PC gaming 2022

tbqh I am borderline considering making the Steam Deck or RPi 5 my next rig. Gamer version of eating the bug, living in the pod.

@natsock I'm really hoping Valve doesn't give up on the Steam Deck prematurely, it's the only hardware thing I'm excited for and I hope it spares me from building a dedicated gaymen rig. At least the Steam Deck fills a niche while nobody really wanted steam machines, steam controllers, or steam links. The Steam Link was an especially awful idea and nobody who knows what "network latency" means would want to stream a game from their computer

@tengumatingpress I think everything you mentioned is a great product and I use Steam Link all the time (I configure it correctly). The reason Valve’s hardware tends to fail is that they don’t behave like a hardware maker. Note how differently Valve treats their hardware compared to a console 1st party. The only exception has been their VR systems, and incidentally those have done comparatively well.

All this being said, rumors say that Valve considers the Deck their flagship product. Besides developing a new OS for it, I’m not sure what that means to them. Hopefully they make a lot of apps and cool shit to exploit its portability.

@natsock As far as I can tell the "new OS" is just a Linux distribution optimized for launching Steam, which is good because it should be usable as a real computer. Very pleased to hear that Valve genuinely views this as a top priority project, though

@tengumatingpress Yes the Deck is "just a PC" and you can alt-tab out of Steam to the desktop. Although it's a Linux distro, it's more than just a ultimate gaymer Arch setup; they're throwing serious code into it.

@natsock @tengumatingpress
> You can alt tab out of steam

Do you have any source, that is talking about this in detail?
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills...

@LukeAlmighty @tengumatingpress
I'm hyped too.
From an IGN article written in collaboration with Valve:
>This flexibility means you can do pretty much anything on the Steam Deck that you can do with a regular PC. Connect a mouse and keyboard? Yep. Alt-Tab out of your games to a browser or video? Sure. Load third-party programs or even other game stores like Origin, uPlay, or Epic Games Store? No problem. You could even wipe Steam OS entirely and install a fresh version of Windows if you want – but the default Steam OS is smooth and efficient at getting you into your games, so I imagine most people won’t want or need to go that far. The point is, you can if you’d like to.
https://www.ign.com/articles/steam-deck-hands-on-impressions-details-valve-handheld-gaming-pc