I think an important factor people seem to forget about the steam deck is that it won’t simply cease to be supported like sony or nintendo do with their consoles. If a game comes out on steam and works on linux, it’ll work on the deck. Considering the amount of people developing wonderful but lightweight games, I doubt you’ll ever think 'this platform is dead".
I bought one of those physical Steam Links nobody cared about. They didn’t do well and Valve ended it fairly quickly. 10 years later it still gets occasional updates from them and benefits from broader Steam Big Picture updates.
Steam Deck has been a huge success. Of course they’ll continue to support it.
I pretty much always consider games through the lens of my Steam Deck. If it’s a cross-platform game that would run well on the Deck, then I get it for the Deck.
And this is primarily because I can freely install those games to other PCs. If my Nintendo Switch were to get destroyed, then I lose my games with it (outside of emulation, of course). I don’t want games being so temporary. I still play games that are nearing 50 years old!
And on the flip side, I wouldn’t be surprised if software still gets updated as Valve keeps its minimum requirements as low as possible. As long as the drivers work, there isn’t a reason for different editions of the Steam Deck to run different versions.
486 and first gen Pentiums are still supported, though I’d expect not for much longer.
It’s funny you mention that.
I’ve been loosely following development around maintaining support for those. (And seeing i686 become the x86 soft target)
It seems we’re entering the era where test units related to these legacy platforms are no longer blockers should they fail. We’re also seeing a mass exodus for support of the x86_64 v1 and v2 feature sets in some distributions and projects.
But that doesn’t mean no one is working on supporting legacy stuff.
It may work, but there are software dependencies that will become end of life. The first to go will probably be the GPU drivers. In 10 years or so, Linux will discontinue the GPU drivers and you will not be able to run the latest Linux kernel.
It seems there’s a lot of misunderstanding in this thread about how linux works and upstream drivers being in the kernel works. If it works it works, it will keep working.
Valve can stop develop wtv they want and it won’t change a thing.
It’ll be community-maintained at that point. If it’s worth updating and there’s demand for it, someone will bother, just like any console, and made all that much easier running open software.
I’d actually willingly bet anyone here $1500 that the Deck will be able to boot a mainline Linux kernel in 2035.
Yeah i agree with you, but there is a limit to community support. The Steam Deck specifically has a big community, but most hobbyists don’t like to spend a ton of time maintaining ancient hardware drivers.
I believe my 11 year old Thinkpad T540p still runs mainline kernels too. The GPU is not supported by the 2018 Intel Iris userspace driver though, so I would need to run a legacy driver that does not support vulkan. Its still packaged by Arch, but it does limit my options.
I’d say 10 years until new games stop running with all features, and 20-30 years until it stops running mainline kernels and loses network access to Steam.
Other handhelds with closed-source drivers probably stop running mainline in 5-10 years.
True, but they make their money via game sales.
Other OEMs make their money via hardware sales.
Valve has a much bigger incentive in keeping their firmware supported than AYANEO or ASUS…
The entire point was that you don’t have to rely on vendor support. With proprietary consoles, unless someone hacks it, you won’t get any support when the vendor drops support.
I think an important factor people seem to forget about the steam deck is that it won’t simply cease to be supported like sony or nintendo do with their consoles. If a game comes out on steam and works on linux, it’ll work on the deck. Considering the amount of people developing wonderful but lightweight games, I doubt you’ll ever think 'this platform is dead".
But also Valve will support it.
I bought one of those physical Steam Links nobody cared about. They didn’t do well and Valve ended it fairly quickly. 10 years later it still gets occasional updates from them and benefits from broader Steam Big Picture updates.
Steam Deck has been a huge success. Of course they’ll continue to support it.
And if you buy a game on PC, it doesn’t stop being playable in a generation or two like consoles.
Speaking of consoles, if you buy a game for PC then boom, it’s also on your Steam Deck.
