Cool? I mean, it changes nothing. Whether you run the ARM handhelds on Android or barebones Linux and the X64 handhelds on Windows or Linux the results are the same. Bazzite, JelOS, Windows, Android, whatever. Go nuts.

Heat is still heat and batteries are still batteries, though.

Well, yeah, I get that, but honestly, if you can't get what you want on that front from a GPD Win 4, an Ayaneo Air S1 or Flip... well, then what you want is better Windows on ARM support. These are still laptop chips we're cramming into handhelds, it's not a matter of size vs performance at that point. There's a reason the Steam Deck is that size.

Honestly, at that point I'd try streaming, which those smaller ARM devices will do just fine. But even that I don't think is worth it. That's mobile hardware territory.

19.5 on the thermostat, which I'm not sure is accurate. In my opinion comfortable indoor clothes include a sweater or a hoodie, so 26C isn't just wasteful, it's very uncomfortable.

To be clear, I'm not advocating to enforcing a minimum spec. I'm saying that there isn't a need to add a performance rating to a SteamOS certification or to the SteamOS compatibility badges because if they're all based on Steam Deck performance they will be valid for all the other certified devices by default. At least until a Deck 2 is released.

I love small handhelds. The Retroid Pocket Mini is great (shame about the bad scaling on the screen). But those are typically Android handhelds for a reason. I don't think a PC handheld in that form factor is worth it. You can just run Linux on ARM and get the form factor without the whole thing running like a hot potato for 15 minutes before it dies. There's a lot of native ports of small PC indie games in that space and ongoing work for per-game port support, too.

Now, all that could change if the upcoming mobile chips we get are great at running at very low wattages and somehow get amazing power management options on the software side out of nowhere. But... I just don't think that's a priority for anybody specifically because ARM chips already have a well established ecosystem to give you basically what you want without having to tie the X64 platform in knots for the sake of running this over Steam instead of Android.

Oh, no, I'm talking about Windows native handhelds, which may be getting SteamOS support in the future, as per the original post.

I think a lot of people (reviewers included, weirdly) assume that you need to navigate those with a mouse replacement every time, so you get a lot of complaints about how bad using Windows without a mouse is compared to Steam OS on Game Mode. But you can absolutely set up Steam to a) autolaunch on boot, and b) launch straight into Big Picture mode. At that point once you unlock your Windows handheld you're straight in the Steam fullscreen mode interface and can do everything (within Steam) with a controller.

Not that I think tapping the Steam icon to manually open it up is that much of a hassle, anyway.

I do have a Deck, but they never made good on their early promises to make it easy to use with Windows. Which they did make, I remember. But nope, if you have a Deck you should probably stick to Steam OS. Valve should just find a better way to integrate third party launchers.

I guess it depends on what you're using? I'm on Fedia and this is very readable. Good indenting and color coding and stuff. Some real 90s forum energy to it.

The thing is, I play a ton of retro games, but I mostly mediate that through RetroAchievements. Since they keep adding new games and have leaderboards and so on it's a great way to have something to follow to help you prioritize your time, instead of standing in front of a wall of boxes paralyzed between replaying Sonic 2 or trying some obscure thing you got seven times in bundles.

But I still love having original hardware in working order plugged into a CRT. It's just almost an archeological pursuit. A shrine to what all these repurposed games I play on modern hardware used to actually look like. And it's fun to fiddle with them for maintenance.

It really isn't mandatory. I applaud the walking away. My day is average to decent, honestly.

And no, you're making excuses. This isn't Twitter, it's well threaded. I expect you to understand what you're replying to. Especially if you butt in two posts from the start of the thread.

You won't be shocked, though, because like I just told you there is already a couple of those and they didn't do well, only to be replaced by 7800U variants in the same form factor (plus a tad of battery chonk, perhaps). This is not a hypothetical.

Seriously, man, just read what people are telling you. If somebody is threatening to tase you unless you're immediately contrarian irrespective of the information being presented to you blink twice and we'll send someone.

I swear, online contrarians don't even bother to read what they respond to now.

GOG comes into play because you're arguing about the necessity of Steam offering third party store support in SteamOS game mode. Welcome back to the conversation you're actually having.

To put this in perspective, it fell by 0.48%

Windows 10 grew by 0.89%

Linux actually dropped by 0.26% in that same period.

Not that I'd be too concerned about any of that, because that's all data from reported OS in website visits, so all those are well within the margin of error.

Would it?

The GPD Win 4 is roughly the size of a thick PSVita and that ran on a 6800U as well and they released newer ones all the way up to 8800U without increasing the size. Ditto for the Ayaneo Flip, which is still chunky but it's clamshell, so I guess you could cargo pants it.

