The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blackeco.com/post/2330473

  • cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    Yeah those cases were bad, steam deck just has Linux on it though. Arch based I think with two DE’s: KDE plasma and a modified’ ‘steam big picture’ mode.

    I don’t think anything is locked, and they aren’t fucking with that in any way dell lenovo or system76 couldn’t.

    • misk@piefed.social
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      2 days ago

      Not yet but they hold you by the balls because you buy license most of your games through Steam. Once they’re entrenched enough they can do whatever. Android was a very open platform in the beginning, now it’s almost iOS. You can fork Android / SteamOS but without Play Store / Steam consumers aren’t that interested.

      • cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 days ago

        But it’s much easier to pirate a program than an OS, and they can’t fuck with the bios too terribly easy once the thing’s in your hands.

        • misk@piefed.social
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          2 days ago

          It’s pretty hard to pirate on iOS (and it will be hard on Android too eventually). Their plan is to do this gradually, definitely not in a single generation of hardware. They’ll have pretty strong arguments for locking down the bootloader (kernel level anti-cheat for games like CoD or Valorant) or just plain locking Steam to supported platforms to lock you out of other OSs first.

          • cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            2 days ago

            And when they do, that hardware will be worthless shit, but steam still has to run of my 15 year old Debian/Fedora x86 box, and other companies are making handhelds like this now.

            • misk@piefed.social
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              1 day ago

              Why does it have to? Valve isn’t known for maintaining legacy software. You assume your software will run forever as-is but you can see how that looks like in accelerated timeline in the case of Valve games on Macs.

                • misk@piefed.social
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                  1 day ago

                  The equivalent of that $300 Dell in 10 years is even more likely to be locked down. Open hardware will become more and more niche, and therefore even more expensive comparatively. This is where the entire industry seems to be going.