Shower Thoughts

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A community for sharing those miniature epiphanies you have that highlight the oddities within the familiar.

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People will put more effort in installing Windows on the Steam Deck than learning how to use Linux (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I really do hope that dev jam project to create a streaming "gaming installation" of Windows takes off and gets picked up by Microsoft. There is very clearly a market for it.

That being said I also think the number of games not supported is really really low and that makes it kind of a non issue. Still, with Microsoft and their ever increasing interest in the gaming division, I don't feel too unsafe having high hopes. It just feels like something they could pull off easily enough, why wouldn't they? One more vector for a license sale.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well I'm biased as a Linux geek, but it'd definitely be a good idea to make Windows better for handheld gaming. Then again, Microsoft have never been very good at adapting, which is why they fell so far behind in the mobile space. I wonder if they wouldn't rather make an Xbox handheld?

Still, I don't think Valve could have made the Deck what it is without leveraging the Linux/FOSS ecosystem. Not only did they straight up use open source software (like KDE Plasma desktop) and existing repositories (Arch Linux), but they also wrote a custom window compositor (Gamescope) and even put patches into the Linux kernel itself. Creating the Steam Deck was a "full stack" job, to borrow a phrase. Valve really put a lot of work into the OS at various levels, and I think the results speak for themselves in that sense.