Is SteamOS a future default for handhelds?

The reason Valve is so heavily investing in Linux is that they know that Microsoft could - in theory - flip a switch and kill their business, especially because Microsoft themselves is a competitor to Valve in the form of Xbox and Gamepass.

It's a defensive tactic, not a money-making venture.

Windows, currently, cannot handle everything Linux can. Linux also has a massive software support advantage, running on vastly more hardware and architectures than Windows does.

Linux has already been given to the masses. People use it every day in super user friendly ways; they just don't realize they're using Linux.

The only reason people use Windows is because they don't choose it. Imagine if every PC sold had a Linux option and a Windows option that cost an extra $100. What do you think people would buy?

The same hardware running Linux will easily outperform Windows (especially at the most common end user tasks like web browsing) by a long shot. In a few days NTFS turns 30 years old FFS (LOL).

Any given hardware accessory will "just work" when plugged in to a Linux PC but Windows will require a special driver that you have to go out and find on your own at the vendor's website that will be bloated AF. It'll also reinstall it if you change the USB port LOL.

I specifically phrased it "could be" as people tend to believe there are 3 preferences, Mac, Linux and Windows. Linux is not one user experience, it could work exactly like your favorite OS. In the face of SteamOS already being a viable option for the average gamer as Valve is basically strong arming it to be, on Steam Deck you're not exactly doing PC gaming any good deliberately installing Windows on it. SteamOS just works.

I also think you're very misguided in thinking it won't have any return to Valve. Microsoft has to be looking at Google Play Store and whatever the Apple Store is called with a lot of envy with how they've managed to lock the entire ecosystem under their stores. This is the end result for Windows as well and its likely anti-competetive clauses are a very bad sign for a company like Valve. Looking back I'm actually impressed just how far back Valve saw this happening. Decoupling PC gaming in its entirety from Microsoft's vendor lock-ins is in the best interest of all of the companies in the gaming industry, but it takes a rich private company like Valve to start doing the hard work for long term benefits instead of always chasing the short term profits.

Even if tomorrow Microsoft launched something that pulled ahead of SteamOS, it would still be in the gamers' best interest to stick with the open platform. With a consistent, large userbase on an open platform it will eventually eclipse anything Microsoft could ever muster.

Linux, currently, cannot handle everything Windows can unfortunately.

I mean it could, companies just don't port their software because there's not enough market share to justify it. And there's not enough market share because the software isn't there. and the software isn't there....

Valve is doing this for strategic reasons and also because they wanted to start the handheld PC market (Steam Deck). Strategic reasons: Microsoft could at any point buy several important gaming studios or distributors, distribute a lot of games (maybe exclusively) via their own store (they even announced that several years ago, but they didn't do it in the end). MS could even implement small things which make Steam perform worse on Windows, as its 100% controlled by MS. If you compete directly with Microsoft on the Windows platform, you will eventually lose because MS can do some very tiny tweaks which happen to make your product be more annoying or slower to use than Microsoft's own. That way they'll still fly under the radar for anti-competitive behavior. So Valve has to ensure that their main business model (selling/distributing games on Steam) remains future-proof, and that means more independent from Microsoft's agenda. To do this, they need to push a fully neutral, but viable alternative to Windows for gaming. Which is Linux.

I'd possibly argue a full GPU could be detrimental. Maybe best to aim for Steam Deck performance in a home console but with the potential for a GPU installation later on. Obviously being a home console would allow for a more power hungry but performamt APU. Maybe they could attain Series S performance whilst being a much more open platform.

SteamOS 2.x was based on debian, but that hasn't been updated in years. The Steam Deck launched with SteamOS 3, which is actually built on top of arch and is much more akin to Manjaro. As for your question, it's mostly the "game mode", which uses IIRC Wayland and wraps games inside gamescope which provides a bit more control in the form of controlling frame rate, resolution, etc externally, but regardless, that can and has been achieved in custom distros. I think the main appeal of SteamOS honestly is the package of an immutable OS optimized for running games on steam. It prevents non-linux users from breaking things and tries to make it feel more like a "console" with a "desktop mode" (KDE Plasma) and "app store" (ala flatpaks). I've toyed with the idea of running it or similar on my gaming PC but always run into the difficulty of Nvidia drivers on Linux.

For me it’s the fact that it just works. I don’t want to fiddle with Wine or bottles or any if that. I pick the game and launch it, never have i had to do more than that.

(which makes some sense given how successful it's been)

It really doesn't make sense, considering how small the hardware profit margins probably are, if any.

What would make sense is making the Steam-first OS open to be installed on any device.

