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From the FAQ [0]: - What OS is Steam Deck running? SteamOS 3.0, a new version of SteamOS based on Arch Linux. - Will people be able to install Windows, or ot
by css 5y ago
From the FAQ [0]:
- What OS is Steam Deck running?
SteamOS 3.0, a new version of SteamOS based on Arch Linux.
- Will people be able to install Windows, or other 3rd party content?
Yes. Steam Deck is a PC, and players will be able to install whatever they like, including other OSes.
[0]: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/faq https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/faq
- modeless 5y agoThat is a great link. Perhaps even more interesting is this: Valve is working with anti-cheat vendors for Linux (Proton) support. So one of the biggest remaining obstacles to Linux gaming may soon be addressed as a side effect of this.
- dkdbejwi383 5y agoI hope they put some effort into anticheat on Linux for their own games. Team Fortress 2 has been barely playable for the past year because of cheaters running bots using widely available software which Valve seemingly can’t detect on Linux.
- CreepGin 5y agoWith YOLOv4-based aimbots on the rise, it's really a losing battle even for the most anticheat infused games.
- episteme 5y agoNot sure what the connection is between YOLOv4 and difficulty of detection? Isn't YOLOv4 about object detection? No matter how good your object detection is, you need to read the game and influence the input which is the part an anticheat is trying to detect, no?
- sudosysgen 5y agoThere is no way to defeat an aimbot that just reads the screen, detects enemies, and moves a mouse.
- majormajor 5y agoThere are probably plenty of ways to tell "fake controller input from a bot" from "actual human controller input" today. Sounds like a scary arms-race, though. At some point the bots will probably be very hard to distinguish from "skilled human." It will be sad if online play becomes only enjoyable with people you already know. I'm surprised how gleeful some people seem to be about this sort of "soon cheating will be undectable!" tech advancement. Or you just go all-in on the surveillance path and there are models that look at your performance in the game over time, your performance in other games over time, etc. Mediocre player suddenly amazing? Probably a cheater! etc... Not great sounding privacy-wise, but Steam probably has access to the data to do this.
- the8472 5y ago> Sounds like a scary arms-race Or a GAN
- sudosysgen 5y agoAlso, there is enough variance amongst human that eventually the generator network can actually slip under the noise floor and become 100% undetectable.
- greenknight 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc They are using deep learning to detect hackers, since 2018
- mhh__ 5y agoAnd it's not working too well.
- bobsmooth 5y agoI had never considered an ML-based aimbot until now. That's both amusing and infuriating.
- azinman2 5y agoNon-gamer here: what’s the point of these bots? Is there money as stake? Or just a leader chart? But if you get your bot to #1, but you’re not able to do anything with it and it’s a bot, what’s the incentive?
- neaden 5y agoFor some people, causing frustration and annoyance in others is all the incentive they need. But in this case also, possibly hats.
- TchoBeer 5y agoSome men just want to watch the world burn
- KillahBhyte 5y agoDepends a lot on the game. If there is nothing to be 'earned' by being competitively better then it is nothing more than street cred. Think simple games or older games. CS 1.6 before rewards, knifes, and skins. A small few players might make some comp scene to get to some incentive but most are ultimately found out. The bigger issue, and I believe the primary reason for the rise in popularity of these bots, is when your performance does 'earn' you something. As the OP was speaking of TF2, this comes in the form of hats and custom weapons. Today's counterstrike game has weapon skins and knifes that go for pretty extreme real world dollars. Almost every modern shooter has some sort of rank up system tied to rewards. Some of the worst examples would be PUBG's real world money trading of loot box items or Diablo 3's real world money auction house. In my mind, these kind of systems turn video games meant for enjoyment into some weird NFT mining system where normal players are manually mining them with pen and paper while the bots have built ASIC devices. In cases where the items themselves cannot be sold, you have people selling the whole accounts. There are entire middlemen businesses set up around this stuff. It's crazy but there is your primary driver for incentive.
- alliao 5y agoChina and it's 50k USD cap per capita restriction (probably lower and harder still now) practically become in infinite demand side pressure for these too. They can buy players /cheat to farm, then sell the virtual goods over to those with USD; with healthy discount as profit for the other end. Thereby transfering their asset out of China.
