We’ve known for a bit they were going to do this.
I’m honestly surprised they didn’t do it sooner. They already had half of the work done for Xbox. Should have been relatively easy to start with just the interface for all PCs and then iterate from there.
Nooo… 90s/00s weird internet videos.
penny arcade? Wow, are they even still around? I havent seen anyone talk about or reference them for…god… 10 years?
“Freedom of Windows” “Power of Xbox” Good stuff. We should make some more. “From a brand you can trust” "Pro gamers choose … " “Powered by Copilot and Game pass”
Well gamepass on a cheap handheld doesn’t sound so bad tbh
and copilot on a cheap handheld that cannot do anything except record you 24/7 and send it off to MS servers?
Less good
This got me thinking that Valve is the best competitor to Xbox. Instead of getting to release some walled garden, single store handheld they have to open it up to other stores because otherwise people would just buy a SteamDeck.
But everyone who cares about handheld gaming already has a steam deck and this is going to be more expensive so I don’t see the point anyway.
I guess they are trying to get people already paying for game pass to buy it, because you can play everything on it. But then people won’t be able to cancel their subscription or they’ll have a very expensive paperweight without games.
Moar power! More more more more!!!
boots up an indie roguelite
Who is this for?
People who want to play games that only work on Windows but don’t want to deal with Windows’ KBM interface or its’ background activity shitfuckery.
Everyone that is scared they can’t play the most popular online games on their handheld. So theoretically a massive demographic according to research (most pc gamers play older live service titles) done but whether they would want a gaming handheld is a different question.
There’s apparently a chunk of gamers who can’t leave Windows because of GamePass. However, I don’t know whether it’s a significant portion.
I am more thinking of the Valorant, League, Call of Duty, Fortnite, etc… players. Which are a majority of pc gamers.
There are different clusters of users who don’t/can’t leave Windows.
- Don’t want to learn another OS at all (They are content with the Windows experience)
- Gamepass users. They enjoy the Netflix model of getting free games
- Multiplayer (with anti-cheat) gamers
- Don’t want to leave the Adobe suite/
- Uses programs which don’t have Linux equivalent
The Linux community has to understand that some of these groups cannot be moved to Linux no matter how much you improve the Linux experience.
I am talking for handhelds which are treated as consoles so the underlying os or gui makes no difference. Unless it stops you from playing the game you like.
No one should tell you to leave an os if it works for you.
No one should tell you to leave an os if it works for you
I agree.
Some people have a special comfort with Windows AND telemetry, ads, bloat are not a concern for them. We should not try to force them to move.
They are trying to make this an ideology too?
For those who need an explanation; Its always The same:
- you habe 2 products (EG. Communism and capitalism, Intel vs. AMD, nvidia vs AMD, Linux vs Windows)
- one of these is just objectively better then The other, so it starts winning over people
- The leader of the just objectively worse thing (EG Trump, Intel, Microsoft, nvidia (kinda) Start just yelling the same old „Dont thread on me you Woke DEI communists with your culture war” effectively turning the Objektive comparison into a simple culture war about ideology, effectively turning all those insecure fucks into deaf and blind wutbürgers.
And that’s what effectively happening right now. The pigeon has gotten the bad cards, so they just shit on the table and eat the pawns.
You’re right on other fronts, but this is more like the classic one-upsmanship of basic competition. The loser srops trying to innovate on their own and tries to immitate the winner, rarely successfully.
Elon and his cyberfuck are a better example of what you’re describing.
I understand completely. When you are done with that pawn, please get some cleaning materials and remove the shit from the table.
It the Zune for gaming.
I mean, the Zune is fucking amazing.
explain
You can Google it. The zune was far superior to iPods but software was absolute dog shit
Exactly!
i had both. the zune was a gigantic plastic piece of shit with a bigass color screen and a bad ui design. the 500gb ipod was better in almost every way
The Zune was at-best an adequate copy of the iPod lacking a click wheel and having an awkward user interface.
The click wheel was one of the worst physical interfaces ever invented
Creative nomad gang.
FM radio when you wanted it, big color screen that you could watch actual videos on at a solid playback that you could do video out to a TV with. WiFi song sharing. Great playback and no fingerprints in my semitransparent case that glows.
Zune was amazing.
The one thing I took away from it was that the Xbox-button acts as alt tab. I WANT THE SAME FROM MY STEAM DECK IN DESKTOP MODE!
