I don’t quite understand the criticism. It’s not gonna be top of the line, but it’s more than enough to replace my dying laptop from 2015 that I pretty much only ever use like a desktop anyway. And I can save myself the time and effort of picking parts, building, and dealing with shit not working as expected.
I dunno. The Deck is/was sold at a slight loss in the hopes it would drive Steam sales.
Maybe so, but while the Deck has a desktop mode it is primarily still a console and used as such by the vast majority of its users. No-one in their right mind would use it as their main PC unless they absolutely have to.
The Machine on the other hand, I can totally see that happening.
I’m currently using my steamdeck as my main PC, because of my cramped dorm room space at college lol.
It’s kinda neat figuring out what works and what doesn’t. The worst part is the immutable updates removing non-flatpack software.
There’s a project that persists non-flatpack software, though it might screw up if it changes something that Valve updates: https://github.com/Chloe-ko/SteamDeckPersistentRootFs
A more reliable method would be installing them in distrobox. It’s kinda like a VM, but it uses the same kernel so it’s not much slower.
And it worked, anecdotally from my perspective as a Steam Decker. If there are two identical sales on differing platforms (like Ubis🤮ft) I choose the Steam one so I can play it on the Deck.
I think the main problem is since the steam machine is relatively open and, if it is sold at a loss, then companies will bulk buy them to replace their infrastructure. A bit like what happened to one of the PlayStation releases.
The playstation 3 sold like that because of the super powerful (compared to cost of equal pc at the time) cpu. The gabecube isn’t unique hardware wise, so even at cost, or slightly below, I couldn’t see this being a goto machine for infrastructure replacement. Many current sff devices already have more powerful cpu options available.