cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/3922769
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/linustechtips by /u/RevolutionaryAd8204 on 2024-09-14 15:50:43+00:00.
I would actually rather like a Steam Deck without a display but with at least one full USB4 port and the ability to split it similar to a switch.
Yeah I’d love a modern stream machine kinda Deck plugged into a TV.
For now PlayStation is nicer for TV where I can get better performance from the couch with quick resume and all. If I could get a static Deck without portable power consumption limits and decent output on a 4K display that would be ideal. But right now the Deck works docked but when blown up to TV size so many games are a low rez mess. If we could get a proper SteamOS that I could install into a media center PC I’d make it myself. All I’d hope for then is a second gen Steam Controller.
Some of the points in the meme are weaker versions of the full truth:
Desktop OS and you can substitute your own.
Biggest game library and you can also side load your stuff from other stores.
It’s almost as if they’re two completely different markets
Can you use a de k on an external monitor?
Yes.
Two actually
Nice
Got mine for my birthday. Of all the computers I’ve owned in my life, this is my favorite.
No joke, I’m tempted to buy a Steam Deck (or true Linux phone) because… It can run a local HTML/CSS/JS app on a browser with filesystem access and audio support. This is the power of having an OS that is not locked down.
Speaking of which, what would you recommend for me to run a local HTML/CSS/JS app on a browser with filesystem access and audio support? (No, Android is too locked down to meet that spec) Other required specs:
- Portable: Can fit in a pocket
- 16GB or more usable storage
- Bluetooth support
- Ideally low-cost
I have an Orange PI Pro 5 16GB on a box that smoothly runs a full blown Ubuntu Desktop version and would fit in a pocket though it’s maybe a little too thick (from memory the box it’s about 3x5x2 cm).
Total cost was about $170.
The board itself would fit a thinner box, but you might have to 3D print one.
Mind you, a N100 Mini-PC that costs the same is even more capable as a Linux Desktop, but it’s significantly larger and will definitely not fit a pocket.
You can find cheaper SBCs capable of running a Desktop Ubuntu but in my experience (with a $35 Banana Pi P2-Zero) if you go too far down the price scale Desktop Linux performance stops being smooth, even if the board is a tiny thing.
It was actually quite surprising for me recently when I found out some of these things are perfectly capable Linux Desktops.
Even if it’s priced too highly, the PS5 Pro will probably sell pretty well. The Playstation Portal is very overpriced for what it is, and yet it’s sold very well. There’s a lot of Playstation fans with money to burn apparently.
I’m not a playstation fan but I’d buy a PS5 pro before I’d buy a steam deck TBHQ. I have a negative interest in portable gaming.
Honestly I think it’s a stage of life thing. As I got older, got married, and had kids I found it increasingly hard to find time to play on my PC. The steam deck is perfect for short sessions you can stop and resume anytime, and I don’t have to fight the kids for the TV or abandon everyone to sequester myself in the office.
I just straight up cannot do this. Either I’m spending time with family and giving them the attention they deserve. Or I’m spending time focusing on the game and the attention it needs for me to enjoy it. Multi tasking just leads to me ignoring both.
If it’s a small child and you just need to make sure they’re not killing themselves then I can do that. But besides that, to me it’s one or the other.
The whole reason I bought my Steamdeck was because I couldn’t get the Portal (thanks to scalpers).
Now I hardly ever turn the PS5 on because I am playing tons of games on Steam instead. When I do I am usually running something over my LAN via Chiaki to my Deck so others in my house can watch TV.
I won’t buy a portal. I probably would have bought a “PS4 in portal form factor” for twice the price, but streaming isn’t worth it.
But I have a friend who did, and have had my hands on it, and it is a genuinely really high quality implementation of the mediocre concept.
I probably would have bought a “PS4 in portal form factor” for twice the price, but streaming isn’t worth it.
Which brings us back to the Steam Deck, which can also stream PS5 games like the portal, except in HDR (if you have the OLED).
It would be a handheld console that would play their console library. They’d beat the Steam Deck’s sales volume as fast as they could manufacture them. Also, the Steam deck doesn’t do the triggers, which is a meaningful loss in plenty of PS5 games.
My actual point, though, was that the build quality for the price is really good.
