Thoughts on the Steam Deck and whether I plan to get one

 It's been awhile since news of the Steam Deck has been out, and I just wanted to share a few thoughts about it.

First off, Valve claims to learned a few lessons from the SteamOS petering out, and the Steam Deck is apparently an application of learning a few lessons from that experience. The particular high points of what seems to be lessons learned I plan to note and comment on.

1. The system itself is rather expensive, especially if you spring for the $699 version, but given it intends to make most Steam games run on a portable system, the price is lower than I expected, though while I remain optimistic they learned some lessons on the hardware side of things, I plan to reserve judgment on whether the price is justified until release.

2. The Steam deck will be using an ARM processor specialized for gaming and a Linux distro based on Arch as its core, which, given the rolling release bleeding edge support for Wine/Proton Steam relies on for Linux gamers wanting to run Windows games, strikes me as a good idea, especially since I use Arch on one of my laptops for the very same reason.

3. The Deck will use an SSD and the projected max memory means it's not likely going to support every single high-end game on the market, it's mostly aimed at the low to mid-end gamer crowd wanting to play Steam on a portable system, which seems realistic, given the form factor means cramming in hardware equivalent to a tricked out gaming computer with parts that cost a king's ransom appears wildly unrealistic.

4. I am a bit leery of what seems to be a planned obsolescence policy, as apparently the internal memory/SSD cannot be easily removed and upgraded, meaning it could be little more than a very expensive paperweight in a couple years if those die out. It will support external storage devices, similar to how the Switch supports MicroSD cards to extend its storable space, which may be a mitigating factor.

Overall, I'm going to approach this with a cautious optimism approach, and will likely give the release a month or two before seriously committing to a purchase, just in case the first release run goes horribly wrong, but having a very portable SteamOS does interest me nonetheless, especially since it will feature robust Proton support as well as native Linux support.