- CodesInChaos 5y agoI expect the anti-cheats to require an unmodified SteamOS. Though the FAQ says the following, so it might not be quite as bad as I feared: > We recommend using user-space anti-cheat components for best results, as they can typically run in the Wine environment and provide the same level of functionality. Kernel-space solutions are not currently supported and are not recommended.
- p1necone 5y agoIt's just a pc, you can install any OS you want on it, if anti cheat already works on that OS then it will also work on the Steam Deck.
- ziml77 5y agoI really hope this happens for all current anti-cheat software. With Windows 11 coming, I was looking into the state of gaming on Linux and anti-cheat seems to be one of the main blockers right now.
- Teknoman117 5y agoIt's really discouraging honestly. Wine/Proton finally gets to the point that nearly everything works and now all of the anticheat systems move to injecting kernel mode drivers.
- Siira 5y agoAnti-cheat is not exactly consumer-friendly. They should design their games such that the client is not trusted, and then the only possible cheats would be UI/AI assistants to the human players, which is not really cheating.
- episteme 5y agoHow would you apply those rules to say, chess? Games should be computers against computers or they are badly designed? That's quite a lot the biggest games of all time that you consider badly designed.
- majormajor 5y agoAn "assistant" that generates input to move your player in a sports game, or aims for you in a shooter, is absolutely cheating. You can't make the client untrusted to the point of "I don't trust that the human really pushed the button" or you don't have a useful multiplayer mode anymore. Cheaters are truly ruining everything, here.
- mulmen 5y agoYou are right of course. Like so many seemingly intractable moderation problems maybe this is why we shouldn't scale to infinity. YouTube is literally too big to moderate. Maybe this is a feature of humanity. What's wrong with more, smaller communities that have a dang to keep everyone in line? Other than the unfortunate lack of dangs in the world. Back in my day CS servers were mostly privately run. If you were caught cheating you got banned. If you appeared to be cheating (you were too good) you also got banned. From the perspective of the players on the server those are the same thing. Communities formed on servers with similar skill levels and recognized players. Cheating in that kind of environment becomes extremely risky from a social perspective. You could piss off your actual friends. There wasn't a need for rank-based matchmaking or anti-cheat or anything like that, you just eventually found a place you fit in and could have fun. Valve tried to replace that with algorithms but maybe they should "crowd source" so to speak, like we did 20 years ago. This is all a lot of words to say that there is a "right size" for a community to form and enable everyone to have a good time. When you get to the point that "technology can't help us" I think that's an indicator that your community is too big.
- entropy1111 5y agoHere are a few good videos about the subject and Linux gaming. I don't know anything in article format or I would have linked that instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8apCPN56PU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8apCPN56PU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B35XhcmBDDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B35XhcmBDDI https://www.youtube.com/c/Collabora/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/Collabora/videos
- exit 5y agodo you think anti-cheating is ultimately solvable? it seems likely to me that eventually bots just take in a video stream, running on an otherwise separate device. what happens to gaming then?
- mikenew 5y agoNot eventually: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-computer-vision-auto-aim-that-works-on-any-game/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-...
- darkwater 5y agoI'm totally out of the game scene nowadays and I don't understand how anticheat software should be installed locally. How does it work? I thought it was done on the server level.
- whatshisface 5y agoOn Windows, anticheat runs as root and scans processes like an antivirus would. As is par for the course with DRM/License management/anticheat systems it is more about making a token effort to increase the difficulty of the most primitive attacks than it is about actually stopping anything.
- SpaceNugget 5y agoIt's gone way past that. Some anticheat software runs in the kernel now. They are doing crazy things like looking for PCIe devices trying to DMA game memory. https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech/blob/master/readme.md#hardware https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech/blob/master/readme.md#har...
- opheliate 5y agoI find it really difficult to see the value proposition for anti-cheat companies in spending time developing that functionality. Is it really worth spending dev hours on catching what I imagine is a tiny population of people, who you already know are prepared to use hardware modifications to circumvent anticheat? Or is it just a good marketing point?
- rasz 5y agoApparently its cheaper than cost of infrastructure that would allow properly implementing server side checks, like validating if the player supplied entity data is within possible parameter limits aka why the fuck is this dude flying all over the map and server letting him do that?!?!?!
- 5y ago
- matheusmoreira 5y agoGod I hope not. I don't want invasive proprietary kernel modules screwing up my system.