Ayaneo also makes the Air, which is supposed to be exactly that, and I think there is a model that targets a smaller APU and is super thin, but the next in line already jumps to the 7840U and is comparable to the Deck. I have to imagine that even small PC handhelds will match that performance going forward.

There are pocketable handhelds out there, but they're generally Android-based, which makes a lot more sense. I think for PC we'll see people trying to hit this level of performance in a compact form factor, but I'd be shocked if people tried to go back to sub-6800 performance on PC on new devices.

Again, the point of the Deck is standardized performance, and it quickly became exactly that. Things will get messier once the Deck is replaced by a higher spec, but in the meantime, if it's certified for baseline Deck you're either probably fine or in such a tiny niche (you own 5840u version of the AyaNeo Air? Who are you) that you probably know what you can do with it.

Not true. Or very incomplete, at least. By the newest reports the market is 49% mobile, 28% console and 23% PC, but that's by revenue, not player counts.

See, if you wanted to torture stats to shoo me away, you should have gone by the market share of GOG, which is quite small. Technically by the numbers they'd be smarter to prioritize getting Roblox and Fortnite working first.

Fiddling with things and actually using things are entirely independent hobbies.

As any midde age nerd who briefly got into restoring retro gaming hardware will tell you. Not that I would know anything about that.

Yeah, there are a bunch of alternatives. I don't even think it's as much of a problem on Desktop Linux, where having Steam and Heroic/Lutris going at the same time isn't a big deal.

But all the hoops to integrate other launchers inside Steam Game Mode and the friction in trying to use them reliably in that environment are just not mainstream viable or functional. As long as that works the way it currently does I'll default my handleds to autobooting into Windows Big Picture instead.

Which, by the way, is totally a thing you can do. People always act like there's a much bigger gap than there actually is between those two options. You mostly only lose the well integrated display and power controls, which may be a bigger or smaller deal depending on what your Windows handheld uses instead.

It's 100% true of all Windows handhelds released after the OG Steam Deck, yes. This is not because the Deck is bad, it's because they all are running the same two or three APUs, all built on the same AMD architecture. If it came after the Deck, it's a 6800U with a 780M or slightly better than that, and no new handhelds going forward will launch with anything significantly worse than that.

So beyond retroactive support for first-gen AyaNeo or GPD handhelds that are older than the Deck, I don't think this is a major concern. And if you're on one of those, which were incredibly expensive at launch compared to the Deck, I think you should be pretty well used to underwhelming performance by the time SteamOS verifies them, if ever.

It's really not a realistic scenario. Our floor for performance is well established and this is coming so far down the line that we shouldn't expect to return to it at this point.

"Gamers are used to fiddling"?

No. Gamers are largely playing on Switch. And PS5, sometimes.

The residual amount of people playing on PC are annoyed by fiddling, with very rare exceptions.

Hell, I fiddle. I've been known to fiddle in my day. And I'm here complaining about the fiddling. I'm a representative of extreme tolerance to fiddling and I'm annoyed.

This is cool, more options are better.

It does, however, make me REALLY want Valve to add official third party library support. I have thousands of games on GOG and hundreds on Epic. I don't need them to officially support all of them, but at least I need a better approach to integrating them than fiddling with Heroic or Lutris in desktop mode.

I don't think that's feasible. The current set of handhelds have the OG Deck at the bottom end of the performance tier anyway, that'll only become relevant if and when a Deck 2 releases, and at that point it will be the same problem to solve with or without third party hardware.

Free to play games do take your money, though. Especially Destiny 2, which is a free to play game that happens to cost about sixty bucks a year. And Rust did offer a refund to users, but not because Valve made them do it (my understanding is they had to actually negotiate with Valve how that would even work). They issued a refund because they announced a native Linux client and then backed out of that promise.

So yeah, no, I don't see what reasonable expectation for refunds there is, I don't see Valve having ever mentioned that Steam Deck compatibility being rolled back or removed would be grounds for a refund (at least outside their time limited no-cause refund policy) or that the reaction to compatibility changes with Proton or Linux would be any different across Epic, GOG or Valve at this point. Things may change if the Deck platform gets a lot bigger in the future and Valve decide to push for it as a closed environment, but that's not where we are.

To your question, the other big game that comes to mind having done the same thing as Apex would be GTA V, which to my knowledge is still listed as "Unsupported" due to adding anticheat, despite initially working on Deck. And I guess you could count the FIFA franchise if you see it as a single game, because I think there was at least one of them supported on Deck before they rolled out Anticheat and all the newer ones have not been supported.

So it's definitely not a one-off thing, and there has been no action from Valve.