I only have anecdotal evidence here, but I know two people who have switched their main gaming computers and laptops to linux recently, and in both cases the Steam Deck played a big part.
I’ve tried convincing people to move over, but in these cases, it wasn’t until they owned the steamdeck for a while and wanted to do something like adding emulators or games from another source that they dropped into desktop mode on the SD and had that experience.
I need a better analogy, but right now I think the Steam Deck is an outstanding Trojan Horse for linux adoption. Many people won’t bother going out of their way to use it as a computer, just a console, but it’s there if they do.
The Steam machines were a similar idea but linux wasn’t useful for gaming until DXVK, several years after the Steam machines. I was dual booting when they came out simply because running games on Linux at that time was a nightmare
Yeah and there’s the rub. If other handhelds only come in the steam OS variant people who come in looking for or expecting a Windows variant are still less likely to pick up the steam OS variant. On the other hand, I don’t know that this is true going the other way. People who want to steam OS variant will more be more likely to buy the Windows variant and flash it to what they want because that’s sort of the nature of a lot of Linux users in general.
I only have anecdotal evidence here, but I know two people who have switched their main gaming computers and laptops to linux recently, and in both cases the Steam Deck played a big part.
I’ve tried convincing people to move over, but in these cases, it wasn’t until they owned the steamdeck for a while and wanted to do something like adding emulators or games from another source that they dropped into desktop mode on the SD and had that experience.
I need a better analogy, but right now I think the Steam Deck is an outstanding Trojan Horse for linux adoption. Many people won’t bother going out of their way to use it as a computer, just a console, but it’s there if they do.
The Steam machines were a similar idea but linux wasn’t useful for gaming until DXVK, several years after the Steam machines. I was dual booting when they came out simply because running games on Linux at that time was a nightmare
Yeah and there’s the rub. If other handhelds only come in the steam OS variant people who come in looking for or expecting a Windows variant are still less likely to pick up the steam OS variant. On the other hand, I don’t know that this is true going the other way. People who want to steam OS variant will more be more likely to buy the Windows variant and flash it to what they want because that’s sort of the nature of a lot of Linux users in general.