I was wondering if steam deck’s existence made linux gaming better for you folks who do not have a deck yet game on a linux machine, as im afraid it did nothing for me at all. I’m trying to see if its failure to influence my side of linux gaming is purely anecdotal.
Thanks!
What exactly did you expect to happen? Obviously the Steam Deck brought some more users and incentivised Valve to further improve Proton, but otherwise the Steam Deck is just another type of Linux PC. Why would that effect you if you don’t have one?
@poVoq @altair222 I think the incentivisation to improve Proton is a big part of it. To be honest, I never really had any issues playing anything in Linux in the year before the Deck, so in practice probably not noticed any difference.
But I feel it’s hard to quantify isn’t it? Like, would Diablo 4 beta have worked without issue had the ecosystem not already been built up to encourage people to tinker and get it working?
These kinds of intangible benefits are still positive factors I think…
This is my POV, proton support and hence more support for games.
It’s possible that SteamOS and the SteamDeck are part of the incentive that finally made nVidia get to work on open-source GPU drivers and Wayland-compatibility
This does sound good!
While it ended up shutting down, the fact that Google Stadia was also a Linux-based gaming platform might also have factored into the ecosystem improvements and interest, maybe just a little bit
@altair222 I think it has absolutely been a net-win, compatibility has been improving. And there’s a ton of progress that was made prior to the Steam Deck even being released that was (in hindsight) Valve gearing up to make something like it. It’s also nice for there to be a defined (fairly lightweight!) platform for people to be aiming for when making PC ports. That being said I haven’t seen too many Steam Deck users fall into being general Linux enthusiasts.
