Steam Deck

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Playtron plans to launch PlaytronOS, a Linux-based OS for gaming (www.gamingonlinux.com)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

To be clear, this is just an alternative Linux OS. The hardware shown in the thumbnail and article is just a mockup meant to represent a potential handheld. Part of their goal is to offer equally good support for all PC game stores (epic etc) vs the "steam first" experience of the deck.

Dedicated builds for the Steam Deck and other handheld PCs are to come later this year.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Some TL;DR from the Verge's coverage of this:

Leadership has connections to CyanogenOS and an ex-Playstation CEO
Ayaneo is looking into releasing a device with this OS at the end of 2024 (free salt grains here)
A handful of celluar providers are interested in connected hardware running this OS
No desktop mode
Beta releasing in the next 60 days
Target audience is likely casual gamers - those who may consider a Switch instead of a Deck

The following is my response copied from the original post in the Linux Gaming community:

Sounds very interesting, but I can't shake the feeling that this company is looking to profit from Valve and the OSS community's contibutions to Linux gaming without contributing much back.

On the plus side, at least the Box86 developer and a couple others they've hired from various Linux gaming projects are now getting paid for their contributions 👍. They also managed to get The Witcher 3 running on an ARM device which is pretty cool.

Playtron hasn’t quite decided just how open source it’ll be, though, and how much it will cater to Linux power gamers versus the next hundred million that Playtron hopes to bring into the fold.

Seems likely that Playtron would follow Valve's apprach where the client application/shell is proprietary IMO, with the rest of the OS remaining open source.

There’ll be no Linux desktop mode.

Hard pass for me, since the deck is also a partial laptop replacement in my case. The article also mentions wanting power users to debug the alpha version of the OS they'll be releasing in 2 months or so - not too sure how they expect that to happen if they're not providing a DE besides their Playtron shell.

I'll be following the progress of their OS though, will be interesting to see if they'll aim for Valve's pretty tight hardware integration or whether they'll keep things on the more generic side like we see with the current Windows handhelds

Edit: Fix quotes

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

has links to CyanogenOS

Wow that is a name I haven't thought about in ages

No desktop mode

I guess this is fine if they're targeting casual gamers? But I feel like by necessity the first people interested aren't going to be anyone you could call casual. It's a big loss of functionality in my book, steam deck with desktop mode is awesome