Steam Deck | RNDA2, 7" display, Dock, starting at $399 (yes OLED)

[Tasty]

let you install Windows

Ew.

to play pirated games!

Double ew.

[Steam Deck is a] closed system

[Tasty]

STEAM OS 3.0

Linux

Windows

[Joe Molotov]

Pirated games are only possible with the power of Windows 12!

[Bebpo]

What the hell is GPD?

[Tasty]

What the hell is GPD?

Some weirdo commie handheld bork had a hard-on for a few months/years ago.

[Uncle]

STEAM OS 3.0

Linux

Windows

found something called Windows 10 Ameliorated that I want to try on Steamdeck 

I like the idea of an ultra-stripped down install without telemetry or calling home crap that eats cycles and reduces battery life, while still being able to enjoy games on Windows with no fuss of tweaking Linux for it

[benjipwns]

Pretty sure you can play pirated games on Linux.

The whole point of basically everything Valve does is to make you not want to pirate games because Steam is that much easier.

[bork]

What the hell is GPD?

Some weirdo commie handheld bork had a hard-on for a few months/years ago.

Still do 

Beps, they're a Chinese company who has been making both Android and Windows-based handhelds for quite some time- The Steam Deck is far from being the first of its kind. There's a lot of these devices out there. But this is the first arguably "big" handheld PC that's coming out, no pun about its size intended.

They make not only small gaming handheld devices, but also productivity oriented PCs too.  Sizes are all over the place- like the Win 3 is the size of a Switch Lite, but the Max is a "big boy" 8" laptop.  Here's a size comparison between the GPD Win 3 and the Steam Deck:



They're probably salty because the Steam Deck is going to cost a lot less than their gaming products and destroy their western sales, but I doubt the Deck will be much competition within China.

The comments about piracy are likely because a lot of games can't be purchased in China, but it's still all just dumb and hilarious coming from them.  I expect that the Steam Deck will also have much better QA in comparison, too.

If nothing else, I hope that the Steam Deck lights a fire under their asses and we see more competitely-priced products from GPD, Aya, OneX, etc. I'm not even quite sure why they're so angry. Some of their products like the GPD Max are actual laptop style machines with more I/O, more on board storage, and even options to use external GPUs. Plus they have keyboards (even the Win 3- it's a slide out touch keyboard, though).  You can do more with these machines than just play games, whereas the steam deck is very clearly oriented towards gaming, and with Steam OS, you're not going to be able to play games from Ubisoft Connect, Origin, Epic, Battle.Net, stuff purchased from GOG, etc., without installing the full Windows on there AFAIK.

[bork]

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/som87v/gpd_steam_deck_is_worse_than_win_3_it_is_a_closed/



GPD are not taking the impending Steam Deck launch well.

Don't kid yourself! The only reason Gabe created this product is to make a closed system, not to let you install Windows to play pirated games!

In the end, whether it's called the Steam Deck or Steam Deck XX, it's a closed system (capitalist will reveal its hideous face when there are enough users) and the hardware will prevent you from installing any third-party systems. You can only buy games from the Steam platform.

Until someone jailbreaks it? 
But yeah, I can see them going this direction, if they want to compete with MS and Sony on the hardware front.  As long as they still have good sales and allow full fledged modding from Nexus/Vortex, I can see it working for them.

TEH PC WORZ!?! 

Jailbreak? I'm pretty sure you can just install Windows on it, dude.  It's not something I plan to do with mine. Just going to stick with Steam OS.

[Uncle]

yeah from the very start valve have said you can throw windows on there, it's just a computer

I don't know whether drivers to make it all functional will be there day 1, but it's an enthusiast device, people will get it figured out shortly

personally I don't understand the hostility toward putting windows on it, not saying that's bork, I've just seen the sentiment all over the internet and I feel like it's unwarranted

linux will be great for many/most things, windows will be nice to have for things that run better under it, I think it's pretty much required for gamepass

[Coax]

A major knock in my eyes to the GPD Win 2 and 3 is they shipped with malware for various units, for years. Somehow I've never seen this brought up in reviews or general awareness despite the subreddit being filled with topics and posts about it. One of their spokeswomen even laughed about it when a user posted that they expected the malware by now.

