A mention in this week's Steam Deck firmware patch notes has some observers speculating that Valve is preparing to release its well-regarded Linux build for third-party hardware....
One of the Steam Deck's primary advantages over more powerful handheld gaming PCs is its operating system, which is designed to mimic a game console interface within a Linux PC environment. Valve has long planned to bring the OS to other devices, but a recent Steam Deck software update includes the first mention of a rival handheld.
Im excited for something like this as I would like to see more form factors. tv sticks, tablets, workstations, gaming laptops. I know anyone can do the last two but having a hardware vendor cover the software officialy is sorta a big thing
The Steam Link tried and succeeded at this. My guess is only technical people understood its use-case at the time. For hardware to do well on a large scale it needs to be standalone. You turn it on and immediately see the benefit of it. Can't be dependent on the customer's other hardware.
well it will help if you can get many of the same internet streaming apps you have with firetv stick and such. so people might just buy it to steam netflix and be part of the market outside of the ones using the game streaming.
They didn't abandon it, they opened it up to anything running at least Andriod 8.0 or newer. So basically every Andriod device made since 2015 can run Steam Link, maybe not at a quality seen as appropriate but it'll run.
I believe so yes (tbh forgot it was a thing) but for example my smart TV does not have a steam link app available for some reason (LGC3) and I would definitely stream to it given the chance. Not sure why the steam app is not available.