Jonni Bidwell pries Valve’s Steam Deck from PC Gamer’s cold, anthropomorphised hands and gets his game on.

When the Steam Client came to Linux it was a watershed moment for gaming. At the time of its official release in January 2013, Linux gamers could run some 50 titles, most of which were Valve titles based on its Source engine. A year later, that number had risen to 300. Today, thanks to Valve’s Proton (a fork of Wine featuring a DirectX to Vulkan transition layers), that number is over 6,000. Driving this recent push has been the Steam Deck, Valve’s all-new Linuxpowered portable games machine.

This is undoubtedly one of the largest developments Linux gaming has seen since the turn of the millennium. So naturally we were keen to get hold of the hardware and see what it’s capable of. The Steam Deck is powered by the third edition of SteamOS, which is based on Arch Linux. This gives it easy access to modern kernels, and the latest drivers for its (not inconsiderable) Zen 2 APU. This also means we can to meddle with it in the same way we like to meddle with regular Linux PCs.

So gather round the Deck’s crisp 1,280x720 display and see how you can customise and tweak this marvel of modern gaming. Also, it can do old games, DRM-free games and games that run in the terminal. And if you don’t like games you can plug it into a dock and use it as a regular Linux device and starting at £350 it’s not even that expensive!.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see how Valve’s previous innovations and efforts have informed the Steam Deck. First came the Steam Machines, but that never really worked out. Because who really wanted an overpriced gaming PC (however stylish) in their front room? Attempts were made to decouple the SteamOS operating system from the Machines, so that it would become a major league gaming distribution. That didn’t really work either, since most Linux gamers were happy to install Steam on their current distro.

The choice of Debian as a base for SteamOS seemed reasonable from both a hardware and software stance. But the need for new libraries meant SteamOS was Debian Unstable with a custom kernel and various userspace modifications. Not the kind of thing people would want to be running as their daily driver. Maybe the plan should have been for Steam to work better on Steam Machines than regular Linux. Anyway, let’s continue the story of Valve’s hardware devices that should have done better.