Natanael

Even as a Linux desktop it would mostly just be interesting for devs and people doing relatively lightweight 3D design work (especially because it will take a while before other distros support it), I don't see it competing against regular desktops.

Any company who depend on their employees having a decent GPU will likely want to be able to upgrade/reconfigure new orders at will, and will prefer a tower, and they will prefer the quick repairability of a tower. Those who don't are increasingly ok with using mini PCs.

Rumors is that the original Zen CPU SoC in the Steam Deck was also the leftovers from another canceled project by "a major OEM", so it's plausible. Sounds like Microsoft planned a handheld Xbox much earlier, which years after the Deck turned into the ROG collaboration, could have been related

FEX will have a performance penalty for CPU bound games (not for graphics if it supports Vulkan (yay passthrough)) so native is better

The compatibility bit is actually not a major problem here, because the target environment for software on SteamOS is actually a portable container environment and not the OS itself.

You can make the Steam Linux runtime work on any distro with Kubernetes or equivalent as long as they support the container image format and dependencies like Vulkan

The secret trick is that they can do both.

The actual software target is their Steam Linux Runtime container. So all you need to install is the container environment, and if your 3rd party OS does that for you then you're already done.

I'm sure somebody will make Moonlight work with it

You also need calibrated sensors and antennas to track the beacons, but OTOH it does have extension ports

They put less resources in other environments, but more than none

They're literally memeing on the store page about it being based on Arch (by the way)

There's some slots for peripherals, so it's definitely doable

I heard it from digital foundry

The friend she said you shouldn't worry about gave her a band pass