I pretty much always consider games through the lens of my Steam Deck. If it’s a cross-platform game that would run well on the Deck, then I get it for the Deck.
And this is primarily because I can freely install those games to other PCs. If my Nintendo Switch were to get destroyed, then I lose my games with it (outside of emulation, of course). I don’t want games being so temporary. I still play games that are nearing 50 years old!
Well, Valve may drop support for the firmware. Edit: Gaben simps need to accept that vendors do drop support at some point.
The Deck is a regular computer and you can run any OS on it.
Not having firmware updates doesn’t mean software suddenly stops working on it.
And on the flip side, I wouldn’t be surprised if software still gets updated as Valve keeps its minimum requirements as low as possible. As long as the drivers work, there isn’t a reason for different editions of the Steam Deck to run different versions.
You‘ll need a community effort to continue driver development.
Yeah, that’s called the Linux Community
Thats kind of a “yes, and?” sort of statement though.
486 and first gen Pentiums are still supported, though I’d expect not for much longer. But you’re still talking 35 years after release.
It’s funny you mention that.
I’ve been loosely following development around maintaining support for those. (And seeing i686 become the x86 soft target)
It seems we’re entering the era where test units related to these legacy platforms are no longer blockers should they fail. We’re also seeing a mass exodus for support of the x86_64 v1 and v2 feature sets in some distributions and projects.
But that doesn’t mean no one is working on supporting legacy stuff.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-SoundBlaster-AWE32
No they won’t
source: literally everything Valve has ever made still works.
hugs Steam controllers
It may work, but there are software dependencies that will become end of life. The first to go will probably be the GPU drivers. In 10 years or so, Linux will discontinue the GPU drivers and you will not be able to run the latest Linux kernel.
It seems there’s a lot of misunderstanding in this thread about how linux works and upstream drivers being in the kernel works. If it works it works, it will keep working.
Valve can stop develop wtv they want and it won’t change a thing.
Weird, my ten year old laptop still works.
It’ll be community-maintained at that point. If it’s worth updating and there’s demand for it, someone will bother, just like any console, and made all that much easier running open software.
I’d actually willingly bet anyone here $1500 that the Deck will be able to boot a mainline Linux kernel in 2035.
Yeah i agree with you, but there is a limit to community support. The Steam Deck specifically has a big community, but most hobbyists don’t like to spend a ton of time maintaining ancient hardware drivers.
I believe my 11 year old Thinkpad T540p still runs mainline kernels too. The GPU is not supported by the 2018 Intel Iris userspace driver though, so I would need to run a legacy driver that does not support vulkan. Its still packaged by Arch, but it does limit my options.
I’d say 10 years until new games stop running with all features, and 20-30 years until it stops running mainline kernels and loses network access to Steam.
Other handhelds with closed-source drivers probably stop running mainline in 5-10 years.
That’s no guarantee. It‘s naïve. And Steam stopped working on Windows 7 machines, so—
Microsoft is generally far more savage about dropped OS support than Linux. The latter undergoes fewer forced overhauls.
Yes, but this has nothing to with my initial statement.
You’re trolling, right? It wasn’t exactly up to Valve lmao. The world stopped supporting Windows 7.
Plenty of software still supports Windows 7. So literally not everything they made still works, there is no guarantee.
True, but they make their money via game sales.
Other OEMs make their money via hardware sales.
Valve has a much bigger incentive in keeping their firmware supported than AYANEO or ASUS…
Yes but thinking a piece of hardware will receive support for eternity is naive. That’s all I‘m saying.
The entire point was that you don’t have to rely on vendor support. With proprietary consoles, unless someone hacks it, you won’t get any support when the vendor drops support.
Bro it’s fucking Linux based. Did you not think before speaking?
I wrote and didn’t speak, did you think? The drivers will need maintenance.
And guess what the Linux Community is known for?
Exactly. He is doubting the autistic driven obsession the Linux community makes to ensure old forks are still updated. And bless them for that