Path: ...!Xl.tags.giganews.com!local-1.nntp.ord.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2025 17:45:02 +0000 From: Spalls Hurgenson Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action Subject: Even Lenovo's Getting Into The Act, Pt 2 Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2025 12:45:02 -0500 Message-ID: <01m2ojdr10d363t79vfqrf9a2ud88mub4g@4ax.com> X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 2.0/32.652 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 60 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-q2uQV2pxuBbLvCdmdZSY46Br/8u5IiCMLGge+0VhqxMiwdPsA4/RLNf1k2bKv0N5o5OvwXowRa3Z9ET!FbItg/NsspdhoXN5pSUujDXZEz9m3IKqvs71Uz8qcoPFNMfR4A8L8Q39yY0Xx18fuxhZmc3L X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 Bytes: 4068 A few months ago, it was announced that Lenovo was pushing its way into the handheld gaming-PC market with the release of its 'Legion Go' device. Essentially a 'SteamDeck' clone, its biggest difference was that it ran Windows 11 rather than SteamOS. This allowed it to run a wide range of apps and games, but on the other hand... Windows 11, amirite? But recent reports show that the Legion Go is getting a refresh, and will be offered (as an option) with pre-installed SteamOS, bringing the device closer to Valve's own platform. Now, personally I couldn't give a damn about the Legion GO... or SteamDeck, for that matter. I just don't really have an interest in handheld PCs, except as a nifty gimmick/toy. I barely can stand to use a laptop. When I computer, I want BIG screens, BIG monitors, and BIG power. I want sound that can shake the windows, more on-hand storage than Google, and more hardware peripherals than... erm, something that has a lot of hardware peripherals (sorry, ran out of steam there at the end with my comparisons). A handheld -or laptop- gives me none of these things. But I am excited about that SteamOS thing. Because Legion Go is the first third-party OEM to use it since the ill-fated SteamMachines debacle of ten years ago, and the first to use the modern SteamOS-with-Proton that has proven to be amazingly (even if nowhere near perfectly) capable of playing most games. I don't want a portable device with SteamOS; I want a desktop running it! Now, technically, you /can/ run SteamOS on your desktop today; if not the official version, then near-clones of the OS like Bazzite and others. The problem is, these distros are all very AMD biased, with poor support for Nvidia. This isn't entirely the fault of the distros --or SteamOS, for that matter-- as Nvidia has been extremely petty with open-sourcing its drivers. GeForce support has been a rough spot for all Linux distros. But if SteamOS starts getting wider-spread adoption, the hope is that Nvidia might be forced to reconsider its policy. [It's not so much that you can't run SteamOS/Bazzite/clones on Nvidia hardware, but all the advantages of doing so --especially regarding Proton support-- are largely limited to AMD GPUs. If you use a SteamOS/clone on the desktop with Nvidia, you're just getting a sub-par Linux desktop] And that's my biggest take-away from the Lenovo announcement: that one day we might see SteamOS actually become something that runs on a wide-range of commodity PC hardware, and not just the tiny subset it runs on today. Like many, the primary reason I still use Windows at all is because it's the platform for gaming on PCs. I'd happily switch over entirely to Linux if it were a better option. I think a lot of people would too. But right now it's Nvidia's recalcitrance that is hampering that change. Maybe if more OEMs like Lenovo start pushing SteamOS, the pressure from customers and OEMs will finally make Nvidia change its tune.