The Steam Deck Is Software-Freedom Friendly

Summary

The Steam Deck is a great gaming system. This isn’t because of it’s great battery life. A Nintendo Switch would probably have better battery life. It’s not because of its great performance. I don’t usually play AAA games, so I wouldn’t know. The Steam Deck is great because of the philosophy on which it is built. The popularity of Steam Decks is directly tied to the betterment of support for games on Linux. This is because the Steam Deck really is a linux computer in a handheld form-factor with a gamepad, among other things, attached to it. According to ProtonDB, over 5000 PC games are certified Verified on the Steam Deck, and over 15,000 games are considered playable. This means that there are tens of thousands of games that can be run on Linux in some way. Thanks to Steam’s efforts, the state of compatibility of games on Linux systems have heavily improved. Not all these thousands of games running on the Deck have binaries that run natively on Linux. Pivotal to the success of the Deck is Proton, a middle-layer compatibility software, that makes this (mostly) seamless emulation possible. Nonetheless, the greater the adoption of Decks, the likelier we are to normalize prioritizing game-builds for Linux. We run software because it serves us some purpose. In this, running software is no different from utilizing everyday objects, and playing games are no different from running software. Yet, this teleological view of computing would miss a lot of context. When picking an operating system, we may want to make a choice that aligns with the goals of transparency or software freedom. But this would not be realistic if the programs we would like to run on top are not supported in such an ecosystem. Since large parts of Proton is open-source, and are released under permissive licenses, gaming on a Deck takes us closer to using a principled software stack for daily use. Purchasing everyday objects give us ownership over them. With media, software and computing equipment, this ...