Not gonna lie. That is hella hype. Although it does make it harder to target hardware as a game dev. It does however make the whole ecosystem way better.
Hope they introduce some minimum hardware requirements that a hand-held has to have for it to be steamos compatible. That way devs can target that hardware and it will run on any steamos verified device
I don’t think that’s feasible. The current set of handhelds have the OG Deck at the bottom end of the performance tier anyway, that’ll only become relevant if and when a Deck 2 releases, and at that point it will be the same problem to solve with or without third party hardware.
Minimum hardware requirements are likely to be performance (at relevant minimum resolution) and battery life at least on the same level as the current Steam Deck.
I’m currently running Bazzite but have been thinking about picking up an ROG Ally X for my husband. I think it having steam OS would be better for him in general. Hope this is available soon.
Get him an OLED Steam Deck instead. I don’t know why anyone would get a ROG, especially if you’re just going to put SteamOS on it.
He has the same problem I did. He has games that aren’t compatible with steam os and it’s one of those things where it’s actually easier to dual boot windows than it is to fuck around with compatibility layers for things that don’t run in proton.
He also isn’t a fan of the touchpads. I personally like the ergonomics of the Ally x better but that’s my own preference.
This is cool, more options are better.
It does, however, make me REALLY want Valve to add official third party library support. I have thousands of games on GOG and hundreds on Epic. I don’t need them to officially support all of them, but at least I need a better approach to integrating them than fiddling with Heroic or Lutris in desktop mode.
Gamers are used to fiddling, so that shouldn’t be a big deal for now
“Gamers are used to fiddling”?
No. Gamers are largely playing on Switch. And PS5, sometimes.
The residual amount of people playing on PC are annoyed by fiddling, with very rare exceptions.
Hell, I fiddle. I’ve been known to fiddle in my day. And I’m here complaining about the fiddling. I’m a representative of extreme tolerance to fiddling and I’m annoyed.
I like fiddling. Sometimes i fiddle and then never actually use what I was fiddling with once it’s working. But even I would gladly welcome not needing to fiddle at all.