Quoting: ShabbyXIt feels like they are scared it would flop if users keep asking for windows and they don't deliver, so they do it even though they think it's wasting their device?

It's not like there's a shortage of handheld PCs that run Windows - even from the same company - so people could just buy one of those instead if they're desperate for Windows, while this device could still get the benefits of using Linux. If they did just get steamrolled by astroturf without getting anything in return then they made quite a serious mistake.

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Quotefully customizable controls from keyboard and mouse to controllers.

Hopefully all at the same time for gyro aimers.

QuoteWill you be picking it up?

I haven't gone back to finish the first one yet. But assuming I enjoy all of that, and when this one gets to an appropriate price point for the amount of support, yeah, probably.

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Quoting: TuxeeI assume the market share of the device will be less than negligible and wouldn't have done a lot for "wider adoption" anyway.

The market share isn't the issue; it's the general perception that Windows isn't the only option. Microsoft really don't want that. Valve can't be bribed or intimidated into dropping their Linux plans, but everyone else is a viable target.

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Quoting: constIt's entirely possible MS gave them a deal that's paying out for them.

For their sake I hope they managed to extract a big bag of money out of Microsoft rather than simply being swayed by a Microsoft-funded astroturf campaign or being leant on for licence fees for their other products if they sell a non-Windows product (those both also being standard Microsoft techniques).

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Quoting: fagnerlnFunnily, I was thinking in replay the UT99 a few days ago.

That would have been about the time my little one got to play UT99 for the very first time.

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Quoting: TruckStopSantaClausThink that Verified icon should be taken away from them when things like this happens.

That did happen to EA after they blanket-broke their games with a blanket update to their launcher. It took a while till Valve got round to it (a small number of weeks as I recall) but it did happen. Ultimately it got fixed and those games started working again, and then got their ticks again.

The Deck Verified rating is a service for Valve's customers to increase confidence in buying things from Valve's store to play on Valve's hardware. A game that doesn't work will get Valve saying that it doesn't work... but on Valve Time.

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Quoting: emphyThis also highlights my biggest problem with the current classification of deck/proton compatibility: support from the dev remains unofficial (if present at all) in most cases.

Valve tried the alternative already with the Steam Machines and discovered that game developers can't be trusted to support and maintain their games on Linux machines. That's why Proton and the Steam Linux Runtime exist - so that Valve can make a best effort to get and keep things working on Linux in the face of developer indifference or hostility.

The only thing that will make game developers care enough to put the effort in themselves is bigger market share for Linux.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: CatKillerupdates are atomic.

I worry about fallout.

Debbie Harry's got you covered.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeWhy would they need two copies of the OS (unless you're referring to the fail over?) I know AtariOS does this with their immutable set up for rollbacks.

If you already know the answer, why ask the question?

The Deck has one /home partition and two completely independent copies of the OS - the current one and the previous one. Updates overwrite the "previous" version, which then becomes the "current" version, and the former "current" version becomes the "previous" version. The device always has at least one complete OS it can boot into because neither version can affect the other - updates are atomic.

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Valve are absolutely not going to put a second DE on the Deck. They're space-constrained already with two copies of the OS before you even get to games and shader caches that you have to fit into 64 GB. They aren't going to bloat that out for something (choice of desktop environment) that's an anti-feature for the machine's use case. It's getting one, and Valve have already picked it: KDE. While there are several plausible reasons to choose that one - it behaving like a normal desktop rather than Gnome's One True Workflow, the devs being much nicer to work with, and so on - the reason Valve gave for their choice was that it was the DE that Valve staff use and like.

There is (finally) a Wayland HDR spec that people haven't rejected. But it isn't finished. So Valve took the parts of that which work for single-window fullscreen games and implemented it in their own compositor; KDE are using just that bit for single-window fullscreen games in Plasma 6, too. At some point all the finer details of how to handle mixed HDR and non-HDR content in multiple windows will have been worked out and there'll be a full Wayland HDR and colour management spec that the compositors can implement; gamescope, not yet being a Wayland compositor and only being interested in single-window games, doesn't need to bother with any of that.

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