Steam OS
Linux based game OS compatible with Steam only. Locked to the Valveverse.
What a weird thing to lie about on the home page of your company.
Not that I would, because it’s trash, but you can install Epic Games Launcher on your steam deck.
https://www.polygon.com/guides/23548311/epic-games-launcher-steam-deck-install-protonup
Fortnite still doesn’t work due to anti cheat which is probably what some people are looking for.
That issue will be true on any linux platform because Epic Games is a nasty company that doesn’t care about consumer friendly practices. How will this device get around that?
Regardless, to say that the Steam Deck is locked down to the steamverse, is such a weird thing to lie about. You can install basically anything on Steam Deck:
It still won’t work with Playtron since it also can’t load Windows kernel drivers under Linux.
The only way this could ever happen without also making it work for SteamOS is if they made a deal with Epic to either support user mode anticheat with their OS or to compile and ship ring 0 anticheat with every release of Playtron.
Fortnite works (confirmed in beta), both anticheats it uses work, Epic just needs to enable Linux support in the EAC dashboard and ship the library to get EAC to work, and for BattlEYE all that is required is an email. They just don’t care about us.
It really is amazing at how little effort it takes, and even that is to much to expect from these enormous companies.
Everything about this seems kinda sus. The website is worded very strangely, makes a lot of big but really vague claims, shits on other OSs, just generally seems… again, “kinda sus” is the best way my lizard brain can describe it.
Sounds very interesting, but I can’t shake the feeling that this company is looking to profit from Valve and the OSS community’s contibutions to Linux gaming without contributing much back.
On the plus side, at least the Box86 developer and a couple others they’ve hired from various Linux gaming projects are now getting paid for their contributions 👍. They also managed to get The Witcher 3 running on an ARM device which is pretty cool.
Playtron hasn’t quite decided just how open source it’ll be, though, and how much it will cater to Linux power gamers versus the next hundred million that Playtron hopes to bring into the fold.
Seems likely that Playtron would follow Valve’s apprach where the client application/shell is proprietary IMO, with the rest of the OS remaining open source.
There’ll be no Linux desktop mode.
Hard pass for me, since the deck is also a partial laptop replacement in my case. The article also mentions wanting power users to debug the alpha version of the OS they’ll be releasing in 2 months or so - not too sure how they expect that to happen if they’re not providing a DE besides their Playtron shell.
I’ll be following the progress of their OS though, will be interesting to see if they’ll aim for Valve’s pretty tight hardware integration or whether they’ll keep things on the more generic side like we see with the current Windows handhelds
lol, DOA for sure.
