A follow-up:

Lenovo --which was following Valve's footsteps by releasing their own
handheld gaming PC, the Legion Go-- has announced that a new version
will be released in June. However, while the previous Legion Go used a
version of Windows 11, this update will be running SteamOS. Which, you
know... cool. Anything to make Microsoft maybe rethink its plans about
how to make Windows worse because 'what can the customer do about it,
run Linux?' Well, yeah... maybe they can.



But even more, Valve has announced that SteamOS is going to be getting
better compatibility with ARM hardware. I'm far less sanguine about
this news.

It's not that I dislike ARM hardware. It's actually quite impressive
kit and can punch significantly above its weight limit. I think it's
probably inevitable that PC/gaming hardware will eventually abandon
its x86/x64 roots and move to ARM. It's not only that x86/x64 is
pretty long-in-the-tooth, but there's real advantage to developers not
having to develop for multiple architectures.

But as impressive as ARM is, it still doesn't hold a candle to the
performance of a specced up PC with a discrete graphics subsystem. If
you want that sort of capability on ARM, you'll probably be forced to
offload some of the processing into the cloud. Which isn't a bad thing
for mobile devices to do. But my PC ain't mobile, and I want that work
done locally. It's (usually) faster, it's more private, and it doesn't
force me to depend on the developer maintaining their servers for me
to use the program.

But if gaming starts shifting towards ARM, it seems increasingly
likely we will lose a lot of those advantages.

So I'm not crazy that Steam is embracing ARM. I'd rather they stick to
the old hegemony, even if that too has its share of problems. But the
new ideas don't really fix them, and seem to bring new issues too.







--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)