this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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All the alternatives are advertised to be shipped with Windows only and so not interesting to me. Probably this is interesting for a lot of potential customers but I don't want Windows on any device that I own.
They're all basically PCs so you can actually still install Linux on them. In fact, there's a distro called ChimeraOS, which is a community-made SteamOS, that you can install on any handheld (or even a regular PC). ChimeraOS contributors even regularly test against popular handled devices (like the ROG Ally for instance) and put in fixes and optimizations for various things. So in that regard, getting something that's NOT the Steam Deck may not be such a crazy idea.
Interesting. Did not know about ChimeraOS. But can I get a ROG Ally without paying for a Windows license?
No, but even with the Windows tax it's cheaper than the Steam Deck. The 512GB Steam Deck is $649, but the ROG Ally equivalent is $599 - and it has a much faster CPU+GPU.
It also depends on the audience. A lot of people might not be comfortable installing a different OS. Steam Deck is ready out of the box.
Personally, I have installed many OSes many times, so I am comfortable doing it to a handheld device. But the inputs on the Steam Deck would stop me from buying any alternatives. SD has so many options, full Xbox layout, track pads in either side, four paddles on the back, gyro, and the two "menu buttons". And they all feel super premium!
The last thing I'll say is about the support of all of this. I have only owned two valve made physical products at this point, Steam Deck and Steam Link. The updates for Steam Link continued far after the product was discontinued. The amount of bugs on the Steam Deck that were fixed via an update the day following it's report is truly astonishing. I have owned 3-4 ASUS ROG products and after the last keyboard I owned (how do you messup a keyboard?!?!) I decided it would take some serious innovation to get me to buy another product of theirs again. I have also owned two different models of GPD win, very unimpressed but the quality of the inputs so I sold them very fast. I can't speak to any other handheld but I can say I feel very comfortable with Steam backing the Deck.
Not even all PC's play nicely with Linux, especially in smaller form-factors and laptops etc. I've had several laptops with weird hardware that didn't have a proper driver (esp tabletized devices with odd audio, video, or network chipset revisions). My last laptop I had to run a bunch of hacked-up scripts to get the audio working (amp would sleep and not wait) properly until kernel support improved about a year later
Linux is versatile, but one shouldn't automatically assume it'll work on Linux.
Nobody is assuming anything. If you take the time to read the post you responded you'd see that ChimeraOS is tested against these devices and is often patched to support the variances in their hardware.