[Nintex]

Noooo you can't make products more cheap than the CCP sweatshops

Big American Steam Deck crushes silly Chinese toy computers at half the price

[Rufus]

A major knock in my eyes to the GPD Win 2 and 3 is they shipped with malware for various units, for years. Somehow I've never seen this brought up in reviews or general awareness despite the subreddit being filled with topics and posts about it. One of their spokeswomen even laughed about it when a user posted that they expected the malware by now.

Does everyone just wipe these things then?

[bork]

A major knock in my eyes to the GPD Win 2 and 3 is they shipped with malware for various units, for years. Somehow I've never seen this brought up in reviews or general awareness despite the subreddit being filled with topics and posts about it. One of their spokeswomen even laughed about it when a user posted that they expected the malware by now.

I remember seeing this reported by a few people on Reddit and the GPD discord, but I want to say GPD had an explanation for it?  Can't quite remember.  I never got an infected unit, but I have experienced QA issues on some units.  I will say that GPD has made good and offered to fix hardware issues or have released driver/bios updates that fixed other problems.  The quality level has gone up with each new hardware release.  The last two units I got from them were fine- the Max initially had this "halo" effect on the screen where it was slightly brighter in a ring shape, but it wasn't that noticeable and it ended up resolving itself with use and the screen is now fine.  Didn't have any issues with the Win 3.

[bork]

A major knock in my eyes to the GPD Win 2 and 3 is they shipped with malware for various units, for years. Somehow I've never seen this brought up in reviews or general awareness despite the subreddit being filled with topics and posts about it. One of their spokeswomen even laughed about it when a user posted that they expected the malware by now.

Does everyone just wipe these things then?

A lot of people do just wipe them and start clean, yeah.

[bork]

yeah from the very start valve have said you can throw windows on there, it's just a computer

I don't know whether drivers to make it all functional will be there day 1, but it's an enthusiast device, people will get it figured out shortly

personally I don't understand the hostility toward putting windows on it, not saying that's bork, I've just seen the sentiment all over the internet and I feel like it's unwarranted

linux will be great for many/most things, windows will be nice to have for things that run better under it, I think it's pretty much required for gamepass

I don't have some kind of vendetta against Windows like Tasty does ( )- I just want to see how it works with Steam OS.  Am assuming without various Windows processes running it might make for better performance.  I buy the vast majority of my PC games on Steam so am good with it being "restricted," too.

[Coax]

This is the response I mentioned, edited to show their official GPD email linked from other profile posts. Taken from the pages I saved about it. There was no subsequent reply from them in that thread.

I remember seeing this reported by some people, but I want to say GPD had an explanation for it?  Can't quite remember.

I looked later last year through it all and didn't find any official explanation (edit: at least on Reddit). Some more charitable user speculation was customs installed the malware but that doesn't explain how other brands don't suffer from it.

Anyway, kind of off-topic but thought it was relevant given the comparison

[bork]

You'll get way more info on discord than on reddit- I've emailed with Kendyz before and they were pretty nice and very helpful.

[bork]

https://www.reddit.com/r/gpdwin/comments/n5u1sy/yep_malware_found_on_gpd_win_3/

When this happened to my Win Max, GPD (Kendy) said it was most likely caused by an infected USB drive used for QC. At his request, I experimented a bit, and was unable to make the infection reappear using their factory image. So the malware or worm is introduced after the fact, and not part of their image or driver packages.

If memory serves, they use usb sticks loaded with software to do QC tests. The last time I heard of this, it was only some units, and they traced it back to 1 of the USB sticks was infected (so every computer it was used for QC on got infected).

Windows Defender successfully finds and quarantines it

Maybe it's because they're using pirated games to do these tests?    But OK, now it makes sense why I didn't have any issues.  It's only on the units that were QC'd with infected drives.

[Coax]

Bit of a strange way for them to handle it if indeed the real responses to such incidents are tucked away in the Discord or only after users email them directly, given it'd been reported by users for a year and a half as of that thread. Perhaps it was convenient for rep damage if less were aware of it 

There are also results from September and October last year where it units were found with it still but one might explain that as from old batch if the QC issue is to be believed.

