BF2S Forums Steam Deck

It does have an SD card slot for storage expansion.  In testing, the difference in loading times between even the faster NVMe drives offered with the Deck, and a reasonably high quality SD card is somehow not very big for most games, although I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head.

Yeah, I think it is both physically larger and weighs more than the Switch.  It's certainly a bit of a compromise of a device.

The thing that really bothers me about it as a new production device of its kind, is that many of its current and future competitors support at least Thunderbolt 3, meaning their USB-C port effectively doubles as a PCI-e slot, which means that: Ideally when you're docked at home and don't need the mobility, you can pair up these surprisingly performant mobile CPUs with a much beefier full-size graphics card that obviously would perform much better and also not steal your RAM for its VRAM(Steam Deck's GPU can borrow up to 8GB of the 16GB of system RAM it shares with the CPU).  Devices like this could potentially become a casual gamer's everything PC if they don't otherwise have use for a laptop, essentially a true PC version of the Switch where it amplifies the power when docked.  Unfortunately Valve deviated from what everybody else was doing and worked out a special deal with AMD, who has always been either late or a no-show to the Thunderbolt party, even though it's royalty-free through the USB standard now, and they've once again neglected to put it into the bleeding edge hardware that's now being used for Steam Deck.

I know it's kind of a niche case at the moment, but it just seems like such a waste when compared.  Although to be fair, those competing devices also cost sometimes twice as much or more than the Deck though.  Valve was surely able to get a deal from AMD in order to bring the cost down this much, because they probably knew they would sell the shit out of these and AMD was more willing to negotiate than Intel was.

Yeah, Valve seems to be firmly on their own with this one.  Nobody with their own marketplace is ready to touch Linux yet, but a lot of Linux gamers are hoping the Deck will be what changes that.  Only time will tell I guess.  I like when everybody can play on the platform they want to play on, even if Linux isn't my particular cup of tea, and Microsoft could certainly stand to feel some kind of significant competition in the OS market from something other than Mac, in order to maybe get them to stop powering ahead with the shit they want that their users don't.  So by all means, more power to the Linux users.

"Gaming is coming to Linux" is something I have heard people say for like 10 years minimum. Never happens. Turns out nobody wants to learn how to use command lines to do stuff. Nobody wants to learn how to use open source programs with lesser features either. Dual boot? Install a Windows VM? Just use Windows. For what it's worth, Windows has become much less obnoxious with updates too.

The only handheld gaming device I would consider buying is a switch. There are more games available for MacOS and I already own a Mac so why get a handheld thing that will play fewer games?

A switch is also cool since you can play with multiple people in real life with the detachable controllers. Actually cool if a lady takes one out of her purse to play with. Somebody using a steam deck to play cyberpunk in public is just weird.