Author: Winni

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Valve Steam Deck versus Nintendo Switch 2

I own an original Nintendo Switch, a Nintendo Switch 2 and a Lenovo Legion Go S  that is currently running the officially supported SteamOS 3.8 – I did not want to buy a by now out-dated Steam Deck.

The Legion Go S is a beautiful machine that I really enjoy using; playing Abiotic Factor on that gorgeous 8″ VRR screen and with that great ergonomic controller is absolutely amazing.

But still, the winner is the Switch 2. And it’s not even a contest.

The Switch 2 is a true engineering marvel: It is super thin, weighs nothing despite its large 7.9″ VRR display and is still powerful. (Although nobody wants to hear or admit this, the Switch 2 is more powerful than the Steam Deck and its aged APU and it can also hold its own against the more powerful Legion Go S). It is the only flawlessly functioning hybrid console on the market, it costs less than its competition, but its real killer feature for me is the fact that it is entirely NOISELESS.

In regard to the “Nintendo is expensive” campaign that is raging on the Internet: There are always hundreds of games on sale in the Nintendo eShop every single day at prices that can easily compete with Steam, Xbox and PlayStation. Yes, first party Nintendo titles don’t drop that much or that often in price (but they still go on sale every now and then), but the over 16,000 other titles in the eShop very often go on deep sales – and unlike on Steam, I have the guarantee that they are compatible with my device and I don’t have to worry about strange Linux/Proton incompatibilities.

The fact that the Steam Deck and other PC handhelds are full-blown PCs actually works against them and their usability – nobody in their right mind will ever want to use them as a PC, having a full-blown Linux or Windows under the hood is counter-productive, even if it is a brutally stripped-down version of Linux like SteamOS: It’s dead weight. Also, if you want to install software/games that you did not buy from the Steam store, you MUST drop down to the Linux desktop – and then nothing is straight forward and user friendly anymore and you actually have to deal with real PC issues. And that is not attractive on a device that is supposed to entertain and relax you and to offer you an escape.

The Switch 2 on the other hand knows exactly what it is and what it wants to be, and it does the job of a hybrid gaming console perfectly. Being able to unplug the console mid-game and just keep using the machine is a feature that I use frequently – because I can and because it really just works.

The Switch 2 also does not care if you lose Internet connectivity, your games will still run: There is no stupid “offline mode” that you need to prepare and activate on the Switch 2 – it knows that you have a license for the game and it will let you play it, whether you’re online or not. (Even Microsoft makes it easier to use a device offline than Valve.) Unlike Steam, Nintendo’s DRM is straight forward and unobtrusive.

Let’s be clear about one thing: In the software, movie and music industry, you, the customer, never owned the software, movie or music – you only owned the physical medium, but NEVER the content that was on the medium. Even with music or movies, you always only bought a very limited use license. You just never bothered to read the fine print on the record, the movie box or the EULA that came with your software. Any IP holder can always at any time withdraw that license and then you’re left with a physical medium that you are not allowed to use anymore.

As far as games are concerned, Valve brought this business model to the PC gaming world in 2005 with Half-Life 2 and the mandatory Steam DRM client – and while doing so they successfully killed physical media forever. Thanks to their DRM, Valve can also disable your games at any given time. So can Microsoft, Sony, Epic, Amazon, Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and everybody else who is forcing a launcher, online account or DRM client on you.

If you’re really into software preservation, GOG is the only software store that sells you at least some control: All software that you buy there is DRM free and you can download (and archive) offline installers for the games. While this does not change the legal side of things and the fact that you are still only buying a limited use license, you can at least rest assured that the Intellectual Property/Copyright holders have no technical means to disable the software at any point in the future.

If thinking about DRM keeps you awake at night, then GOG is the only place to go to buy games. (And that is the reason why I buy my PC games there whenever possible – unfortunately, not all game developers sell their products there: Game publishers love DRM, because that is how they can control and milk their customers.)

Recommendation:

If you’re new to the market and want to buy a handheld gaming device, you cannot go wrong with the Switch 2.

But if you already have an existing library of games that you want to carry over to a mobile device and if your eyes are compatible with a small 7″ screen (mine are NOT), you might want to wait until October 16 when ASUS and Microsoft are going to release the ROG Xbox Ally (X) – with its new “Xbox Windows” operating system, this device has chances to be a disruptive game changer in the PC handheld market.

To everybody else who wants a PC handheld I will recommend the Lenovo Legion Go S with SteamOS or the forthcoming Legion Go 2, provided that it will either ship with SteamOS or that it will also get the new “Xbox Windows” that Microsoft will first ship with the ROG Xbox Ally.

Due to its age and increasing performance issues with new AAA games and its lack of a VRR display (which should be a mandatory feature for gaming handhelds), the Steam Deck cannot be recommended anymore, no matter how important and fascinating the device might have been.

