One of the Steam Deck’s primary advantages over more powerful handheld gaming PCs is its operating system, which is designed to mimic a game console interface within a Linux PC environment. Valve has long planned to bring the OS to other devices, but a recent Steam Deck software update includes the first mention of a rival handheld.

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24 points

Isn’t that what the Steam Link tried to do?

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14 points

The Steam Link tried and succeeded at this. My guess is only technical people understood its use-case at the time. For hardware to do well on a large scale it needs to be standalone. You turn it on and immediately see the benefit of it. Can’t be dependent on the customer’s other hardware.

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3 points

well it will help if you can get many of the same internet streaming apps you have with firetv stick and such. so people might just buy it to steam netflix and be part of the market outside of the ones using the game streaming.

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4 points

It is, but Steam has a habit of iterating, maybe we’ll see an updated Steam Link- like device in the future?

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4 points

They abandoned it because they could just build it into TVs.

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7 points

They didn’t abandon it, they opened it up to anything running at least Andriod 8.0 or newer. So basically every Andriod device made since 2015 can run Steam Link, maybe not at a quality seen as appropriate but it’ll run.

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4 points

Unfortunately smart TV’s are just a step up from potatoes. Having separate hardware is gereally better than a smart TV app

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2 points

Yes, but it really only works at low latency over a wired connection. It’s great for video or games where input lag isn’t a big deal.

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1 point

yeah and steam had a desktop I think but Im hoping it just sorta being cheaply licensed will work out better for that kind of thing.

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1 point

Loved that thing, I could play party games from downstairs with our 5ghz network. Made college weekends so much fun!

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1 point

I believe so yes (tbh forgot it was a thing) but for example my smart TV does not have a steam link app available for some reason (LGC3) and I would definitely stream to it given the chance. Not sure why the steam app is not available.

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