Originally posted by Balderick:

It will be interesting to see how well Psychonauts 2 performs on Steam Deck running through SteamOS 3.0/Proton in comparison to Xbox X/S

Well for the case for Psychonauts 2, the game is planned to come to Linux and Mac natively later this year.

Originally posted by Balderick:

I just see subscribing to cloud gaming services as an alternative to upgrading the hardware on local pc - especially with what we hav seen with availability and price of gaming GPUs in this last year or two.

Have to admit buying a current gen console has never been so appealing too, especially when considering the OG Steam Machines were supposed to be console killers.

I found Shield TV and cloud gaming made it a pc killer - removing the need to own a high end gaming spec PC

Having used Stadia and GeForce Now, I can say cloud streaming is cool tech but its far from perfect. Both have very noticeable video compression artifacting (especially during lag spikes) and split second to multi second lag spikes due to Internet bandwidth and connection reliability fluctuations can cause massive input lag. This is even worse over Wifi networks. When my internet is working perfectly, it can be a somewhat satisfactory and maybe not see a lag spike for several minutes at a time. However, it's nothing I would consider great or as good as playing locally. When things aren't working well, it can be completely unusable garbled slideshow lol.

I suppose if you have a rock-solid fiber connection to a data center within a hundred miles or so, you can obtain an near native experience but real world conditions are generally far less ideal.

The original Steam Machines were a good idea by attempting to expand the audience of the open PC ecosystem as opposed to the walled garden consoles. But not being able to play 80% of the games on Steam was an obvious deal breaker as were the stupidly high prices for some of the machines.

Steam Deck can be in a better position to compete if Valve can deliver on it's Proton compatibility promise. There are far more native Linux games compared to before, the Deck is priced aggressively low and the Switch-like form factor is in popular demand compared to a living room computer.

The question is whether or not Valve can deliver on that promise. Many games are still not click and play and require tweaks with Protontricks and custom environmental variables. Something like Glorious Eggroll's Protonfixes scripts could help here. Then there is of course kernel anti-cheat that Valve promises to solve but hasn't yet.

Originally posted by Balderick:

That seems like a lot of hoops to jump through but thanks for sharing the synopsis of what is possible option.

Shadow cloud gaming supports games from MS Store and have a linux client iirc as well as support many other platforms as client but they currently have a one year waiting list in UK (Paris server region) but could be considered a much more plug and play option for linux users wanting access to MS Store apps which will probably work better than xcloud.

Shadow's future is uncertain with it's bankruptcy and convincing gamers to cough up $30 per month after spending $400+ on a handheld PC meant to play games locally will be a tough sell.

XCloud game streaming should be fine for Game Pass Ultimate, especially considering that the Deck's native screen resolution is 800p.

But like I said, ANY other store besides Windows Store would be far better to purchase individual games from. In fact, even if I used Windows regularly, I wouldn't want to buy games from the Microsoft Store because it's known to be buggy and malfunction and pure UWP games on the store can have limitations compared to Win32 counterparts on Steam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YM7s8cLBdQ
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Store:Microsoft_Store

SteamOS 2.0 is way too old and unsupported. Its based on Debian 8, while Debian is now at version 11. Don't use it. Wait for SteamOS 3.0 or use another distro.

I think Linux will need a robust ARM to x86 translation layer before things can become viable. There will be tons of games that are no longer supported that wont ever get an AARCH64 rebuild. We'll need to watch how Box86, Hangover, and FEX-Emu matures.

One concern I have with ARM is the large number of SoC variants and proprietary iGPUs. Linux support for some of them is often spotty. That would explain why standard Linux distributions often don't well support ARM Chromebooks outside of Chrome OS. I'd like to see this vastly improve before considering ARM systems as well.

Originally posted by Balderick:

oooh it a case of when; not if.

Why do you think that there will be no official aarch64 build of SteamOS 3.0?

Steam Deck 2.0 may very well prove to be a custom ARM device, or standalone SteamVR hmds or ...
.. AMD and their partners build custom ARM cpu/apu/soc too. https://www.amd.com/en/products/semi-custom-solutions

I'd be curious to know if that is a native ARM port of the game or if it's running in Wine or Proton using a special x86 to ARM translation layer.

If it's an translation layer like we see with Windows 10, that would be really cool for Linux.

Originally posted by Balderick:

Will that be the only way to try out latest build of SteamOS 3.0? Why is that build's development not tracked at https://repo.steampowered.com/steamos/dists/ ?

All the Steam Support pages for Steam OS (there is only one nowadays) still only mentions Debian based SteamOS.

Public test builds aren't released yet.

https://i.postimg.cc/Pr36MF8S/Screenshot-from-2021-07-16-12-14-22.png

I placed a reservation for the 256GB model.

Steam OS is currently dead. Use a different distro.

Steam OS development is dormant and very outdated.

I suggest using Gamer OS or another distribution.

https://gamer-os.github.io/

Originally posted by Suutox:

installing ubuntu and turning it into steamOS is the best option you have.

Originally posted by XÆЯO_Vince:

Steam OS is pretty outdated and a lot of newer games may not work simply because of it and it's old drivers.

SteamOS is just steam for linux. it should still work with the latest games. (last time i checked, linux gets updates frequently on most distros)

SteamOS is based on Debian 8. Debian 10 has been released 6 months ago.

I don't know what Valve's plans are for SteamOS but it's certainly a dormant project now.

Steam OS is pretty outdated and a lot of newer games may not work simply because of it and it's old drivers.

GamerOS would probably be a better option.

Well considering that Valve just discontinued the Steam Controller and the machines themselves awhile back... the whole Steam Machine initiative seems to be dead. Steam OS is probably unofficially dead as well.

Valve is enhancing Linux gaming with driver development in Mesa and kernel, Steam client, and Proton / Wine.

It's possible to workaround the problem with Rockstar Launcher. The workaround I made awhile back works for me. A future Proton build should have a patch for the pipe and wmic issue and there is a patched 3rd party Proton build that fixes the problem. But the easiest method is the workaround script.

Try this script and add it as a "non-Steam game" to your library then try launching it. If it doesn't work in standard big picture mode then try swapping to the Steam OS Desktop and running it from the desktop Steam client interface.

Cloud gaming only works if you have fast, low latency connection and not very far from data centers. The other problem is cost. Not everyone is willing to pay a monthy subscription to play games in the cloud.

Wine and Proton have advanced gaming on Linux alot in the past year. Now DirectX 11 games are running well on Linux.

The value I see in cloud gaming ATM is for people who don't own computers and want to play PC games on their smartphones and tablets or Linux and Mac users wanting to play Windows Store UWP games like Forza 4 that cannot run in Wine.

Hopefully Wine or a 3rd party comes up to start developing support for UWP apps / games on Linux. As of now I'm playing with In-Home Streaming with a crossover cable connection between the computers for playing Forza 4 demo.