I also do not believe for a second that there will ever be a Steam Deck 2 now that Valve is licensing SteamOS to OEMs – SteamOS only occupies a small niche market and Valve cannot compete with their OEMs on their own turf, that should be a pretty straight forward logical conclusion.

Also, Valve makes its money with the Steam store, not with the extremely costly development of hardware. Nintendo sold more Switch 2 units in the first three weeks than Valve has sold Steam Decks in three years (look up the numbers, it’s a fact) – there really is no incentive for Valve to pursue the hardware market any further when they can just license their store front to other companies whose core competence is the hardware business. Even the trillion dollar company Microsoft is now retreating from hardware development and is letting ASUS do the job for them.

tl;dr

“Just get a Switch 2.” 🤗

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Will Linux/SteamOS eventually replace Windows for gaming?

Digital Foundry posted a video on YouTube asking the question “Will Linux/SteamOS eventually replace Windows for gaming?“

The short answer is: No, never.

WINE/Proton will always be at least one step behind the current state of the real Windows operating system and many parts of commercial game development simply cannot take place natively on GNU/Linux for proprietary and licensing reasons of third party dependencies alone.

GNU/Linux might be great for Open Source stuff – but because of its GPL license and the fact that most parts of its runtime environment and libraries are also licensed under the GPL, it can quickly become a legal nightmare for Closed Source products. That’s the main reason why Apple’s operating systems and the Nintendo Switch OS and Sony’s Playstation OS are built on top of FreeBSD and not GNU/Linux.

And now I will stop calling it GNU/Linux and will just call it Linux instead. For those who don’t know: The software generally known as Linux is just an operating system kernel, it is NOT a full operating system. Traditionally, the GNU “GNU’s Not Unix” parts bring the missing pieces to the table that make Linux a full operating system. And then come the so-called distributions that take all those pieces and configure and customize them in their own – incompatible to each other – fashion and ship them as individual operating systems. For example, what runs on Ubuntu or openSuSE or Red Hat or Gentoo is out of the box not necessarily compatible with the ArchOS-based SteamOS by Valve Software, even though they all are Linuxes… Confused yet? We have not even spoken about the many different graphical user interfaces and desktops…

Linux is such a diverse landscape that it’s chaos incarnate.

The many different distributions and their varying software versions make the deployment of binary builds on Linux a complete nightmare – Linus Torvalds himself pointed that out, and in that same public appearance he also mentioned that Valve could only solve the deployment problem by creating huge statically linked binaries.

There was another quote in that video that I want to comment on:

“Using Windows is annoying at times.”

My response to this:

Absolutely. And yet, it still is lightyears ahead of any Linux desktop system and even macOS.

Windows still is the only platform that has viable solutions for ALL (industrial) niches and it also is the only platform that does NOT need to carry a second OS in a VM around to run industrial software to get things done.

In commercial satellite communications, for example, there exists a shitload of management and configuration software for super-expensive bread & butter hardware that only runs on Windows – and that’s an industry where I spent ten years of my life earning my living. In biological/genetic research, where I also spent a few years heading an IT department, the situation is the same: Microscopes costing a million Euros a piece only support Windows. The list goes on through other industrial niches.

People who always advice other people to install a Windows VM for the one or two apps that don’t run natively on Linux or macOS fail to understand that having a second OS in a VM DOUBLES the administrative overhead while at the same time reducing available system resources, sacrificing performance and usability while at the same time significantly increasing the complexity and actual cost of ownership. In short: It’s very bad advice, usually coming from naive wishful thinking and blind ideology.

I’m using computers since the very early 1980s and I’ve been in professional IT for over 35 years now – I’ve used it all, from the Sinclair ZX81 over the Apple II and the early IBM PCs to IBM mainframes and large long-term storage clusters with robotic tape libraries that are required by law to archive (genetic research and/or clinical) data for 30 to 60 years.

I’ve spent two decades of my life personally maintaining hundreds of Linux servers and I’ve also had and owned dozens of Macs – if anything, I am platform agnostic, but I also have decades of real world experience with each platform.

I’ve used Linux desktop systems and Macs for my personal stuff for years – but I always had to get back to using Windows because something I needed never was available on any other platform. And at some point you need to accept that a platform is only truly viable when it does NOT need to carry around another platform in a VM to get the job done.

Nobody will ever invest in porting software to a new platform or even rewriting existing legacy software just because icons in cornflower blue are now the latest hype – and Windows is the only platform that actually cares for longevity. The developers at Microsoft go through great lengths to provide backwards compatibility for software that was written decades ago. In contrast, Apple breaks something with every annual macOS update – and when you don’t have the source code of the software that you’re using on Linux, well, guess where that will take you after a distribution upgrade.

Love it or hate it: Where people do actual work and where bread & butter jobs need to get done in a finite amount of time, despite its many flaws and problems, the only functioning “one size fits all” platform still is Microsoft Windows.