True

I don’t know of a way to use the scaling options LS offers on deck, just the frame generation.

Most demanding games have upscaling built in, and the deck already has several scaling options built in, so it’s less of a need than the frame gen options.

My English Achille’s heel

This was clearly a project someone did for fun, it’s not meant to be practical or actually useful. Everyone else understands this and is making jokes about it, and you’re lashing out at people acting like the joke responses were people being serious.

It should be obvious that it’s not actually very helpful to have a controller that can charge itself, if placed within a few feet of a charger, on a perfectly flat surface, under a webcam, with a running computer and webapp managing the whole thing. It also wasn’t useful to make a program to “drive” the controller with wasd. It also wasn’t useful to make a program to sing chiptunes with the vibration motors. It wasn’t even useful for valve to make the controller scream when dropped. It’s just funny, and people are enjoying it.

I was kinda joking with the Roomba comparison.

I could kinda see a use for this where the controller could wake itself up and try to plug itself in if the battery gets low, but the steam controller battery life is so good that it’s a pretty low need

Why would anyone buy a Roomba when they can just vacuum the floor themselves?

I think I saw that Minecraft just added vulkan as a graphics option, but I’m not sure what versions of Minecraft.

This is used on the deck specifically for framegen. Native frame gen options in games add a lot of latency at 30 or less fps, which usually makes them unplayable. Lossless scaling 's framegen option is less accurate in creating the in-between frames, but has far less input latency, making it a viable option.

It doesn’t work for all games, some games will still feel really bad with it enabled. But there are a lot of games where you can use it to run a 30fps game at 60fps, with only slightly more input lag than using a Bluetooth controller.

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.

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.