The least important one is booting straight into Game mode, which is good for TV top boxes meant to act as gaming consoles. I’m mostly fine with autobooting to Steam Big Picture on Windows, but people make a big deal of edge cases where you may need a mouse and keyboard, so the demand is there for a native implementation in living room situations.
The more important one, IMO, is SteamOS’s handling of displays, and especially of HDR. I recently spent a not insignificant amount of time and effort trying to get a fairly typical high end desktop setup (Nvidia card, couple of HDR monitors with high refresh rates and different resolutions) on an existing Linux distro and… yeah, it’s not good. Not only did I have to try multiple distros and do some manual configuration until I found the right mix to get everything going under Wayland/KDE Plasma, but the end result is kinda flaky still and struggles with going in and out of sleep without breaking everything.
If, and it’s a significant if, Valve figured out the sort of display reliabilty they have on Deck for desktop that would be a major step forward. Granted, that’s several steps down the line. An endgame solution needs to have out of the box support for all GPUs and their drivers (and good driver support in the first place), reliable support for VRR, support for multiple HDR standards and built-in monitor profiles, support for multimonitor with indepenent scaling and on the fly changes and more. Some of that is already in there on SteamOS, some of that is a long way away.
But it’s the bar for success here. That’s when I consider switching for real. If someone else figures it out before Valve does, even if it involves building on top of Gamescope, then great, but Valve sure seem to be the closest, at least for gaming-focused setups.
For now I can see them adding support for specific closed hardware specs by certifying third party handhelds and consolized MiniPCs (hi, Steam Machines 2.0), but I won’t really perk up my ears until that includes at least one device with a high end dedicated Nvidia GPU and external display support.
There are two reasons I disagree with you there.
The least important one is booting straight into Game mode, which is good for TV top boxes meant to act as gaming consoles. I’m mostly fine with autobooting to Steam Big Picture on Windows, but people make a big deal of edge cases where you may need a mouse and keyboard, so the demand is there for a native implementation in living room situations.
The more important one, IMO, is SteamOS’s handling of displays, and especially of HDR. I recently spent a not insignificant amount of time and effort trying to get a fairly typical high end desktop setup (Nvidia card, couple of HDR monitors with high refresh rates and different resolutions) on an existing Linux distro and… yeah, it’s not good. Not only did I have to try multiple distros and do some manual configuration until I found the right mix to get everything going under Wayland/KDE Plasma, but the end result is kinda flaky still and struggles with going in and out of sleep without breaking everything.
If, and it’s a significant if, Valve figured out the sort of display reliabilty they have on Deck for desktop that would be a major step forward. Granted, that’s several steps down the line. An endgame solution needs to have out of the box support for all GPUs and their drivers (and good driver support in the first place), reliable support for VRR, support for multiple HDR standards and built-in monitor profiles, support for multimonitor with indepenent scaling and on the fly changes and more. Some of that is already in there on SteamOS, some of that is a long way away.
But it’s the bar for success here. That’s when I consider switching for real. If someone else figures it out before Valve does, even if it involves building on top of Gamescope, then great, but Valve sure seem to be the closest, at least for gaming-focused setups.
For now I can see them adding support for specific closed hardware specs by certifying third party handhelds and consolized MiniPCs (hi, Steam Machines 2.0), but I won’t really perk up my ears until that includes at least one device with a high end dedicated Nvidia GPU and external display support.