Subscription for Internet access is the one that’s always baffled me. What a stupid business model. I guess devices not belonging to their buyers is not a new thing.
is it for “internet” or access to ps servers?
It was MS that started that back on the OG Xbox.
I think all the F2P ones (and a handful of others like FFXIV) are exempt from it. At least on Playstation.
It makes sense because servers are expensive to operate. The real scam is nintendo where you pay for P2P multiplayer…
They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.
Remember that Sony gets a cut from games being distributed to their platform, so online fees are just them double dipping for extra profits.
Web servers are different from game servers. You need a lot of performance and fast low latency servers to keep up with realtime game play. Webservers however dont need that and can benefit of load balancing accross multiple servers. Scale of economy helps a lot, but with game servers the cost doesnt change much because a session has to be on a single machine.
As for distribution costs, most of the cost is manufacturing and physical distribution of discs. So yeah, they are making a killing by continuing to take a a huge cut from game sales when most of their distribution is online.
They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.
They’re expensive when you’re not already building a CDN for delivery of massive files all around the world. Economies of scale quickly matter there.
It is not “biggest game library on earth” I bet, that would still be a high-end desktop running windows…
But then you are running windows…
Yes, but it has still a bigger game library as steam deck has and thus calling steam deck having “bigges game library on earth” is just bullshit.
But maybe there is a joke in that, that woooshed over me…
Yeah but a Deck is a Pc, which can absolutely run Windows. Therefore, they are the same thing. A high end PC AND a steam deck feature the “Biggest game library on earth”.
Doesn’t even have to run well. The fact that you can attempt to play it in the first place let’s it win the medal.
Any version of Playstation can’t even attempt to play half the games on a deck ;).
steam deck can run windows afaik
Can run most windows games via proton atleast.
While this is technically correct, it still doesn’t matter. I have built my own high end PCs in the past and it is a huge waste. I’m not even sold on the steam deck yet - I do all my non- critical stuff like lemmy on this 10 year old shit tablet running Android 7
Never told that it matters 😇 I game on an nvida 980 endeavourOS PC myself. Steam deck is probably able to run more games than that 😂
At this point, it’ll be easier to count the games that wouldnt work on the steam deck.
Fair, still not biggest library on earth
So what would hold that title?
High end windows laptop
And I see that one can argue that try running it is good enough, but instant crashing file would I myself not call a member of the game library. If that would be the case, any device that is able to download files has the “biggest game library“
The deck can run windows, so if it didnt run in compatability mode in linux itll work in native windows. Now if you were to put a limitation that it must acheive 30fps in any game, you might have a point, but… thats really grasping for straws.
You could put Windows on the deck if you’re inclined to do so
I think they mean “console library”
Steam deck has an emulator so it should
Both run games at 720p
This comment is brought to you by fsr
In desktop mode you can change the resolution of the connected display. It goes back to 720p if you go back to gaming mode, but you can always just launch games from the desktop if you want higher resolution for a specific game.
You can also change the resolution in gaming mode
I didn’t see it in display settings, but maybe I missed it!
IIRC they also just recently launched a new setting that allows you to permanently set the target resolution for all games (this might still only be in the beta branch though).
Previously you had to go into each game’s settings from Steam, and change the resolution there (which might be how you missed it).
One can be used in an airport/aircraft/train and the other can not.
One is fit for travelling and the other is not
I’m legitimately worried about next gen, since Sony is doing the same thing with their pricing as GPU manufacturers.
That thing being, the increase in price is >/= the actual increase in performance. The PS5 Pro is a 75% price increase over the similarly disc-driveless $399 PS5 (hardware which is almost a half-decade old now).
Ps5 pro Gpu is apparently way more powerful, but it might be bottlenecked by the similar cpu and ram to the base model
The PS5 Pro pricing is testing the waters for PS6 pricing. If they can’t sell well, they can easily drop prices (the PS5 Pro barely costs more than the PS5 to produce). They’re just gathering data on what people will accept.
Doing that with the PS6 is too risky. Sony botched the launch of the PS3 and it backfired on them hard letting MS get a foothold with the 360. MS then did the same with the XBone launch and the PS4 ran away with it.
If people signal to Sony now that the PS5 Pro is way too much (it’s £700/$913 here ffs), then the PS6 will be cheaper. Don’t accept their greed.
