My main game console right now is one of those little gaming boxes you can buy on Amazon for about $400, where I have installed NixOS + Jovian to get the "SteamOS" interface.
I really like it. It really does feel like a "game console"; usually when I've made my own console using Linux, it always feels kind of janky. For example, RetroPie on the Raspberry Pi is pretty cool, but it doesn't feel like a proper commercial product, it feels like a developer made a GUI to launch games.
I have like 750 games on Steam that I have hoarded over the years, in addition to the Epic Games Store and GOG, which can be installed with Heroic, and the fact that I can play them on a "console" instead of a computer makes it much easier to play in my living room or bedroom. It even works fine with the Xbox One controllers; I use the official Microsoft USB dongle to minimize latency, it works great.
I think there actually is a chance that Valve could really be a real competitor, if not a winner.
Set top box [1], like an Nvidia Shield TV [2], to play (digital) TV and other programs. My point being, would you be able to have this machine function as such (not so much portable, rather standalone with a remote control). Because that way, you take the hardware STB out of the equation, saving you (on the Nvidia Shield TV Pro) a good 200 EUR.
I tried making it my main media center, but I couldn't figure out a way to get good quality streaming from the main services, since they limit the quality and bitrate pretty heavily for the browsers. I thought I could just live with it, but it was bad enough to really bother me. After a lot of effort to try and get things working with different emulators and user agent settings, I was unsuccessful getting the quality tolerable.
I haven't fully given up on that dream, but right now I'm just using an Nvidia Shield TV that I already had.
I meant they have set up the Nix directory so you can write to it without having to mess around with bind mounts, overlayfs, etc. because the system is normally read-only.
IIRC, the nix package manager can run entirely user-level on any distro. It doesn't ship on the Deck, but it's the same process there as anywhere else.
Which box is that? I personally have a Nvidia Shield with Steam Link to stream games from my gaming computer to my TV. I connected an Xbox controller and it works pretty well. I also use an old iPad for streaming games for games that don't lend themselves well to a controller.
It's obviously not a direct replacement since it still relies on my gaming machine, which not everyone has, but it gets a pretty good console experience, and it's portable.
The one I ordered had 32 gigs of memory; this was more than a year ago so I'm sure there are better ones now, but I have to say that I feel like this thing "punches above its weight" in that it does seem to run a lot more stuff than I thought it would at a decent framerate.
I have one of the higher-end beelinks. Super small, quiet, doesn't get hot and I can play modern AAA titles on it, driving my huge screen TV in my living room.
Can you quantify this? Which Beelink? Are you powering a 4K TV? When you talk about playing modern AAA games, which ones, and what settings do you run at?
Thanks for this! I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a 4K TV with my ROG Ally X right now, but I added an eGPU to get nicer 4K graphics. Very cool to hear that a mini is capable of playing it too!
Very very cool! Every time I look at building a hot gaming PC I think to myself that I'm just going to play SNES games and Elden Ring, so what's the point? Something like this would be great.
I really like it. It really does feel like a "game console"; usually when I've made my own console using Linux, it always feels kind of janky. For example, RetroPie on the Raspberry Pi is pretty cool, but it doesn't feel like a proper commercial product, it feels like a developer made a GUI to launch games.
I have like 750 games on Steam that I have hoarded over the years, in addition to the Epic Games Store and GOG, which can be installed with Heroic, and the fact that I can play them on a "console" instead of a computer makes it much easier to play in my living room or bedroom. It even works fine with the Xbox One controllers; I use the official Microsoft USB dongle to minimize latency, it works great.
I think there actually is a chance that Valve could really be a real competitor, if not a winner.