But in Desktop mode the Steam button does absolutely nothing while a game is running.
I guess you could remap them in desktop mode? I haven’t tried but it should be possible.
No, you cannot change the mapping of the Steam and … buttons. They are only available to the Steam client. You cannot remap the Steam+other button combinations either.
Funnily enough when no game is running the Steam button focuses the Steam window. But that functionality is gone as soon as a game is running. Really frustrating.
That’s wierd, works well enough for me? It’s called guide button chord layout.
Why do you use desktop mode for a game?
I like to have other apps like a browser easily accessible with proper window management. And most of my games are non-Steam games which allow me to easily swap between desktop and gamepad bindings easily to alt tab out.
And I’ve found that running KDE Plasma Wayland has no visible performance impact either. No idea why they use X11 in SteamOS.
Steam os is pretty old now, compared to the Wayland readiness timeline, and proton doesn’t fully support Wayland yet
Ah, but the really funny thing is how Gaming Mode works.
They start the gamescope wayland compositor which launches an XWayland session to run the Steam client in. Which will start gamescope to run the game, which will use a second XWayland session to actually run the game in.
It’ll probably take at least two more years until they can get rid of X.
Oh god, why have you cursed me with such knowledge
Remote play for whatever reason works far better in desktop mode
Can’t you map Alt-Tab to one of the back buttons? Or does that not work in desktop mode?
EDIT: Or if that doesn’t work through steam then is there gamepad software in KDE or the Software Centre that lets the desktop map gamepad buttons?
ROFL More like chains of Microsoft!
Players on either device will be able to tap into Gaming Copilot …
…yeah
Oh, Paul Marketing, you crazy fellow.
Honestly
As compared to consoles? Windows is pretty free.
Bro the Linux mafia is gone git Hugh.
Honey I am the Linux mafia. I’ve spent the past 15 years pushing Linux on my circle of gay nerd friends
And it even stuck with 3 of them.
I mean, pushing was clearly your mistake. We gays like it to be pounded into us.
Other than the Windows tax, ads, bloatware, constant intrusive up-sell attempts…
Again
COMPARED TO CONSOLES? That’s basically paradise.
Modern, unhacked and unmodded Consoles are:
-
Completely locked down, not only do they not let you install applications not approved by the manufacturer, in reality you can ONLY buy them from the manufacturer and you pay a hefty tax for that “privilege”.
-
Feeding you ads and upsell attempts whenever you turn them on, as the UI has basically been redesigned to try to sell you more shit first and make getting to your actual games take a few extra steps
-
Any undesired feature in a console’s OS is something you just have to accept and move on. Powerusers killing Windows bloat with third party tools is a time-honoured tradition that goes back to Windows 3.11
I’m not saying Windows is good.
I’m saying that for someone coming from a PlayStation or a traditional XBoXSeXxxx (I love making jokes out of this name), this whitelabelled ROG Ally machine would feel like finally being able to breathe. Just for the fact that you can use more than one storefront and install applications from wherever you want.
That’s a really good comparison
Also, compared to something like the Switch? I don’t see MS remotely bricking these devices if you run “homebrew” on them.
-
That’s a typo, it’s supposed to be an R in the middle there, not an F
I saw that it’s a trimmed down version of windows so I’m interested in giving it a chance. Who knows, maybe we will be able to install said trimmed down version on regular hardware which would be interesting.
You can always use a debloat script to fix a lot of issues. Nothing will help with Windows broken, ancient architecture, but the scripts do help.
That form factor has me interested. Wonder if I can get something like that for the deck
Just install Bazzite on it.
Then buy the rog ally.
They pretty clearly said they liked this form factor, which is quite different from a standard ROG Ally? I strongly doubt it’s going to have a locked down bootloader, so any firmware differences should be worked out fairly quickly by the Bazzite team et. al.
Maybe, but this is basically a thicker back which can be added as 3rd party accessory, but if the price won’t be more than 50 euros / dollars more than the normal one it maybe worth it.
No, it very much is not just a thicker back. This comes with the next generation Z2 and Z2 Extreme chips.
Then it is an upgrade 👍
Fwiw I specially was referring to the Xbox controller like handles built in. I find holding the deck for a long time to be a little uncomfortable.
I really want an upgraded deck, hardware wise, but I am happy to look for a case first.
