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Honestly I hate to say it but I think the Switch was actually the big advance. It does not run PC games but it does run a fairly standard OS ( I believe a flavo

Honestly I hate to say it but I think the Switch was actually the big advance. It does not run PC games but it does run a fairly standard OS ( I believe a flavor of android ) and the old Nvidia processor from the Shield. I guess what I am saying is it is sort of like the Steam Deck but based on a tablet instead - and can pretty easily be hacked into a tablet instead. The Steam Deck is much more locked down but they MUST have been hugely inspired by the success of the Switch when making the Steam Deck. Personally I think I am excited for when we might get something a bit more of a hybrid of the two - if ARM does indeed take off on Windows and Linux more then we may end up with a device that can sometimes take a full ARM stack with all of its power advantages and then also run standard older OS processes as well.

monocasa 4y ago
> It does not run PC games but it does run a fairly standard OS ( I believe a flavor of android ) No, it's a totally custom OS. Custom kernel, custom user space. They run the BSD network stack off on the side, but so did Windows up until Vista.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Got it. But the hardware is still tablet hardware so its perfectly hackable into Android mode. Not the same as the Steam Deck at all but I think my point still sort of works
  - ranger207 4y ago
    AIUI only old hardware where Nintendo forgot to burn some bootloader fuses are hackable. Newer ones are not
    - piperswe 4y ago
      Those are the only ones that are softmoddable, but there are modchips for newer ones.
      - monocasa 4y ago
        Following that, just about every game console of the past 25 years has been able to be hardware modded to run Linux. The switch isn't special here.
    - jerf 4y ago
      Yes. Nintendo intended it to be 100% fully locked down. They made a trivial mistake in the early versions, since corrected. But they absolutely do not intend for you to run anything other than their exact stuff on it. It could not hardly be more closed down and proprietary.
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wbear 4y ago
This Steam Deck is much less locked down. It's an x86 PC.

monocasa 4y ago

> It does not run PC games but it does run a fairly standard OS ( I believe a flavor of android ) No, it's a totally custom OS. Custom kernel, custom user space. They run the BSD network stack off on the side, but so did Windows up until Vista.

Melatonic 4y ago
Got it. But the hardware is still tablet hardware so its perfectly hackable into Android mode. Not the same as the Steam Deck at all but I think my point still sort of works
- ranger207 4y ago
  AIUI only old hardware where Nintendo forgot to burn some bootloader fuses are hackable. Newer ones are not
  - piperswe 4y ago
    Those are the only ones that are softmoddable, but there are modchips for newer ones.
    - monocasa 4y ago
      Following that, just about every game console of the past 25 years has been able to be hardware modded to run Linux. The switch isn't special here.
  - jerf 4y ago
    Yes. Nintendo intended it to be 100% fully locked down. They made a trivial mistake in the early versions, since corrected. But they absolutely do not intend for you to run anything other than their exact stuff on it. It could not hardly be more closed down and proprietary.

deleted 4y ago

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wbear 4y ago

This Steam Deck is much less locked down. It's an x86 PC.