[Svejk]

                 
 

[bork]

Bit of a strange way for them to handle it if indeed the real responses to such incidents are tucked away in the Discord or only after users email them directly, given it'd been reported by users for a year and a half as of that thread. Perhaps it was convenient for rep damage if less were aware of it 

There are also results from September and October last year where it units were found with it still but one might explain that as from old batch if the QC issue is to be believed.

To clarify, I don't think the GPD people are on the discord. But there's just way more active users and more info coming from there than Reddit.

One of the comments mentioned an apology but I couldn't find it.  I don't think they really care TBH.  They were clearly getting enough sales. That's why I'm so interested in seeing what happens with the Deck- my guess is that kind of mentality is not going to fly anymore.

[Uncle]

what level of retro gaming does the GPD get up to? can you play anything up to N64/PS1 flawlessly, after that it gets sketchy, something along those lines?

[Svejk]

what level of retro gaming does the GPD get up to? can you play anything up to N64/PS1 flawlessly, after that it gets sketchy, something along those lines?

It can run Yuzu just fine.... 

[bork]

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck/mygames

steam deck library compat checker

[Tasty]

Finally a first-party solution that doesn't require a public profile. 👏

For me:

10 verified (The Evil Within 1 huh? neat)
7 playable (including the ones I care most about, Master Duel and Omori)
1 unsupported (Friday the 13th, probably a combo of online/DRM stuff and the dev being legally unable to patch it themselves)
56 untested

[bork]

https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck/mygames

steam deck library compat checker

Hmm.  A lot less are listed as compatible than I expected.

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

Hmm.  A lot less are listed as compatible than I expected.

Their criteria for 'works perfect' seems to actually be 'works perfect', so I'm not that worried tbh - these are the reasons Team Fortress 2 is listed as only partially compatible:

• Doesn't have full native controller support
• Doesn't use steam input icons for button mapping everywhere
• has some hard to read text (which I can pretty much guarantee will be the killtexts)

This is Slay The Spires entry:

[chronovore]

Is anyone still playing TF2? Is Steam updating the game at all? I thought it was a wild-west kinda Mos Eisley bed for cheaters and Russian spies or something.

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

Is anyone still playing TF2? Is Steam updating the game at all? I thought it was a wild-west kinda Mos Eisley bed for cheaters and Russian spies or something.

I haven't played it in years, but its still in the Top 10 most played games available on Steam

[chronovore]

Is anyone still playing TF2? Is Steam updating the game at all? I thought it was a wild-west kinda Mos Eisley bed for cheaters and Russian spies or something.

I haven't played it in years, but its still in the Top 10 most played games available on Steam

I didn’t mean to imply that it hasn’t been played, or isn’t still popular, it’s what crowd is playing it and to what purpose?

On the 360, the Uno game was more of a chat roulette kind of thing, where players would just drop in and hang out and chat with each other and kill time. I understand that TF2 is rife with soviet players, and lots of people hacking the game with aimbots and stuff.

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

Its still a pretty solidly designed multiplayer FPS, and its also F2P, so I'd say its niche is probably teens mixing it up between their Fortnite and their Destiny.

Also as it predates the whole XBL style 'matchmaking only, no custom servers' fad, and has an honest-to-goodness old fashioned server browser, presumably people find servers with active admins to kick obvious cheaters / bots and favorite them

[Uncle]

[bork]

[Uncle]

Gabe Newell is going around hand-delivering Steam Decks in Washington state

https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/t2dzar/gabe_newell_delivered_and_autographed_my_steam/

Saw a camera crew going up to my neighbors house while I was loading stuff into my truck. My roommate recognized the guy being followed as Gaben, I didn't believe him, our other roommate then verified it was indeed Gabe. After delivering my neighbor's Deck, we yelled "Hi Gabe!". At which point he asked how many were living in the house, then he went back to his van and grabbed us each a Deck. Was also filmed receiving ours so I assume these will be used in some promo or online. Very cool day.