- Rd6n6 5y agoPersonally, I don’t really want some invasive anti cheat running on my Linux system that I probably will not know about
- minimaxir 5y agoValve engineers explicitly frame the Steam Deck as a PC with an integrated controller rather than a game console: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLtiRGTZvGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLtiRGTZvGM
- css 5y agoYeah, this is an awesome change of pace for an industry that notoriously locks down its hardware.
- novok 5y agoSteam is the platform for games on non locked computers
- moron4hire 5y agoYeah, they're more focused on screwing the content creators rather than the consumers.
- spiraling_shape 5y agoSteam is the only place I ever actually pay for software. They earned my trust where so many others have lost it.
- serf 5y agoI pay for software on Steam, too -- but it makes me incredibly nervous consolidating lots of purchased goods with a single walled-garden vendor who holds the keys ; and they never really earned my trust, they're just the only game in town for most titles now. The internet is filled with stories about locked accounts, lost libraries, games being pulled out of the library due to 'low quality of gameplay' while people are actively playing them on Steam, DLC and in-game currency sold that can never be redeemed or used in the game it's bought for (see: 'Wizardry Online' debacle, Steam/Valve continued selling in-game currency far beyond the point that it was being discussed to remove the game from the library all together.. then removed access from the game for Steam users after making a tidy profit. This was a current/active/new game with a bad launch, not an old title.) So just to re-state: Valve never won my trust with their behavior with Steam and associated acts. There is just no one else; let's call this phenomenon 'Walmart Syndrome', perhaps?
- flatiron 5y agothey really missed out on saying (btw it runs Arch) or somin to play to that meme
- gremlinsinc 5y agoAt this point, i can't tell if I'm an arch user because of that meme, or if that meme is true because I'm an arch user...either way as an Arch user, I must make you aware of this fact whenever linux operating systems are brought up (I think it's even in the EULA). This has been a PSA.
- jchw 5y agoI’m super excited to see that they’ve chosen Arch as a base for SteamOS. I understand fully why they originally chose Ubuntu, but I feel like Arch actually hits a lot of sweet spots for consumer use cases and could be adapted for such use quite effectively. (To be fair, I feel similarly about Gentoo, which was similarly adapted for ChromeOS quite successfully.)
- gremlinsinc 5y agoI'm required as an Arch user to also reply and say I'm an arch user, and approve this message.
- peakaboo 5y agoI use Arch btw
- furgooswft13 5y agohello fellow Arch user. I too approve of this message and sudo pacman -Syu without fear.
- encryptluks2 5y agoMe too... don't forget the Btrfs snapshots.
- lscotte 5y agoZFS here.
- vlowther 5y agoSame, except just yay.
- luke2m 5y agoroses are red, violets are blue sudo pacman -Syu there is nothing to do
- JeremyNT 5y agoThis is an amazing bit of kit for the price, and it's just a normal PC running Arch Linux! I hardly ever even play video games these days, but I'm absolutely buying one of these just to have a nice little portable PC.
- linspace 5y agoI have both Steam on a PC (Windows) and a Nintendo Switch and I mostly use the Switch for gaming for the convenience, although it sucks to see the price difference on so many titles. So, great news!
- moooo99 5y ago> although it sucks to see the price difference on so many titles Thats what I always think when considering a new Switch game as well. They're so incredibly expensive, Breath of the wild is still 50€ although it was released 4 years ago. Having a handheld device with all my Steam titles playable is huge!
- uncoder0 5y agoIf you want to see something heinous look at Skyrim's price. 10 years old... $60...
- 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 5y agoYeah I can imagine this being super nice to have even just lying around at home to connect to as a remote development environment or better: Plug it into the TV like a switch and have a powerful PC that fits behind the TV. At least for me it's super convenient since I wanted to play old games on emulator anyways (but not on a underspecces raspberry)
- yellowapple 5y ago> Plug it into the TV like a switch Speaking of: I wonder if it'll work with a Switch dock? Probably would require some physical modification of the dock itself, but it'd still be neat if they're interchangeable and I can stick either one into any dock.
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoGoddamn, take my money
- dm319 5y agoThe video looked like it was running KDE.
- Nullabillity 5y agoFrom the specs page[0]: > Desktop: KDE Plasma [0]: https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech
- alanwreath 5y ago`Steam Deck is a PC, and players will be able to install whatever they like, including other OSes.` this is probably this most exciting thing about this release. How many days until this thing is running k3s and/or serving up a prometheus dashboard on the same device that is touch capable?