I mean, a pound don’t buy what it used to. We’ve had rampant inflation, and it’s going to be hard to keep any next gen console in a price point that we think of as suitable. I mean, this is the first gen where the price has gone up during it. PS2 slim went down to under £100 by the end. I paid about £80 for a GameCube late in the gen. I remember Xbox having to give money back to people because they launched at about 300 and Sony immediately went down to £199. It was carnage.
£299 felt like a standard price point for ages. My Amiga 1200 cost about that in the early 90s, and I paid the same for a PS2 nearly 10 years later, and the Xbox 360 was about the same.
£700 feels like a piss take though, and the sales figures will surely reflect that. PS6 has got to be under £600 I reckon, and we’re probably about 5 years away from that.
No, but it’s been getting stronger relative to the dollar consistently over the past 2 years. But we aren’t seeing that in prices.
I’m not expecting it to be like ~2007 time where £1 was $2.
But things should definitely be better than it was 2 years ago, relative to USD pricing.
My thing is if Sony wants me to pay computer prices, it better act like a computer. If it doesn’t and the trend continues with PS6 then that’s the end of me buying PlayStations.
If the PS5 wasn’t my first PlayStation ever, I’d probably be pretty disappointed with it. Kinda wish I held off and waited for this one, since I’d rather have it, but financing this just doesn’t make sense in my current position. Would rather build a PC and use my Deck for remote play.
This is an aggressively mid generation, I have to admit.
I think the best thing about this gen is running those slightly too ambitious PS4 games at 60fps.
steam deck is locked to a steam account
it requires internet to verify that on first launch
otherwise it is a great device. If it could use apple’s messages.app then i would be so happy.
If it could use apple’s messages.app then i would be so happy.
That’s an Apple problem, not a Steam Deck or Linux problem. Apple refuses to allow support on non-Apple hardware.
Don’t they HAVE TO open their messaging app now with the “EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act”?
EDIT: Huh, no they don’t (link) cause they are not “core platform”…
You can still install whatever OS you want on it, unlike a PS5. It would be nice if you could get into desktop mode without signing in once, but that’s not the end of the world. You need a Steam account to even buy it in the first place, and they’re not tracking you nearly as much as say Microsoft.
Also the price scales wayyyy better. Steam Deck starts at 313,65€ now.
if you have less money, buy that, get an sd card, and if you enjoy it put an ssd in later.
That’s $346 in USD, if anyone is interested.
That’s the 512gb version even. You can get the 64gb version for $296 right now, which is a great deal. Upgrading the SSD later is pretty easy too.
Not to mention you can just toss a 1tb SD card in, with no skills needed and only minimal cost difference.
Yes, accessing your data off an SD card is marginally slower than off an NVME ssd… but we’re talking, iirc, milliseconds. If it really bugs you later down the line, then you can upgrade the SSD.
You think a microSD is only marginally slower than an nvme SSD?
Found some benchmarks. Load times appear to be influenced by the CPU doing decompression. It’s not the SD being as fast as a SSD, but rather the SSD bring as slow as a SD because of this. That’s… interesting.
In the steam decks case yeah.
Load times have always been bottlenecked by the CPU, so it’s not a massive surprise that the SSD is about on par with a decent SD card.
On the PS4 an SSD was faster than a HDD, but not by a massive amount. At least it was quieter though.
Yep. At some point maybe Valve will change that, but for now, it’s a great way to get a steam deck. And even if they do change/fix that later, you’re not really missing out on anything- everything will be the same speed it always was for you.
Well, sometimes load times matter. In Borderlands 3 going off SD card instead of disc drive caused a minute or more of loading time when launching the game.
Does it have a USB port to plug in my external hd filled with games?
Usb-c port, so yes, though you may need an adapter… And a long cord.
Unless you also grab the dock, but then you also need a controller.
I’m a PC couch player, I’ve played with a controller for the last decade with my 75" TV.
I’d definitely get a dock for it.You guys are selling me big time on this.
I’ve been told (haven’t done it myself) that the ps5 controller pairs extremely well with the steam deck + dock. I would ask around though- I have an actual Steam Controller that I use, myself, but I don’t think you can buy those anymore.
Jesus. That’s a great deal. Makes me consider getting one instead of a new laptop.