So Gabe was just giving away free Decks to people who didn't even order them?

Pretty much, my neighbor had pre-ordered one but I don't think they charged him for the one he was delivered. My roommates and I didn't order anything and each got one though. Right place right time sorta thing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/t2fmg0/gaben_showed_up_at_my_house_and_delivered_my/

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/t2kt9t/gabe_newell_going_around_the_seattle_area_hand/

[chronovore]

Holy crap, Gabe really is Santa!

[Beezy]

https://twitter.com/Wario64/status/1498688819335348224

[Svejk]

Holy crap, Gabe really is Santa!

Dood is looking more like he's about to leave a bomb at your doorstep.

[benjipwns]

Valve made a game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1902490/Aperture_Desk_Job/

[Sho Nuff]

It’s a cute tech demo. You can play it on PC using only a gamepad, they hack out the Steam Deck specific features if you’re not playing it on that

[Tasty]

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/03/how-valve-made-steam-deck-the-first-pc-to-smoothly-run-elden-ring/

Elden Ring now runs better on the Steam Deck than $1000+ PCs.

Da powa of Linux gaming

[bork]

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/03/how-valve-made-steam-deck-the-first-pc-to-smoothly-run-elden-ring/

Elden Ring now runs better on the Steam Deck than $1000+ PCs.

Da powa of Linux gaming

Pretty sure this was fixed like a week ago?  Haven't noticed any stutter lately.

[bork]

https://twitter.com/OnDeck/status/1501982693231251459

[Tasty]

https://twitter.com/OnDeck/status/1501982693231251459

[BikeJesus]

Got my 512GB unit a few hours ago. It's fantastic.

[D3RANG3D]

https://twitter.com/OnDeck/status/1501982693231251459

[Tasty]

💯

[Uncle]

a true proponent of freedom of use for your own hardware would never criticize others for doing whatever they want with it, for their own convenience, or just for fun

I will install Windows 3.1 on my Steam Deck and I will play SkiFree and Castle of the Winds 

[Uncle]

tho to be honest this is amazing and will be the first thing I do

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/t79fqj/formatted_my_sd_card_to_btrfs_managed_to_squeeze/

a 1 TB card that effectively ends up working out to being 1.4 TB 


I'm reading that this may actually be better for performance too, because SD cards are slow media so it's faster to read a small file and decompress it than to read an uncompressed large file

[D3RANG3D]

[Uncle]

 

[benjipwns]

 

[Tasty]

LINUX

[benjipwns]

Microsoft's in:
https://twitter.com/CJGluckstein/status/1504874456300154884
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/03/stadia-xbox-cloud-gaming-finally-work-on-steam-deck-thanks-to-microsoft-edge/

[Tasty]

 

[Uncle]

holy shit Linux is fucking awful and every moment trying to do anything in it is excruciating

I set myself one simple task: play Super Smash Bros Melee in the Steam version of RetroArch

I want to use Steam RetroArch instead of native RetroArch as a non-Steam game for the sake of cloud saves and other Steam-related conveniences, it's nice, it should work

I install Steam RetroArch and Dolphin is not among its DLC cores, you can't just run it out of the box

so I look around online for how to add non-official cores to the Steam version, and find out that the easiest way to do this is to install regular RetroArch on your computer and then copy the cores over

I already have RetroArch installed so I grab Dolphin and put the files on a flash drive, and connect it to the Deck...it turns out Windows cores are .dll files and Linux cores are .so files, now that's my own dumb mistake for assuming any files could make the jump between Win and Linux

so I have to install Linux RetroArch to use those cores instead, and I do this through Discover which uses Flatpak

along the way I am poking around at SteamOS's Linux and either it's Valve's fault or KDE's fault or Debian(? Arch Linux?) or some combination of everything, but it just feels buggy as hell with a million little imperfections, like when I open Steam's virtual keyboard for some reason it mirrors a chunk of the desktop elsewhere for a second before the actual keyboard drops into place, and every few minutes I keep getting pop ups that my internet connection disconnected and then immediately reconnected, and the directory structure for everything is completely bonkers