- jcastro 5y agoFinally, someone thinking outside the box! :D
- yellowapple 5y agoOr, more accurately, thinking inside of many tiny boxen.
- rasz 5y agoThe only exciting thing is the form factor. Spec wise its an underperforming laptop with integrated graphics delivering below 8 year old GTX 760 level of "performance". 1280 x 800 at up to 30 fps.
- ChuckNorris89 5y agoThe Nintendo switch has the same screen resolution and way worse specs and sold like crazy.
- risyachka 5y agoIts because when it comes to gaming consoles hardware doesn’t matter. Only games do. Nintendo has proven this over and over. You can add rtx it still won’t sell unless there are some great titles that run like native (usually this means custom ports because ui and other elements in 99% of games are not created with small screens in mind and usually are not usable at all)
- Ericson2314 5y ago
- ghostly_s 5y agoIsnt using Windows on this thing going to be an awful experience, though?
- deadbunny 5y agoThat's the beauty of a device that respects the fact that it is indeed your hardware. It'll allow you to shoot yourself in the foot however you like.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- matheusmoreira 5y agoThis is absolutely awesome!
- l0b0 5y agoArch Linux is amazing. The biggest surprise for me was that it's more stable than so-called stable distros, probably because the various packages don't end up drifting several months from each other when keeping up to date. Hopefully this eventually results in more user friendly Arch Linux installers. The learning curve is an absolute wall when installing, even after several years on Linux, but after that it's pretty standard. Based on this trajectory I expect they'll be migrating to NixOS (or maybe Nix on Arch) in about 5-10 years.
- christophilus 5y agoI share your feelings about Arch, but I'm still running Fedora mostly out of laziness. Still, I think Arch is an interesting choice for a console. I'd think you'd want stability (in the sense of very controlled changes / not requiring updates every day).
- gchamonlive 5y agoIf you are conservative and thorough in your update routine, arch can be very stable.
- awill 5y agoAgreed. I've used Arch for about 12 years. My system has been unbootable after an update maybe 3 times. That's not bad really, and that's just applying updates daily. Any additional rigour should improve this a lot.
- gchamonlive 5y agoI myself had a couple of bricks when messing with grub. Nothing that a live boot and a mkinitcpio didn't solve.
- Jnr 5y agoMy guess is that Valve will keep their own mirrors and update from upstream only once their relevant packages will be tested for compatibility. I have been using Archlinux for more than 10 years and from time to time some major upgrades can make things broken for a couple days until all the packages get updated and all the relevant compatibility fixes have been pushed upstream by the developers. But in most cases this happens with some 3rd party desktop related packages or closed source drivers. I bet that Valve won't have that many problems with AMD since their drivers are open source.
- ineedasername 5y agoThanks! This was the #1 thing I was looking for and didn't see while scrolling through all their marketing material.
- m-p-3 5y agoI hope we'll see other cloud gaming platforms make their services available through it.
- willjp 5y agoThis is so exciting. 1st tier support!
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agoWe’re working with BattlEye and EAC to get support for Proton ahead of launch. Does this mean all steam users will get this now that they have hardware to get support of? IMO this would be huge
- Abishek_Muthian 5y ago> 7" Display | AMD Zen 2 | 16GB Memory | microSD > Arch Linux > KDE Plasma > Will be able to install whatever they like Is that you smartphone? The one I've been waiting for?
- BatteryMountain 5y agoIt will fill the void that was left by the Nokia N900. Still miss that thing's slide out keyboard.. soft rubber buttons.
- shaan7 5y agoYes! Still keeping the dreams alive that one day we will have something like that again. #shutupandtakemymoney
- nullsmack 5y agoLook into the PinePhone, it runs Linux and there are several distros. You can open the back of the phone and even swap it out with other backs that add functionality. They're working on a keyboard that looks a lot like the old Psion Series 5 keyboard. It replaces the back of the phone and turns it into a clamshell style device.
- Abishek_Muthian 5y agoN900 is legendary when it comes to utility, It's also when the smartphone manufacturers realized that providing utility doesn't result in profit as compared to black box bricks with just biannual camera upgrades for that selfie. I'm sure there will be keyboard cases for the steam deck, We still might have to carry round a GSM radio module if we want that LTE/call/SMS.
- Koiwai 5y agoI remember it has plastic buttons, not soft rubber.
- IQunder130 5y agoWhy would you want to install windows on something that doesn't come bundled with it or needs it for work?