Introducing Steam Deck
July 16, 2021
Steam Deck is a powerful handheld gaming PC that delivers the Steam games and features you love.
Source: Introducing Steam Deck
It's pretty, isn't it? Valve's newly-announced handheld is a slick little system that will hopefully spur lots of interest in Linux gaming and light a fire in the mini-gaming laptop market where before your only choices were GPD, GPD, and GPD.
I'm slightly (um VERY) annoyed that it's running Arch instead of Ubuntu - it BETTER not be because someone was being a dick about snaps and wanted Valve to promote them by demanding they use them - but I'll definitely be getting one ASAP.
If you've never used Valve's touchpads before, they are wonderfully accurate and easy to pick up. It's basically the same as playing a game on your phone. Having two of them, and a second physical stick, and a physical D-Pad, is pretty sweet.
Anyway, we'll see what happens with it - I'm quite hopeful that it will kick off interest in native versions of Linux games, and will clearly push Proton to new levels of compatibility, but I don't know if Valve has the same amount of power that Nintendo does to really compel devs to do the work to support the console properly.
Let's hope they do.
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