They didn’t earn $544M, they had $544M in revenue. They lost $124M but it’s all due to their decisions. They have a great operating margin in the 60s and spent all the money elsewhere.
Revenue is how much you sold stuff for. Profit is how much did you make after paying for everything to run your business. They got $544M but spent $668M, so they didn’t make a profit.
SteamOS also uses an immutable filesystem and the system updates as a whole. Because of that, there is no risk of something updating separately and breaking compatibility.
It's fairly common for things to update on regular linux distros and break e.g. anticheat support in Proton or some other thing.
Another thing SteamOS does, at least on the Steam Desk, is actually using two partitions. The updates are always installed to the inactive one, so there's always one image that's known to work. Even if an update fails, the device will simply boot into the intact OS image. Regular distros usually don't have much in terms of fail-safes, so if things break, they have to be fixed manually.
Basically, SteamOS is trying to be as reliable and "hands-off" of an OS as possible to provide best console-like experience.
It provides an alternative UI environment built and optimized for gaming. It has a separate windows manager, a complete ui, and a set of menus to simplify customization of whatever is needed for gaming and power saving.
And quick access to steam store.
It is extremely convenient if you like a console-like experience, but, if you are a tinker gamer, it has anyway a lot of nice additional features.
It is inconvenient as general purpose desktop os, because on update you basically lose packages not installed as flatpack
And it is somehow moddable, like people created plugins for the UI. I hope someone ends up adding alternative stores directly there and not just steam. But in any case you can install the respective apps and so on.
yes, it doesn’t run plasma when it’s in big picture, it runs it in github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope along with other tweaks, so it’s lower overhead and game windows tend to behave better
it also handles updates to os as well as to steam so you don’t ever end up with an update that breaks steam, they’re always in sync
Mainly that it’s specifically calibrated for running games on Linux. I’ve tried the Steam Deck and it works pretty damn well out the box, compared to any other distros, so a PC version would be cool.
Aside from native proton, being able to do everything (easily) from the controller. It’s amazing how often you still need a mouse, or just the windows key, in windows :(
What I really appreciate is that it’s geared toward handhelds, but has a decent desktop experience and is powerful enough to be a nice mobile media/piracy box with a remote and a USB-C breakout dongle. You don’t even need to change the read-only filesystem if you use WireGuard VPN (this might take some legwork to generate the .conf files you need, depends on VPN provider) and a streaming/torrenting program that comes in flatpak.
EDIT: Also forgot, you can add a custom shortcut to your Steam Library and have (some) programs launch from the SteamOS frontend rather than desktop.
Mostly just Valve specific software implements to make the experience better. SteamOS has a really good suspend/resume sleep feature where you can just power off the Deck during a game like any other console, then when you hit the power button again it just lights back up to where you were in the game.
The Steam deck is very quick though. I just paused Like a Dragon Gaiden and it took about 2 seconds to go to sleep, left it sitting on the table for an hour or so while I did some errands. Picked it back up and hit thepower button and I was back on the pause menu in about another 2 seconds.
Steam Deck "sleep" is more like locking your phone than it is like putting a Windows PC to sleep
We are dependent on the success of our customers in the gaming market. Adverse events relating to our customers or their games could have a negative impact on our business
Remind me, why did you alienate your customer base with a per install fee Unity?
It’s because they keep buying random companies. Then weirdly there’s those random companies don’t make them any money, and so the obvious illusion is to buy some more random companies.
Headline really feels like it's trying to imply unity is currently making a profit. They haven't been out of the red in a while. Businesses tend to die when they're bleeding money and there's no VC.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. There are a lot of accounting tricks to be constantly making losses but end up cash flow positive.
I don’t work or invest in Unity so I don’t have a great understanding of their metrics but companies I worked at would constantly capitalize new projects to add expenses in the future. You can structure sales deals so a new feature is added late in the contract. That pushes revenue out, but you can collect more cash early.
If unity didn’t do share buy backs this quarter, they would have a positive cash flow. Which points to they should be a profitable company but instead are using accounting tricks to post losses to lower tax bills.
I get the impression any more urgent gaps will be covered by the community.
I’ve used my Deck in its desktop mode, plugged in a dock, for extended periods when I didn’t have access to my PC, and it was a decent enough experience for the most part.
I could definitely see SteamDeck sized devices becoming standard computers with a dock for larger screen, IO, keyboard/mouse and maybe GPU in desktop mode while sizing down to a portable device for travel. Same games in both configuration just 4K high quality when docked and 1080 medium quality when handheld. Plus with a full Linux os it could become our main device.
I’ve been thinking about this for some time, but rather smartphones as the form factor. It aligns with the trend of converging technologies, where devices are becoming more multifunctional, and users are seeking more flexibility and efficiency from their gadgets. It’s a future-forward vision that I believe will redefine personal computing.
People have floated this idea of “dockable devices” for decades. Microsoft even made a Windows Phone that did it. The only time it worked was the Nintendo Switch, where they sold the dock together - and even then, I think their studies showed that a majority of players only play in one mode.
So it comes down to consumer friction. What do they get in one box, and how likely are they to buy a second?
I’m glad to hear they’re still working on it, they are one of the few companies I would actually trust to follow through with what they’re saying. It is in their best interest to deliver it so I’m sure they will.
Good thing the linux community already has pretty much all of their concerns covered? Linux already works on regular computers. I have bazzite, which is a drop in replacement for steam os, on my deck and my laptop, and in regular use you would never know the difference. It even has read only root like steam os, but you can install system packages that survive updates.
There is, IIRC, at least once other distro that I believe can do deck as well as regular PC installs, but I haven’t tried it and don’t know the pros and cons.
SteamOS has, in my experience, avoided a lot of problems that any desktop OS has with being a gaming-only device, Windows or Linux. Stuff like applying updates or needing to alt+tab to address notifications that are major pains in the ass to do with a controller.
Such good news. I hope someone can answer this either theoretically or practically as I’m not as knowledgeable in this.
One of the things I love about the steam deck is the ability to just turn it off and back on a few days later and the game is exactly where I left off. If steamOS is on a PC or another handheld deck. Would it still be possible to still have this feature? I guess my question is whether this is a software or hardware feature.
I’d imagine this is something the HW has to support, and the software has to implement a solution via that HW support. I’m really excited to see SteamOS coming up as the next mobile linux platform. With the support from Valve, I’d consider a steam deck or similar over other tablet options.
It’s software. I’m pretty sure my linux desktop can do this… It’s not a special feature, exactly, the system state gets saved to RAM, and then the CPU goes to sleep.
On resume the kernel reads the state from RAM and puts everything back where it was and things continue from the exact same point from which they were suspended. Theoretically.
It’s a complex sequence, and windows sleep is famous for getting it wrong on lots of hardware configs. I’ve had trouble with it on linux, as well, almost always relating to the GPU.
Valve very likely put in some work to have it work as well as it does on SteamDeck, but theres no reason it couldn’t work on any given device.
I’m using HoloISO (it’s like 95% SteamOS) on a mini PC (all AMD, 680M iGPU because I wanted to get close to the deck specs). I mostly stream games from elsewhere in the house, but it has a few titles installed locally.
The sleep works perfectly so far for local titles. I assume other Arch based distros with all of the steam software installed (like ChimeraOS) work just as well. If the hardware maker who puts it on their box makes sure their hardware is well supported it shouldn’t be an issue.
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