I have to google where the working directory of RetroArch actually is, I can't even find it right now, I think the app is located at var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications?  what the fuck is being exported or shared here? and then there are a million satellite folders to get lost in which lead nowhere like var/lib/flatpak/app/org.libretro.RetroArch/x86_64/stable/active/files etc. etc.

ok wait I just found it again, the actual place is home/.var/app/org.libretro.RetroArch/config/RetroArch/cores, again what is the deal with this path?  config?  this isn't a folder with a couple configuration options, it's the whole damn program with your downloads and screenshots and save files and everything

meanwhile guess where RetroArch installed by default on Windows? C:\RetroArch-Win64, and literally everything is right there with no fuss

so I go in there and I copy dolphin_libretro.so over to...googling again...run/media/mmcblk0p1/steamapps and I can find Steam's RetroArch from there, and paste it in

games still don't work, it appears that RetroArch has no idea what the core actually is or what files are associated with it, so I do some more research online and find out that I need .info files alongside the cores to provide that info, and I find a helpful link to https://github.com/libretro/libretro-core-info as a mirror of those needed files

so I download it and put it where it needs to go and it still doesn't work, which has to do with github not being that simple to download from, instead I need the raw text of the file saved into a .info file, so I click the button to copy the raw text and THAT doesn't work, some unspecified error

well I don't want to do text editing on the Deck with a virtual keyboard anyway so I figure what I probably should've done in the first place is get the .info files from the existing Linux install and put them in the Steam install, so I go looking for them and they're not there

where the fuck are the info files, again I reiterate on Windows they are simply located at C:\RetroArch-Win64\info

but when I go to home/.var/app/org.libretro.RetroArch/config/RetroArch there is no info folder

so I open RetroArch to look in the directories section

by the way you can't do anything but mouse around and click unless you have Steam's interface actively open to somehow enable other buttons to work, like those in RetroArch, and half the time it gets stuck and just won't fucking open at all so you're boned, again is this Valve's fault?  Linux's fault?

I restart the Deck so I can actually open Steam so I can actually push buttons within RetroArch, and then I get to the directories section



oh ok it's in app/share/libretro/info

except it's not, there is no root app folder

what the fuck is this file path?

I use search functions to look for app/share, oh I guess you can't do that, ok I just search for app then, oh there are a bunch of those and none of them are the right one

I google around and I find this page describing my problem: https://github.com/flathub/org.libretro.RetroArch/issues/102

But if I look for something like /app/share/libretro/info, I can't find anything under ~/.var/app that's even remotely like it.

Which suggests to me that these things probably aren't expected to live under ~/.var/app at all.

I then looked in my users whole home directory and something like /app/share/libretro/assets/ seems to have something much more like a match under:
~/.local/share/flatpak/app/org.libretro.RetroArch/x86_64/stable/a437b0ef4eb1f1563d84a8ec881b9f19eb9fb84c06b35ecafe4ce85d5aad918a/files/share/libretro/assets

I looked at a few more and they also seem to have matching things under ~/.local/share/flatpak/app/org.libretro.RetroArch/x86_64/stable/a437b0ef4eb1f1563d84a8ec881b9f19eb9fb84c06b35ecafe4ce85d5aad918a/files

oh ok so when Linux says files are located in one path they're actually in a completely fucking different place, I see

except I don't have the path this guy has, when I check home/Deck/.local/flatpak I hit a complete dead end, there's no app folder there

so I fuck around for another while and finally discover where the .info files are located

they are in var/lib/flatpak/app/org.libretro.RetroArch/x86_64/stable/[shitload of numbers and letters]/files/share/libretro/info

so easy to find!  Linux is a joy to use!

I copy the Dolphin .info file to Steam's RetroArch, and then Dolphin works

except I had a minor panic because it ran super shitty until I realized it's because I locked the Deck to 30 FPS and emulators need to run at 60

this whole process took 1 minute in Windows, and hours of fucking around in Linux

 

[Bebpo]

hey, at least you got it working in the end.

[remy]

imagine using the flatpak versino of retroarch 

[Tasty]

Flatpak is the future of Linux







































That said, right now Flatpak leaves something to be desired in certain specific cases.