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The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

(isomorphism.xyz)
305 points todsacerdoti | 6 comments | 03 Apr 25 11:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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glenstein ◴[03 Apr 25 12:55 UTC] No.43568917[source]▶
It truly is, and it's the culmination of a long history of development to get to this point. Back in, I want to say 2016 or so, we had Steam Machines, which were a series of hardware partnerships with various vendors for a console-style form factor of essentially PC hardware running on the first version of Steam OS.

It was an incredible idea, but at the time rather frustratingly, I think some people came down with what I like to call The Verge Syndrome, which is to judge things on whether or not they're an overnight success, and otherwise deemed failures. So, according to some people, the fact that there were fewer Steam Machines than PlayStations in the world meant that the project as a whole was a failure.

And so the Steam Machine was not successful (by that metric at least), but it got the ball rolling on increasing sophistication in developing the Linux ecosystem and the understanding of hardware that culminated in the Steam Deck, which is a triumphant rebalancing of the PC gaming universe, away from dependence on Windows. But try telling that to someone in 2016.

I'm happy to sing the praises of Valve, but I think a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.

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1. candiddevmike ◴[03 Apr 25 16:11 UTC] No.43571821[source]▶
Valve should acquire Framework and have them do Steam Machine 2.0.
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2. lreeves ◴[03 Apr 25 16:17 UTC] No.43571913[source]▶
Please no, all due props to Valve but they really can't count to 3.
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3. MostlyStable ◴[03 Apr 25 16:58 UTC] No.43572486[source]▶
I'd much rather a partnership than an acquisition. Valve is great, but open, repairable hardware is not their core mission. I think Framework needs to stay independent to maintain that.

But also, Valve is doing a decent job of it on their own already, with the steamdeck being quite repairable and upgradeable, especially in comparison to the competition. I'd rather there be a greater number of companies all independently demonstrating that repairable hardware can be a commercial success rather than the market takeaway being "oh that's just that weird Framework thing, it won't work for us".

4. ChoGGi ◴[03 Apr 25 20:57 UTC] No.43575310[source]▶
Tends to be a lot of Holy Grail fans at Valve one would surmise.
5. whazor ◴[04 Apr 25 10:47 UTC] No.43580403[source]▶
The Framework Desktop is what you would want for a Steam Machine 2.0. But the price is around $1,186 and I think that price is too high for a game console. As a PlayStation 5 Pro is $700. Maybe they could reach that price with a second-gen chip? Or when they introduce a new chip and this machine gets discounted.

I do think Linux-based experience for a TV based game console is still lacklustre. There are rumours that Valve integrating either Google TV/Chrome OS. And it would be nice for a game console to also be used as a media center for Netflix and others.

6. glenstein ◴[04 Apr 25 12:50 UTC] No.43581526[source]▶
I love the idea in one sense, which is that I think they're two great companies working in areas that could plausibly converge and be quite complementary. I do have to imagine there's something about their different respective business missions or business cultures, and the ethos and philosophies that inform them that might not make it work in practice. Although I definitely see a place for a framework laptop that's happy to run SteamOS.

I think perhaps that's the goal is that there's any number of companies that we feel are pretty great that are phenomenal at serving a specific vision of gaming and computing that's oriented around Linux and that are quite happy to talk to each other in effective ways and so I wouldn't necessarily say that the culmination of that should be a merger between those companies but an ecosystem that thrives with deeply compatible hardware and software.