Valve Publishes New Steam Deck FAQ With A Few New Details Shared

[pal666]

no reasonable person would expect the Steam Deck to run their high-res high frame-rate VR-only games.

they obviously talked about games that run on steamdeck screen at steamdeck screen resolution(hd). and the quote was "steamdeck can handle", i.e. it will have playable(rather than high) framerate at some quality settings

[bple2137]

So casefolding ext4... That's probably what the device uses itself for the internal storage.

Too bad it's not something with reflink support

[heavyjoe]

- Improvements to Proton intended for the Steam Deck, like around anti-cheat, will also be available to Proton on the desktop. [...]

This news makes me happy.

[bple2137]

This news makes me happy.

There's nothing new about this, it was pretty clear from the beginning. Same as contributions to RADV, Mesa, Wine or Linux - it all goes upstream.

[heavyjoe]

There's nothing new about this,[...]

No sure about that. If anti-cheat meassurements need some sort of custom kernel stuff it would be another story or not?
Still happy news...

[uid313]

I hope that Proton improvements can be quick to reach back into mainline Wine.

[skeevy420]

You will be able to format it using whatever FS you like, it defaults to EXT4 because it is a Linux box and that's more or less what most people use in Linux.

I for one I'm delighted, I can't stand FAT/NTFS and promoting anything else is great, I understand why the entire industry always dances around MS's tune, but there is no need in this case.

Can't wait to get my hands on a SteamDeck, I'm genuinely excited for a device for the first time in years.

People wanting to share a volume with their Deck and their PC. Until there's an Arch Linux based Steam Machine 2.0 or they release their OS to the wild it is very safe to assume that most people will have a Windows 7/10/11 PC that doesn't support Ext4. People here using Linux or dual-booting are the minority.

Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with the sentiment. Anything to get the world off of MS reliant solutions is a blessing.

In reality, however, I think they need to prompt the user between BTRFS and NTFS since Linux supports both. NTFS if you need Windows support and BTRFS if you don't....or just BTRFS, throw some devs onto WinBTRFS, and make it part of Steam. They could do the same thing with ZFS or Ext4...but ZFS or BTRFS would be the better long-term choices in regards to features available, performance tuning, making backups, and already having cross platform projects running to piggy-back off of and/or hire/contract its dev.

[bple2137]

People wanting to share a volume with their Deck and their PC. Until there's an Arch Linux based Steam Machine 2.0 or they release their OS to the wild it is very safe to assume that most people will have a Windows 7/10/11 PC that doesn't support Ext4. People here using Linux or dual-booting are the minority.

Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with the sentiment. Anything to get the world off of MS reliant solutions is a blessing.

In reality, however, I think they need to prompt the user between BTRFS and NTFS since Linux supports both. NTFS if you need Windows support and BTRFS if you don't....or just BTRFS, throw some devs onto WinBTRFS, and make it part of Steam. They could do the same thing with ZFS or Ext4...but ZFS or BTRFS would be the better long-term choices in regards to features available, performance tuning, making backups, and already having cross platform projects running to piggy-back off of and/or hire/contract its dev.

You can share the drive with Windows and use NTFS on it IF Steam will change its behavior to store compdata always on the main system drive. Recently I tried to do just that (install a game on external NTFS storage) and the game couldn't lunch at all until I made a symlink so that compdata was on Linux FS. Then the game run without any problem.

[Michael_S]

I actually had a conversation explaining that the statements from a Valve Developer obviously were a generalization -- and not meant to be taken literally as "every game on steam" -- citing that no reasonable person would expect the Steam Deck to run their high-res high frame-rate VR-only games.

Someone replied that they "expected Steam Deck to do VR from their statement" I facepalmed and moved on.

Not everyone that uses Steam is a tech enthusiast. Most, sure, but not all. So that needs to be in all of the SteamDeck promotional materials so that casual gamers among the early adopters don't get burned.

I'm not much of a gamer these days, but I'm hopeful that Valve's push on this product is what gets Linux gaming truly into the mainstream - and by extension, Linux for home users in general.

I'm also interested to see how it would work as a streaming device. Since it's got a full Linux distro and Bluetooth, presumably I could use it for Kodi and then use a browser on it for Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, and so forth. Obviously $400 for a streaming gadget is way too much, but I got a Playstation 4 for streaming 5 years ago and I also use it for streaming.

[polarathene]

People wanting to share a volume with their Deck and their PC. Until there's an Arch Linux based Steam Machine 2.0 or they release their OS to the wild it is very safe to assume that most people will have a Windows 7/10/11 PC that doesn't support Ext4. People here using Linux or dual-booting are the minority.

WSL on Windows uses EXT4 or something I think? I believe there's been an EXT4 driver for Windows available for some time too. While I'm with you with wanting to see BTRFS/ZFS get official support/adoption on Windows more than EXT4, it'd probably be EXT4 before either of those.

I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft and Valve would work together to get EXT4 going, but then again we have NTFS upstreaming into the kernel, so perhaps that'd get pushed more as compatibility between the two OS with SteamDeck?

For internal storage instead of external, I imagine like mobile devices with microSD storage, it might be available via USB connection to the OS that way. I think that requires some not so great protocol for Android devices (MTP?), but abstracts the filesystem part. Some manufacturers just provide an app for Windows and macOS users which I often found to work much more reliably and perform better than the alternative Linux would use.