You're fundamentally misunderstanding what this development means for gaming affordability. Not having to buy a scarce, way overpriced Nvidia (or even AMD) external GPU means that gaming is a whole lot cheaper. If developers are optimizing for hardware like the Steam Machine - budget cards and iGPUs suddenly become viable again.

Especially with the llm crash, this may keep the fabs running Its some degree of good from like every direction.

Holy crap I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, nvidia needs to die. Nothing tied to palantir should survive.

The competition on... Okay, so, it's an OS right? So for free linux-native stuff, there's the default package manager that comes installed. Switch your steam deck to desktop mode. There's a lot there, including emulators that will run on steam deck from ancient Atari shit to Nintendo switch. But you can also run non-steam executables with proton. Heroic, lutris, etc are great tools from that. You can buy your games anywhere without rootkit DRM. Most things from itch.io or gog.com will run. Or, you know; other places. You *can* just pirate shit. You can in fact uninstall the stock OS and run anything you can compile for midrange x86 hardware.

You missed the part where Android wanted to [lock people out of installing their own apps](https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/25/google-will-require-developer-verification-for-android-apps-outside-the-play-store/). They postponed it for now due to pressure but it will happen eventually. Also the part where [bootloaders lock you out of changing OS](https://fudzilla.com/news/mobile/61438-samsung-kills-bootloader-unlock-globally). This thing is possible when you vendor lock people in a vertically integrated system and people here are completely oblivious to the trap they’re walking into.

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.

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.

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.

It’s pretty hard to pirate on iOS (and it will be hard on Android too eventually). Their plan is to do this gradually. They’ll have pretty strong arguments for locking down the bootloader (kernel level anti-cheat for games like CoD or Valorant) to lock you out of other OSs first.

No way its that close to steam deck prices

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.

Why does it have to? Valve isn’t known for maintaining legacy software.

Because most people play on the 300$ dell their mom got them for school ten years 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.

Okay. I agree this is likely abd a problem. But like, is valve's hardware locked down?

Valve, unlike Dell, has the power to vertically integrate an ecosystem. They own an App Store with de facto monopoly over PC gaming. If Valve says that starting 2030 you can only run Steam on Windows and their own locked down OS what can you do about it? You only licensed games from them, never bought them.

Why can't they take back shit you 'bought' rather than just licensed? Ownership is just a licensing agreement under capitalism. I agree the problems are real, but they are not specific to valve.

I’m dying on this hill because people act like Valve is different. If I had to guess it’s PC players that want to feel superior to others, even though they were first to lose access to physical copies of games and second hand market it provided.

The thing is: they're not different. And their hardware isn't, like; *special*; it's a single board computer running the standard x86/64 architecture that ships with a lightly customized OS most users won't change. I'm more worried about what nvidia Intel and and are getting up to. They'll fuck you first. I guess valve kind of is special? They are a games company, so they don't have big government contracts, they don't work with palantir, and they dont work at a low enough level that they can easily install something my electrical engineer or hacker friends can't possibly fix with a soldering iron. Theyll fuck me, sure, yes, but the chip makers already have their pants down.

What are Nvidia and Intel doing?