Given many new handhelds coming on the scene and general disinterest of Microsoft to support the market, do you think SteamOS will take place of default OS the same way Android did on phones some time ago?
Given many new handhelds coming on the scene and general disinterest of Microsoft to support the market, do you think SteamOS will take place of default OS the same way Android did on phones some time ago?
No, Steam doesn’t support arm. So my hacked Switch runs cobbled together emulationstation + xfce + antimicrox + onboard. I don’t like Horizon OS and only SuperTuxKart works flawlessly on Android for me. In SuperTux, the sound desyncs from the game. Minetest doesn’t support gamepads, and I couldn’t find any Android alternative to AntiMircoX. I also just don’t like how 99% of Android apps “need” Google Play Services.
Linux is what I need, but there isn’t any decent interface that isn’t SteamOS (x86 only) or RetroArch (everything must use libretro) or batocera.linux (their version of emulationstation completely shits itself when ran outside of batocera, and I really don’t want to recompile batocera)
There are several x86/x86_64 on ARM emulators in development to solve this problem. The main two are box86 and FEX. Both are able to run Steam on ARM Linux already, with varying degrees of playability. There is also qemu which has been around for much longer, but qemu doesn’t do much in the way of optimizing for speed while these newer emulators forward system and library calls on to native code where possible and use dynamic recompilation for speed.
I was able to play Half Life 2 from Steam on my PinePhone Pro when it first came out using box86. It was sort of playable.
I still prefer having a “native” system menu over one that’s being emulated.