"Works" to varying degrees. It usually needs to be tailored to the hardware.

I used that 3 windows installations ago but switched to a PowerShell script that is backed up on my friends computer that I set up.

They are way more powerful but makes less use of the power. Also way more expensive most of the time. Valve actually sells the Deck at a loss and hope to get it back on games. It's currently the best value for money.

Doesn't the ROG Ally just use Windows?

They would then also “just” need to develop and ship an x86 to arm translation layer, like Rosetta 2.

Lol there's a whole lot more to it then that. On top of needing to have proton/wine support ARM as well, which is super complex.

This would also open it up for running SteamOS VMs on Apple Silicon Macs. I was surprised how few distros actually supported arm I switched over and none of the gaming oriented ones I looked for had ARM support.

What I mean is, I thought for sure Valve would make the OS available to third parties. Maybe even work with them to get it running properly on their hardware.

Windows has terrible sleep issues (on every platform, because of shitty drivers) and has had this problem ever since S3 sleep was getting deprecated.

The Ally has shitty software but the AYANEO has a much better overlay. Asus and software just doesn't seem to go well together.

However, all of the proper features SteamOS provides rely heavily on good drivers. Power consumption and sleep issues have plagued the Deck as well, Valve just fixed them in time before most people ran into them.

Do you expect Asus to put as much effort into patching their AMD drivers if they can't even get their device to sleep properly on Linux? I'm willing to bet that if they went with SteamOS, they'd release with terrible drivers, an outdated kernel, very few kernel updates if any at all, and of course some minor modifications that will never be upstreamed to the Linux kernel.

Asus sells devices running Linux and they're not exactly known for running the latest and greatest Linux kernel. The Zenphone 9 runs on Linux 5.10 and will probably never get an update to 5.15, let alone 6.1. I can't find much about their routers, but from what I can tell they're running a version of Linux 4. They also make liberal use of proprietary modules and kernel forks, of course, making life much harder for themselves if they care about upgrading the kernel in the long time.

The Steam Deck is great mostly because Valve is working hard at making the kernel and underlying OS work right. If a vendor can't do that on Windows, they're definitely not going to pull it off on Linux.

Rog Ally is a good portable space heater.

That's good to know, I'm glad they patched Halo. Maybe I'll give it another go some time.

Last I knew playing Halo MCC in coop still requires manually syncing your ucrtbase.dll files.

I made a guide for it on reddit, I'll probably repost it here sometime.

I mean the features end users care about. You get the console interface, the button remapping, the save game sync, and even the FPS overlay. You've got a usable desktop environment through Windows (that'll also work better for most people despite Microsoft's attempts to make Windows worse) with things like eGPU support.

You probably don't get the performance sliders, but every handheld has their own little overlay bound to a special button that'll offer the same options anyway.

If you install Steam on your Linux distribution of choice because you dislike Windows, you get all the Proton tricks for free as well. You may even get the performance sliders if you're on an AMD handheld and the kernel packs the right drivers.

Of course SteamOS has a lot of features hidden from the user (A/B boot setup for seamless updates, a custom Wayland server dedicated to playing games) but those only matter to diehard Linux users.

People buying a Steam Deck just want to play video games.

Ah! Got it. Like windows, Linux, etc…

Sure. They could do that. That doesn't really address my point though. And it's really unlikely to happen on any meaningful scale, imo:

1. The market for a dedicated phone OS from one of the larger consumer electronics makers is ORDERS of magnitude larger than any kind of handheld PC gaming console. Just because Samsung did it for phones does not mean anyone will do it for handheld PCs.
2. Even if they do, there's a lot of negative sentiment about Samsung's version of Android, to the point multiple Android users I know will never buy a Samsung phone. It's not necessarily a goal to emulate.
3. Leaving all of that aside, that is still not the same thing as the maker of the device also being the developer of the OS. You're at the whims of upstream to fix a lot of major things, or you're maintaining a massive patch process on top of their releases. It's a much larger task than just "hire staff to optimize steamOS".

We already have some makers offering "steamos support" in the form of... basically a single steamos image they release once and don't steam to maintain? GPD's "GPD OS" from Dec 2022 and Anbernic's Win600 Steam OS image from Jan 2022.

And still the best way to run SteamOS on either of these devices is ChimeraOS.

The closest to what you're describing is AYANEO's ayaos. I don't know if it's a steamos fork or not, but it's their take on linux gaming OS. It's been in development for a while and we've got nothing but a few clips of it to view. And considering it mostly seems to replicate the Ayaspace windows app interface, I'm not sure it even offers any benefits over Windows+ayaspace.

I still prefer having a "native" system menu over one that's being emulated.