inally we’re seeing another handheld vendor jump in with Linux. The AYANEO NEXT LITE was announced today and much like the Steam Deck, they plan to ship it with SteamOS! AYANEO are one of the top brands when it comes to PC handhelds, so it’s really interesting to see them be one of the first to jump in like this. If Linux is a success for them, no doubt they will do more and other vendors will follow along.
↫ Liam Dawe
It was inevitable for SteamOS to spread beyond just the Steam Deck, but an important note to make here is that Ayaneo is not working together with Valve. Instead, they’re using HoloIso, one of the community-maintained variants of SteamOS anyone can use and install. I’m a bit surprised by this, since moving SteamOS beyond just Valve products in an official capacity seems like a no-brainer for Valve; they’re not really in it for the hardware money, after all, and instead earn their money from Steam game sales.
I’m fairly convinced this isn’t the last time we’re seeing a non-Valve product with SteamOS, but I’d rather have Valve involved in the process before spending any money on one of these.
my concern is that the “value for money” means it just wont have the same capability to play games as the steam deck (which is already limited by form factor, power and linux support).
IMHO, the Steam Deck is not as limited by Linux support as folks might think. It actually can run older stuff in some cases more easily than Windows can (though, yes, it does take some effort). It’s difficult to explain how good the experience it – not perfect, but pretty darn good (far more “perfect” in Gamescope mode). And a lot of newer stuff runs better on Steam OS/Linux than it does on Windows 11 (on the same hardware), and Gamescope has only improved things, at least if you have an AMD GPU.
I can’t find it, but there was an article a while ago where someone at Valve explained the problem is that they are hyper focused on supporting the Steam Deck itself, and have so heavily optimized their distro for that device, that it’s simply difficult for others to use it in its current state. In other words, it’s not that they don’t want others to use their OS, it’s that they haven’t spent the effort to support others (and I’m sure it’s not actually an insignificant amount of effort).
Using something that is already running, like holoiso (or maybe Nobara in the future) to me, makes a ton of sense. Honestly, anyone at Ayaneo, or MSI, or wherever, could simply hire the right people to support the thing properly on their own hardware. Heck, an independent could likely build a business to support those use cases. Valve has done most of the work, but they aren’t required to be the ones to complete the multi-platform part of the work. This isn’t windows – the whole industry (and most of the media it seems) is stuck in this Windows product mind set. Open source doesn’t work that way.
There is a reason Windows has so many OEMs, and that’s because it allows OEMs to completely forget about software. You’ll even see OEMs using a variety of WiFi adapters on the same model, and if you go to the driver’s download page for your particular laptop model you’ll either see multiple brands listed or a single installer that has 3 installers inside (and the correct one is launched). Windows OEMs are literally chip packagers and don’t want to get close to compiling an OS.
kurkosdr,
That might seem plausible until you look at android, which is a larger market than windows and shows that most OEMs don’t hesitate to customize the OS when they can. Heck many owners wish OEMs would customize the OS even less.
While you could argue that OEMs are only supporting android because of it’s market share, the exact same argument can be flipped to argue that OEMs only support windows because of it’s market share. I’m not suggesting your point is wrong, but that your point is not self evident. You would need some other kind of evidence to really back it.