Valve specifically released a new installation image that comes with an installer, has added hardware support for non-deck hardware and discrete graphics cards, and has officially updated their support documents to say that it’s supported on more hardware.
You may have a right to install it before, but that doesn’t mean it would have worked or been a good experience.
Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo don’t have monopolies within the console space.
Also (and this seems stupid to me), having a more open platform can open you up to antitrust lawsuits. In the Epic vs Google and Epic vs Apple lawsuits, apple was ruled to be fine to have a closed app store, but Google was rules to have an illegal monopoly on Android, despite it being the more open platform.
Basically Valve having the Steam Machine be an open platform (or being sold as a PC which is expected to be open) while steering Steam use could be considered more of a monopoly issue, than if they released a stripped down Steam only “console” and advertised it as such.
The brand new SteamOS image apparently does have an installer, but I’m not sure what installation options it has since I haven’t tried it.
Hopefully it does support drives/partitions better than the previous recovery image did.
Presumably PC games are considered their own market, separate enough from console games. It honestly seems murky reasoning to me, but I would imagine valve would be cautious about it since they’re currently facing monopoly lawsuits.
I’ve also read speculation that selling it at a loss could contribute to antitrust lawsuits against them. Basically if they sell gaming PCs below cost, and the gaming PCs incentivize Steam use over other platforms, there would be an argument that Valve was using their 30% sales cut to sell hardware others can’t compete against, to further cement their monopoly. This would be partially countered by the open nature of the device, but not fully since it would still “steer” common users towards steam over other platforms.
This isn’t an issue for console makers because there are multiple competing consoles with valid market share.
Mainly just that there’s constant improvements happening. I’m not sure how far behind it still is, but constant improvements are nice.
For example, I saw a story in my RSS feeds this morning that the open source Nvidia driver just got DLSS support.
When the Steam Frame comes out we should get an ARM SteamOS recovery image, but it will probably only be for the Frame hardware. It’s possible that Valve will have prioritized wider hardware support for it though, since that’s something they’ve been actively working on with regular SteamOS.
CachyOS isn’t immutable though, which comes with pros (it’s easier to change major parts of the OS) and cons (such as it being easier to break the system).
The single biggest advantage of Bazzite over SteamOS is that it has the option to install programs from the normal software repos. If something you need isn’t available as a flatpak/appimage/etc, you can install it anyways to a package layer, and it will be available after a reboot. This is also really nice for programs that need better system integration, for example getting a flatpak password manager to integrate with a flatpak web browser often doesn’t work.
For a full desktop experience, something like Bazzite will be better.
That said standby/sleep issues can be nasty to track down, hopefully swapping distros will fix it, but be prepared to maybe have to deal with it on other distros as well. I’m in the middle of having to fix an issue with some ASIX usb network drivers on my desktop, where a recent update started causing loss of network and other issues after sleep.
My understanding is SteamOS was lacking hardware support for most devices, and that they’ve been slowly fixing this. It’s been mostly functional for awhile now, but used to be completely broken, and it’s only now that Valve is saying it’s actually ready for most AMD devices.
It’s part of why people had needed to use things like Bazzite/ChimeraOS on other gaming handhelds, because bare SteamOS wouldn’t work. There were things like hardcoded support for just the Van Gogh chipset, hardcoded TDP management that would cause system crashes on different hardware, no support for network devices, etc.
The open source Nvidia drivers are coming along nicely I hear.
Kinda an accident to be honest, the article title is “The Steam Machine Was Originally Meant to Cost About $750”, but when I submitted it to Lemmy, the default title for the URL was instead ”Valve Says the Steam Machine Saw a Similar Price Increase as the Steam Deck…”, so I tried to change it back to the actual article title from memory. I was on my phone at the time, so I didn’t double check the title as I should have.
I’ll fix it now.
I bought mine as part of a bundle with the game ICEY for $8.
Steam Machine, like our other hardware products, is made up of many components that we source from manufacturers around the world. The price at which we sell our hardware is a direct result of the cost of these components. We felt like we had a good understanding of how those costs might change over time when we first started sourcing them for Steam Machine back in 2023. That understanding was born from the many years of data we all have about the evolution of PC hardware prices – primarily, that it tends to get cheaper over time as new technology arrives.
Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we’re sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we’ve secured them over the past 6 months.
Price wasn’t the only thing impacted by all of this: availability was as well. There were periods where we found we couldn’t source some of our components at all, at any price. More than anything else, this has impacted the number of units we’ve been able to produce for launch.
Also:
If I don’t get a Steam Machine right away, is there anything else I can do?
Thanks to the openness of the PC platform, there are lots of options for devices that will allow you to run games natively or streamed to your TV. There are many PC sites and communities out there that can help you with that. For our part, we are continuing to work toward enabling SteamOS to be used on more hardware than just ours. In fact, with the newly-released SteamOS 3.8, you can run the same code and operating system as Steam Machine on your own living-room PC using whatever PC parts you want:
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/65B4-2AA3-5F37-4227 . Right now, only AMD GPUs are supported, but we’re working on expanding support for the future.
It was a surprise drop, as far as I know. We knew it would be soon due to rumors.
To be fair, windows hibernates a lot without telling the user (hibernates when shutting down, hibernates after sleeping too long). Hibernating when shutting down was largely meant to help with slow boot times on HDDs, and it maybe shouldn’t be default now that everyone is on SSDs that both boot faster and receive more wear from hibernating.
Normally sleep wouldn’t affect it, because it just keeps the ram powered and doesn’t write to the SSD.
However I think windows will quietly hibernate if the computer has been asleep too long. At least on laptops it will automatically hibernate after a few hours of sleep, or after a % of battery is used.
After the recent attack, I setup aurscan (mentioned in the article) with a locally hosted Gemma model to scan package builds and install files.
Hard to know how well something like this will actually work. So far it’s cleared most updates I’ve thrown at it, with one false positive/warning.
You’re right about it being underhanded tactics that resulted in the monopoly charge, but it also just seems silly that they could instead say “no other app stores are allowed” and it would suddenly be ok.