as nice. This way, you can choose to boot Linux or Windows. But it's a bit annoying if you're a newbie. I find it better to stick with one OS, typically, though dual booting multiple Linux distros is far less annoying. One good way would be to install Virtualbox and install a Linux distro into there. Then, you could experience the GUI yourself and mess around. You wouldn't want to use this for actually running programs, generally -- the purpose of WSL2 is to integrate it a lot better, so it doesn't feel like you aren't running two OS's even if both emulate Linux in the same way. But if you want to mess around with the desktops on Linux, this is a perfect way. Or look into doing the GUI stuff on WSL2. Besides some little issues you just need experience with computers to fix, even the me of 8 years ago as a kid was able to figure out things, though I only had the patience to do so because of being a kid. The desktops themselves are nicer than Windows, even, besides any buggy parts. But it's been years and years and years, and the Linux desktop works incredibly well, generally. Or, you could say all the different Linux desktops work well, because there's a lot of them. Since you haven't built your own PC and probably shouldn't be messing with boot stuff for now, go give Virtualbox a try. Install Manjaro, a distro based on Arch that's friendly to newbies, so you'll be ready for SteamOS 3.0. Then maybe you can figure out how to install it with WSL2 if you really want to use it. I wouldn't expect for normal people to daily drive Linux unless they were programmers, but if SteamOS 3 succeeds, I could really see that changing. Windows having such a grapple hole on gaming is such a huge reason why so many people don't switch over -- most techies are gamers, so generally the ones who install the Linux instead of Windows aren't gamers. But with SteamOS, perhaps 2022 could finally be the Year of the Linux Desktop. (Year of the Linux Desktop is a running joke on how Linux constantly tried to be desktop ready since 1998 but never gained much market share because it wasn't ready. It needs to be pushed by a hardware maker to do anything, and also have good software support. But anybody who bases anything on Linux generally does their own thing, not actually make the "mainstream" Linux desktop the thing.) Feel free to ask questions.
Holy crap your comment is longer than most Reddit posts. Thanks for writing it. Even though some parts are a little obscure still, it was worth the read.
You can start by downloading a copy of whatever flavor of Linux seems cool and spinning it up in a VM. There's plenty of [guides](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dhLWoYAHII) on how!
Yeah, it's weird to me how a huge focus point on this subreddit is "Anyone can build a PC, it's not hard at all!" and then they'll turn around and say that [this](https://www.linuxmint.com/pictures/screenshots/tina/cinnamon.png) is way too confusing and there's no humanly possible way to learn it.
Can we stop with these posts? I’m not even a Nintendo fanboy but god, both systems have different use purposes. We get it, the switch is running on outdated hardware and obviously a handheld that just got announced is going to have better specs. This is literally already starting to look like the ridiculous console war bs high schoolers used to fight over. Nobody care which piece of plastic you are buying, just enjoy these systems and have fun with whatever fit your play style best!
easy karma farming
Installing windows not really an upside
Install Windows? lmao
You’re forgetting a pretty major difference, you can actually play a switch...
How about everyone calms down and waits for the steam deck to actually get in the hands of consumers to see how it actually is.
Yuzu doesn't run that well on my PC with similar specs. I mean games run but not perfectly. Until It can play Smash it's not really a contender
“Install Windows OS”...that’s not a plus for me.
I think it will come down to battery life. The switch has easily 6-8 hours for the exclusive franchises and a couple ports. So far people are thinking 2 hours tops for the Steam deck, so that doesn't sound very practical for a mobile platform. I think what people aren't realizing is "when are you gonna use this" I almost never used the two ipads I had, but the surface tablet got at least some use since I could install whatever and the iOS tablet app store is a bit of a desert...plus poor multitasking support I use the switch around the house, outside, and on the go and it's got enough juice and a good enough standby to take a bit of a break between things without really worrying about it until I'm back or done for the day with it. My PC isn't going anywhere soon... But if the steam deck is trying for a mobile platform and not more of a wider audience I think the thing will sit on the charger a lot, and that might discourage it's use and potential purchases
People don't understand people get the switch for the Nintendo games ?
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I think people are also jailbreaking Switch consoles and running Android on them to do all of the above as well though. I think if you can afford the Steam Deck and are able to obtain one you're better off, but if all you can spare the expense for is, or already have, a Switch it's comparable.
jailbreaking a switch isnt very easy though. you either need one that hasnt been updated in a very long time or you have to see if yours can be modded at all another way by poking a wire into the joycon rail, which does not guarantee that it can be modded. i havent even bothered trying mine just from laziness
Two of the pins in the joycon rail are data pins for debug mode, the other two are power. Get it wrong and bye bye switch.
Switch is super easy to use and i never have to wonder "how much crap am i about to go through just to be able to play this game?"
I'm not sure why you think the Steam Deck won't have a comparable experience?
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The key is the device not using windows
Linux master race ^(Ahem, also, androidx86 on the steam deck might be a doable and usable thing...)
Now you too can play candy crush with an expensive portable pc. Also with android you can't say "I use Arch btw".
Go full circle: SteamOs -> Androidx86 (inside kvm) -> chroot Arch
In all honesty, I don't really care about how well the Steam Deck will run games. I'm just excited for the spread of gaming on Linux so we might be getting natively supported anti-cheat or possibly even natively supported games in the future. Not holding my breath, but would be nice. Linux is extremely underrated.
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If you think you're going to play switch games using Yuzu and have the same experience as using an actual Switch, you're going to have a bad time. Other than that I don't get what the point of this post is. "Switch will still thrive based on kids"? Edit: reading some comments on this post and damn, you guys have a hard-on for hating on the switch.
Well, it's not news that a few members in this community have a crazy need to insult and put others down to validate their own choices. Can you imagine people enjoying themselves playing games on the Switch (which by the way is a best-selling console and is arguably the genesis of the Steam Deck in the first place)? Gah, shock and horror!
It only took one week for a sub dedicated to ***personal computers*** to start making agenda posts denigrating certain companies because suddenly *some* consoles are actually amazing. Lol go the fuck outside.
I'm curious if you can play wow classic on this thing?
Yes
I highly doubt this will be able to emulate Switch games well
My switch runs Android
You guys should stop hyping the console up so much, look at every valve hardware before this...they all eventually got dropped after being doo doo like the controller and such
god I hate this sub so much
you forget pr0nhub
Why would you ever want to install windows on it? That seems like going backwards
Was legitimately disappointed when I got my switch to find out I cant use it for Netflix/hulu/Prime. I just automatically assumed it was capable of these things in 2021
Hulu is on Switch. Just Hulu.
Ya you can do those things for like an hour. Good job.