Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
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Nov 21, 2025 at 12:29 PM EST
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Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing.
Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.
Hardware not so much
Most hardware is actually relatively simple (though hardware engineers do their best to turn it into an incomprehensible mess). Software can get pretty much arbitrarily complex.
In a way I suspect it's because hardware engineers are mostly old fogies stuck in the 80s using 80s technologies like Verilog. They haven't evolved the tools that software developers have that enable them to write extremely complicated programs.
I have hope for Veryl though.
With hardware, you have about one billion validation tests and QA processes, because when you're done, you're done and it had better work. Fixing an "issue" is very very expensive, and you want to get rid of them. However, this also makes the process more of, to stereotype, an "engineer's engineering" practice. It's very rules based, and if everything follows the rules and passes the tests, it's done. It doesn't matter how "hacky" or "badly architected" or "nasty" the input product is, when it works, it works. And, when it's done, it's done.
On the other hand, software is highly human-oriented and subjective, and it's a continuous process. With Linux working the way it does, with an intentionally hostile kernel interface, driver software is even more so. With Linux drivers you basically chose to either get them upstreamed (a massive undertaking in personality management, but Valve's choice here), deal with maintaining them in perpetuity at enormous cost as every release will break them (not common), or give up and release a point in time snapshot and ride into the sunset (which is what most people do). I don't really think this is easier than hardware, it's just a different thing.
Obviously it has to “work” at sale but ongoing maintenance could be shared with the community.
It's fine (or arguably not) for locked down corporate devices.
Not so fine for building computers people want to use and own themselves.
Cynical: Valve doesn't sell hardware or operating systems, they sell games. These devices are merely another storefront.
Optimistic: Valve has also figured out how to turn good will into a commodity. Blowing cash on Steam sales is a bit of a cultural centerpiece of the PC gaming community.
Gabe has proven that you can make stupid amounts of money by [mostly] doing right by the consumer. I'm not sure if there's more to the secret source, her sauce, because we've yet to see another CEO pull their head out of their arse far enough to see how lucrative this approach can be: consumerism is fickle, fanaticism is loyal.
Goes for console controllers too.
Also possible the touchpads are better for fatigue than joysticks
I bought the SteamDeck because it looked like a cool product and I liked the openness ("it's just running Linux"), and I love it. And it got me back into gaming :-).
I ended up selling it to a friend because I enjoy making things much more, but the Deck is such a fantastic device.
My comment was more to prove that it possible to do open source while having share holders. My claim that Google does more is auxiliary to it.
Even this article it is not clear how beneficial some of their open source work is for everyone except Valve.
The repo[0] is basically an issue tracker and the hardware is not open either (but they're repair-friendly which is already an improvement over... everything else.)
They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear. If you subtract the GPU, you can get an comparable Beelink for ~$350. ~$500 would be the zero-margin price for a Steam Machine. It seems to me that the only people willing to pay an extra $150 for a mid-range GPU that's not good for AI would be gamers.
Not to mention that the Beelink comes with a Windows license, and the Steam Machine doesn't.
I can understand that, OTOH I have a $1500 gaming PC (probably worth far less now--I built it over a year ago) for explicitly that purpose. What I don't have is a modern, low-power living room HTPC with native/first-class Linux support on which to run Kodi (I have a custom one that's quite long in the tooth). If I could dock a steam deck in my living room and use it for Kodi 80% of the time with games for the remaining 20%, why should Valve care? I have already given Valve hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in game sales.
Everytime their name pops up it's inevitably "oh some thankless extremely technical low level work leading to impressive/long-awaited features"
Their customers, Valve, in this case, deserve credit for being good FLOSS citizens (even if they are building a DRM walled garden on top of it :/), but the actual workers are the real unsung heroes. Them, Codethink, Collabora, and other open-source consultancies I might have missed are doing the community a huge service."
Additionally you can get a lot of the benefits of Steam (Proton etc.) even for titles you didn't acquire through Steam - you can add and launch third party executables through the Steam client.
Steam is not exactly a walled garden save for some rather light curation of their own store.
This is gonna be fantastic.
Or maybe there's 2 next-gen Steam Decks, an ultra-portable ARM-based one that's as small as can be, and a more performant x86 one with AMD's next-gen APU...
They would realistically gain the most efficiency by getting Nvidia to design a modern super power efficient GPU like what was used in the original switch and Nvidia Shield. AMD GPUs can be great for desktop gaming but in terms of power efficiency to performance ratio Nvidia is way ahead
An AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU might be a hard thing to actually negotiate however given that AMD is big in the GPU space as well. As far as I know most "APU" aren't really that special and just a combo of GPU and CPU
BUT, what about a “Steam Deck Mini”? Something at/above the current Steam Deck, maybe a little closer to Switch 2, but smaller/thinner/maybe a little cheaper?
Yeah you’re not going to run Cyberpunk 2087: Johnny’s Rent Is Due. But older games, less demanding indie games, and many emulators would still work great. Plus remote play of your big desktop if you have one.
I’m not saying they will, but I could see it as a possibility.
The Frame is essentially there already, with what should be the top mobile arm setup.
If an x86 chipset dropped that fit their needs better, I don't think Valve would hesitate. I think it's just a matter of Valve trying to enable the best options down the road, whatever they may be.
One nit: it's too bad Valve / Igalia choose to completely ignore the lessons from Bazzite.
Bazzite already runs a scheduler like LAVD, called BORE[0]. It would have saved them a lot of work to extend and improve that rather than invent the wheel again. I'm not sure if Valve and Igalia are unaware of Bazzite and BORE or if this is a case of NIH.
Gamehub is a proprietary app by a Chinese controller manufacturer with some suspicious behavior and several LGPL violations that unfortunately works much better then the alternatives. Funnily enough their CDN endpoint is called "bigeyes", which when researching a bit was apparently their (failed) effort to bring x86 VR to ARM almost 10 years ago. Some people have "debloated" the app, but it seems very amateur hour to me and the process isn't very transparent (the GitHub repo is just a readme)
There's also GameNative, which seems promising, but is very buggy.
And Winlator itself, which is a mess of tons of tunables and different forks that I really don't have the patience for when PC handhelds exist today and have a much better ecosystem.
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