- cross-posted to:
- pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
It is a bigger, don’t have the Steam Controller dongle integrated, and you need to manually install SteamOS on it.
But you get a machine that can be upgraded way more easily than the Steam Machine, and a better GPU from the start.
and they will support it for the lifetime of the machine, i assume?
What kind of support do you want?
For instance my 11 year old Steam Link box, discontinued in 2018, got a firmware update 17 hours ago by Valve.
That kind of support.
It’s fucking Linux, which still supports CPUs that are more than 20 years old. You don’t need to rely on any company to provide you “support”.
Given Valve have been the ones keeping older AMD GPUs working and up to date on Linux, pushing upstream etc, I’d argue we kind of do rely on a company to provide support.
I’d rather spend my money on something I have stronger confidence will have developers maintaining and committing patches etc for all the components in the box than a box of components I can’t be sure will all have the same level of support across all its components into the years to come.
Take x86-64-v1/v2 (and even v3 in some cases) CPUs for example. They’re “supported” on Linux but many distros’ packages don’t support it, meaning you’re often compiling from source to get a package functioning. Sure the kernel isn’t the issue but the rest of userspace is.
With Valve seemingly having no intention of ending maintenance support for their hardware even after end of sale, and their huge contributions to Arch and other parts of the Linux ecosystem, it’s nice to have an option to buy a complete system that will be maintained, and remain a target/reference platform for their distro (which means binaries will be around should I want to distro hop).
Just noting in case anyone is wondering. A Valve engineer is keeping the Radeon HD 7000 series useable with the latest amdgpu driver. It’s from 2012.
And the last driver shipped by AMD for Linux for those cards was in 2015…
Have you even looked at the linked patchnotes? I don’t think that “Added support for GameCube controller rumble when the adapter is in PC mode” is something linus torvalds fixed personally in the linux kernel lmao.
And, for the sake of the argument, let’s say all of those improvements are upstream linux kernel improvements. Then valve still has to pull them, build a new build and push it, something that no major company can be assed to do. And that effort is still commendable.
For $1,000 I do
You are buying hardware, you ask support from the manufacturers. The store is simply selling hardware.
So if I buy Valve, I’ll gain the benefit of support and the hardware. Nice!
Makes more sense, since part of the hardware is soldered, and they work closely with the parts manufacturers to ensure linux compatibility.
On the hardware side, the warranry is 5 years. On the software side, it is Steam responsability, not LDLC. Considering Linux still support some hardware that are more than 30 years old, I suppose you don’t have to worry too much here.
the big thing in terms of support is developer testability. just like with the deck, it’s basically a given that it will see significantly better support from third parties than any normal pc. it’s the same reason that “you can build a pc with the same performance as an xbox for cheaper” was always irrelevant: the marketing push behind the platform is what drives devs there.
also, considering valve isn’t selling this at a loss, the prebuilt only managing to undercut it by €40 is quite telling.
I think the pre-built is aiming to exceed the performance of the SM, albeit with much more power draw, size, and noise.
It is basically the equivalent of comparing a desktop PC to a laptop. One is cheaper if you completely ignore the form factor and purpose of the other.