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> There is nothing special about the Steam Deck. It's just another Linux machine. That's not true. It's a read-only linux on a fixed hardware platform, which i

> There is nothing special about the Steam Deck. It's just another Linux machine. That's not true. It's a read-only linux on a fixed hardware platform, which is a vaaastly different beast than the myriad of hardware/software combinations that exist out there in the wild.

zamalek 4y ago
> It's a read-only linux on a fixed hardware platform I have heard that argument about macOS a lot, and this is nothing like that. There isn't some "special sauce er... Source" that they apply to their platform. It's just GPL Linux. They may have avoided bad decisions like relying on NVIDIA for Linux gaming, but that's hardly the level of ownership that you see with other vertical integrations. If I use an AMD CPU (or Intel, which would be arguably better) and AMD GPU, there is no reason why my PC couldn't be just as "first-party" as the Steam Deck. Wine/Proton ultimately access the GPU through DRM, that remains the same for Valve hardware or custom-built hardware. Both Steam and Wine/Proton currently render via X11 (via XWayland if necessary), on both my PC and the Steam Deck. I feel like there is a gap of understanding how a HAL works here.
- admax88qqq 4y ago
  I feel like there is a gap in understanding of how commercial software deployment goes. When you have a platform like Steam Deck, it's the platform that gets tested by QA, and the platform that most of your devs are building for every day.
- mariusor 4y ago
  Sure, a linux machine is made out of just a CPU and a GPU. Even if that would be the case, what about the software combinations that can exist and that the SteamDeck simplifies? In the gamedev world I heard a lot of people not wanting to support linux because they never know which glibc version to support, which mesa version to support, which hardware GPUs to support, which graphical API to support, etc. Cutting down that matrix (and I just mentioned the most egregious examples) to only one element is invaluable in ensuring your users have a bug free experience.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > It's just GPL Linux. "Just" GPL Linux encompasses myriad library versions, kernel versions, driver versions and varied hardware. > I feel like there is a gap of understanding how a HAL works here. Just because you have a HAL doesn't mean that you don't get different behavior and crashes with different numbers of CPUs/concurrency or other hardware beneath. Modern GPUs are also pretty complicated beasts, and assuming that's fully abstracted is a mistake. And this all leaves aside the myriad of other problems you can have with the ensemble of software running on the machine that interacts with the game (directly or indirectly). Being able to test and make one restricted platform work well is a far different beast than covering the huge mass of variation users create on their own machines.

zamalek 4y ago

> It's a read-only linux on a fixed hardware platform I have heard that argument about macOS a lot, and this is nothing like that. There isn't some "special sauce er... Source" that they apply to their platform. It's just GPL Linux. They may have avoided bad decisions like relying on NVIDIA for Linux gaming, but that's hardly the level of ownership that you see with other vertical integrations. If I use an AMD CPU (or Intel, which would be arguably better) and AMD GPU, there is no reason why my PC couldn't be just as "first-party" as the Steam Deck. Wine/Proton ultimately access the GPU through DRM, that remains the same for Valve hardware or custom-built hardware. Both Steam and Wine/Proton currently render via X11 (via XWayland if necessary), on both my PC and the Steam Deck. I feel like there is a gap of understanding how a HAL works here.

admax88qqq 4y ago
I feel like there is a gap in understanding of how commercial software deployment goes. When you have a platform like Steam Deck, it's the platform that gets tested by QA, and the platform that most of your devs are building for every day.
mariusor 4y ago
Sure, a linux machine is made out of just a CPU and a GPU. Even if that would be the case, what about the software combinations that can exist and that the SteamDeck simplifies? In the gamedev world I heard a lot of people not wanting to support linux because they never know which glibc version to support, which mesa version to support, which hardware GPUs to support, which graphical API to support, etc. Cutting down that matrix (and I just mentioned the most egregious examples) to only one element is invaluable in ensuring your users have a bug free experience.
mlyle 4y ago
> It's just GPL Linux. "Just" GPL Linux encompasses myriad library versions, kernel versions, driver versions and varied hardware. > I feel like there is a gap of understanding how a HAL works here. Just because you have a HAL doesn't mean that you don't get different behavior and crashes with different numbers of CPUs/concurrency or other hardware beneath. Modern GPUs are also pretty complicated beasts, and assuming that's fully abstracted is a mistake. And this all leaves aside the myriad of other problems you can have with the ensemble of software running on the machine that interacts with the game (directly or indirectly). Being able to test and make one restricted platform work well is a far different beast than covering the huge mass of variation users create on their own machines.