• @rog
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    211 months ago

    Has anyone put steamOS onto an Ally yet? I think Windows will eventually come to the party with a decent mobile version tailored towards games, but until then I cant think of anything worse than windows on such a small screen without a better interface than just joysticks and buttons.

    • Hibby
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      11 months ago

      While not the official Steam OS, which Valve still hasn’t released officially, people have thrown Arch on one to do benchmarking comparisons and there are tutorials for getting Linux on it.

      • @rog
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        111 months ago

        Huh, I didnt realise this iteration of steamOS hadn’t released. I remember tinkering with the distro they released (probably in alpha/beta) back in the day when steam machines were going to be a thing,

        • Hibby
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          411 months ago

          They switched from a Debian based OS to an Arch based immutable fork for the Deck. There are folks who have built a close version to SteamOS 3, but there would be no need if Valve would just release the official OS. I can’t imagine why they haven’t. It would only make it cheaper for other hardware manufacturers to release a product. I don’t know how much of the Ally’s price is just covering the Windows license, but it has to be a substantial percentage of the overall retail price.

            • Hibby
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              111 months ago

              Not out of the box. You don’t have sudo privileges on the SteamOS 3. Valve made an immutable fork of Arch for stability and to dissuade unskilled folks from punching stuff into the terminal that might cause customer service nightmares.

          • @rog
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            111 months ago

            I think the main selling point of the Ally is Windows though.

            There are plenty of people who are scared to touch linux, even with a nice launcher on top that does everything for you if you are happy with a vanilla experience. I personally know people, in their 30s as well, who said a while back that they would rather wait for a windows handheld for “stability”. They havent picked up an Ally though.

            • Hibby
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              11 months ago

              It’s an immutable filesystem fork of Arch, not vanilla Arch. It’s as stable as any operating system is, doesn’t update in the same way Arch does, and doesn’t even allow the user sudo privilege. Also, you don’t even need to interface with Linux. The front end is extremely intuitive, but you also have the option of a pretty great KDE Plasma desktop mode if you switch over. Fortunately, it has no Candy Crush, Teams, or Cortana in the Start Menu.