Is SteamOS a future default for handhelds?

Fuck I hope so

For the future of PC gaming I sure as hell hope so. People stick to and defend Windows as their go-to 'till the bitter end, likely not realizing Linux could be everything their Windows machine is and there is a real industry player with a lot of money making this reality right now. If we just let it.

If we would just give Linux the critical mass, we could free the last locked aspect of PC gaming, the OS itself. That way we would no longer be at the whims of Microsoft's decisions because let's face it, even Windows users hate the shit they do.

IMO Steam OS is the "Windows" for handhelds. Sure there will be lots of variants of Linux with custom skins (hell even Windows itself). However, I think Steam OS has already established itself as a comfortable default for most people due to how optimized the UI is for handhelds and the fact it works out of the box for most PC games without any tinkering 🙂

SteamOS's UI is incredible. It's not always easy for a UI to be feature rich while also being intuitive and easy to use, but Valve did a wonderful job. I love pulling up the Quick Menu to check the battery and time or tweak a setting without needing to pause the game or go back to the Home Menu.

SteamOS has been out on Steam Deck for 18 months, but still no general release in sight. I wouldn't hold my breath. I think we'll just have to continue to make do with the likes of ChimeraOS/Nobara.

I'd love to see the return of Steam Machines. I loved the concept back in 2014 but Linux gaming absolutely wasn't ready back then. A first party Valve Steam Machine could be a great entry point for many potential new PC gamers.

I at least suspect there will be a community porting some variant of SteamOS to the more popular handhelds.

It would be a good thing. Gaming on windows has been a shit experience since everything after windows 7. I don't want to have to manually(or scriptedly) remove candy crush installer icons among other bloat shit every time I install the os just for a basic clean experience that still spies in me.

What are these many new handhelds you speak of

Probably not while ARM handhelds are so popular. I think that it's a good choice for intel and AMD for now, though.

Steam OS is awesome. I consider myself a tech savvy person, yet I never felt the need to tinker with my Steam Deck to run retro games or emulate stuff since I have it (1+ year)

The library of games running natively or with minimal controller changes is so big I will probably not run out of games and Im playing more than ever.

I thought it would but it's been over a year and still no one is shipping with it.

ETA Prime always referring to "Steam Deck OS" and claiming that's the name it's widely known by is so cringe.

I like it, if only because theres a lack of OS's that boot with controller support.

Permanently Deleted

Only possible if all handheld machines have transparent hardware designs, i.e., all electronic components inside are known, have open source drivers and do not rely on third-party proprietary drivers or reverse engineering. This is due to Linux itself rely heavily on open source software and doesn't play well with proprietary parts (take Nvidia GPU for example, every person who has it in their Linux machine knows it causes headache once in a while). Unfortunately, so far only Valve's Steam Deck has a hardware specs that satisfy this requirement. The other ones more or less suffer from closed source components

I hope its form factor gets closer to the switch so its more mixed mode handheld/console.

Looking at how many celebrated ROG Ally shipping with windows I doubt it will catch on. Only possibility I see is if valve would do profit sharing with the handheld maker for purchases made in the steam store.

For a third party to ship with steam os now would essentially mean they are also supporting the largest player in the market with no gain for themselves.

I hope so, but only if the option to install other OS's remains an easy option. I love android but installing a different operating system on my phone is so much of a pain in the dick that it's not even worth it.

I feel like I'd probably avoid a handheld if the option to install windows wasn't there, even if I don't end up using it much.

If my choice was a default windows install with the option to install steamOS myself, or a default steamOS install with no other options, I'm choosing the windows install every time.

I do not get reference to smartphones. In US iOS is dominated system.

No. Steamos is only really great on deck because of the whole making the hardware and software thing. If other people use it it loses that and you end up with a computer with a less compatible OS.

I'd be OK with that, it's been excellent so far!

No, Steam doesn't support arm. So my hacked Switch runs cobbled together emulationstation + xfce + antimicrox + onboard. I don't like Horizon OS and only SuperTuxKart works flawlessly on Android for me. In SuperTux, the sound desyncs from the game. Minetest doesn't support gamepads, and I couldn't find any Android alternative to AntiMircoX. I also just don't like how 99% of Android apps "need" Google Play Services.

Linux is what I need, but there isn't any decent interface that isn't SteamOS (x86 only) or RetroArch (everything must use libretro) or batocera.linux (their version of emulationstation completely shits itself when ran outside of batocera, and I really don't want to recompile batocera)