A PC on the go? - The Steam Deck

Valve, the company who owns the Steam store and also one of the creators of the Proton compatibility layer for linux(a huge deal for linux gamers) has recently announced their brand new handheld gaming console called the Steam Deck. Valve claims that you can run almost all of the games present on the Steam store on their new handheld.

This Nintendo-Switch-like handheld is powered by a custom APU that Valve has co-developed with AMD. They offer the Steam deck in many storage options including either a 64gb eMMC, or for faster load times, a 256 or 512 gb SSD as well. It also has USB-C which handles the external display support as well. It is good to know that the device is not locked down, as Valve has confirmed that the Steam Deck will be compatible with any USB-C dongle, though they are going to sell a first party dock for the Steam Deck as well.

Now, on the software side, the Steam deck runs SteamOS which is an Arch based LInux distribution. With their promise of the Steam Deck being able to run almost all the games on the steam store, this could mean that support for gaming on Linux is going to get even better, whether you buy the Steam Deck, or just use something like PopOS! for gaming.

They also heavily advertise that this console could turn into a PC if you wanted it to. You can even install Windows on this thing if you want to (though I would highly suggest you stick to Linux).

Though the handheld was very well received by the linux and gaming communities, Valve faced a lot of criticism regarding the name of their device as the name “Steam Deck” was sounding too close to another very popular device in the gaming community called the “Stream deck” The Stream Deck is a device made by Elgato for game streamers which allows them to control their stream without ever leaving their game. Since the Stream deck is also a popular product marketed at gamers, a lot of people believe that the name of the device could have been better.

Overall, this is an exciting product for Gamers and Linux users alike as it brings about a new era of the Gaming industry where games are not bound to a single proprietary platform any more.

( P.S. - switch to linux! 🙂 )