Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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I specifically phrased it "could be" as people tend to believe there are 3 preferences, Mac, Linux and Windows. Linux is not one user experience, it could work exactly like your favorite OS. In the face of SteamOS already being a viable option for the average gamer as Valve is basically strong arming it to be, on Steam Deck you're not exactly doing PC gaming any good deliberately installing Windows on it. SteamOS just works.
I also think you're very misguided in thinking it won't have any return to Valve. Microsoft has to be looking at Google Play Store and whatever the Apple Store is called with a lot of envy with how they've managed to lock the entire ecosystem under their stores. This is the end result for Windows as well and its likely anti-competetive clauses are a very bad sign for a company like Valve. Looking back I'm actually impressed just how far back Valve saw this happening. Decoupling PC gaming in its entirety from Microsoft's vendor lock-ins is in the best interest of all of the companies in the gaming industry, but it takes a rich private company like Valve to start doing the hard work for long term benefits instead of always chasing the short term profits.
Even if tomorrow Microsoft launched something that pulled ahead of SteamOS, it would still be in the gamers' best interest to stick with the open platform. With a consistent, large userbase on an open platform it will eventually eclipse anything Microsoft could ever muster.