Me in 2001 with a stuffed nose:

Steam Deck was the Gabe Gear, this is the Gabecube, all we need now is a smaller Steam Deck - the Gabe Boy.

They really need to sell these in Walmart next to the Playstation. It'll be the year of the Linux desktop!

I thought it was the okama gabe sphere. It's spherical!

even more nuts is that it will support pc games via FEX, an emulation layer that runs x86 windows games on ARM in Linux

In addition to streaming from your battlestation

Any ideas on Linux support?

”Quest 3 without Meta” is what I’ve been dreaming about. I feel like Steam Frame could be my entry to the VR space, if the price is decent.

I just recently upgraded from my OG Vive because I didn't want an inside out tracking or wireless, but... let's see what the price is and if the thing is actually as good in real world conditions as Linus makes it look. I might just try those pancake lenses (because the Vive Pro 2 lenses are bad).

And yeah, I will never give Meta money. Not directly, and indirectly as little as I can.

I don't see it in the hardware design, but from a software perspective the groundwork is there for modularity. Offloading the core compute to the PC frees up onboard processing to run peripherals like full color front cameras (onboard are black and white / IR) and more advance proximity detection, hell hook up lidar and go nuts with full body tracking.

That said, all of that would depend on decent I/O. 2x USB4 ports would go a long way.

Steve from Gamers Nexus has a solid video where he met with people about Valve and goes into a lot of details on the announced hardware. He reported that they told him that the Steam Machine is not aiming for a console price. This made sense to him as he pointed out it’s basically an ITX computer and you can do computer things with it. Anyway I don’t know what it will cost but I’m guessing north of $500 easily.

I’m in a similar boat. I have both PS5 and series X. Consoles are getting enshittified at an increasing pace. I welcome valve improving Linux compatibility as they invest more in their devices. I don’t think I’ll be getting Sony or Microsoft’s next consoles.

I've been an Xbox user for the longest time and have been dreading them losing the latest console war. I've never been a huge Nintendo fan, and fuck Sony. This sounds like it'll be my next big gaming platform.

There isn't really any point in comparing this to a games console. There would be no real point valve developing a console because pretty much all of the games on their platform expect to run on a PC so they'd end up having to emulate keyboard inputs as a lot of their library won't really work with a controller in any logical sense, so they might as well just make a PC.

I thought the GabeCube was even better.

That would be impossible to search online

Fuck, they did! 😫

It feels like just yesterday that VR was the big hype tech.

That's because they make an insane amount of money by taking 30% of every sale on their platform, which nearly everyone uses because they're a near monopoly and the alternatives are terrible. Around $3.5 Million per employee, nearly 5x the next highest company, which is Facebook at around $780,000 per employee.

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-profit-per-head-from-steam-commissions-is-out-there-and-at-usd3-5-million-per-employee-it-makes-apple-and-facebook-look-like-a-lemonade-stand/

They need their products to be as clean as possible to hook people into microtransactions and their proprietary platform. Valve is a for profit company and the ceo owns a fleet of mega yachts

Arch linux ARM (the base of such steam os) has existed for a while now. Not to diminish Valve efforts, just putting in some context.

Same, but at least it feels like the focus was on usability rather than looks. Keep it humble, Steam!

That seems like its pretty close to us being abke to run linux on a newer phone

You can run Linux on current gen flagship arm SoCs. The framebuffer, gpu and cpu stuff mostly just works (with some support from hardware vendors). It's the rest of the device that's the problem: the phone part, the camera, sound, power management, etc.

I'd consider it a significant advancement. Phones have much tighter regulations than many consumer devices and this may not necessarily align with Valve's long-term business objectives, however, so I have some skepticism but would be pleasantly surprised if they pursued such an endeavor.

I'd say a lot of the backend stuff has the stars aligning now for such potential. Front end user experience is increasingly the sore spot now.

Not just this but if the compatibility layer on the snapdragon works on over ARM chips for other Linux distros, we could have desktop Linux on arm (including on new macbooks if you want).

Someone far more knowledgeable is free to correct me but that might have been the single biggest announcement they made

Doubtful, phone vendors already had access to binary blobs to run Linux (Android) on them.

It's no surprise Valve who is buying those SOCs is also provided with them.