I’m interested in buying a Steam Deck purely to run FOSS games, e.g. OpenTTD, 0ad, Minetest, Torcs etc.
What is the experience of playing these games on the Steam Deck? Do they work out of the box with the controllers on the device?
Additionally - does anyone have any experience running a standard distro (e.g. Debian, Arch) on the Steam Deck, without installing a lot of Steam Deck specific cusomisations?
I’m guessing there are a lot of patches that have not been upstreamed or not made it into certain distros yet - does anyone know of any resources to show what contributions have been upstreamed and which are still outstanding?
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If the games run in a modern Linux desktop with an AMD GPU, they will work on the Steam Deck.
If you add them to Steam, you get access to the granular control over every input. If you don’t, the Steam Deck will essentially behave as a Xbox 360 controller.
That’s about it, really. The Steam Deck is no different than a desktop PC running Linux.
As for the other distros, they will work, but you’ll lose a lot: fan curves will be worse, you’ll lose precise haptic feedback, the touchpads will not behave correctly.
Thanks for the reply, this is really helpful!
If you don’t, the Steam Deck will essentially behave as a Xbox 360 controller.
I see, this makes sense and I guess the “Xbox 360” experience will depend on whether the games themselves have native support for controllers or a very flexible input scheme.
the touchpads will not behave correctly
This is interesting, do you know what would be the difference between using the touchpads on other distros vs through SteamOS? Are they not just seen as a regular mouse input device by both OSs?
I believe this might be fixed if you install Steam and leave it always running in the background of your new distro.
But in general, the touchpads will act like a track pad and the triggers as mouse click buttons on generic distros. But on SteamOS, they run as a simulated trackball with friction, momentum, a very nice haptic feedback and very granular control over acceleration. They also click down by themselves, with customizable pressure, without relying on the triggers.
Gotcha. Now I understand a bit more about the way input is locked down, it looks like I would need OpenSD to allow for more sophisticated controller input without using Steam.
I’ve personally ran a few FOSS games on Deck. Typically if you want them to work automatically in terms of controls you have to add them to Steam from Desktop Mode and then go to the community controller configuration. MOST games from the FOSS community I’ve tried had some community bindings, though keep in mind that for some more obscure ones you may have to do some heavy lifting yourself and make a control scheme. It’s also important to note that Steam uses the name of the application as a means to connect it to Community Control Schemes, so if you change an applications name or if the application recently had an update and changes its name every update, IE: (Game 1.2) to (Game 1.3), Steam may lose the ability to tell what game it is and show none of the Community Control Schemes. Ones you’ve already downloaded will stay however.
I can’t say I’ve personally ever done any dual booting on Deck, but I know that it is fairly straightforward and works quite well. The only thing to keep in mind is this is unsupported by Valve, so Game Mode’s excellent sleep mode won’t work and instead it will do a laptop style sleep mode. Other deck specific features may be broken as well.
In terms of patches, there is no super unified way to tell what’s up to date. If you go to the Steam Deck website and go to the news section, you can read the patch notes. https://www.steamdeck.com/en/news I’m not super concerned with being on the bleeding edge for my use case with the Deck, but I have heard that recent updates have brought the deck to a much more recent version of Mesa for example.
One last thing to remind you as well, Steam OS that comes on the Deck has an immutable file system. (I assume that’s why you are asking about other OS installs.) While you can get under the hood very easily, you should be aware that any OS update will wipe anything installed outside of the immutable file system, but you still will have readily available access to reinstall it once you set a root password for the first time.
Hopefully some of this info is useful!
Thank you for writing up such a detailed response!
I run Debian on my laptop and tend to install FOSS games through the regular package manager. However, I don’t spend as much time playing these games as I would like, so when I was looking into the Steam Deck I was hoping that it would let me have a very similar setup, but as a portable device.
I see through your reply that, if I want automagic compatibility out of the box, this is crowdsourced and implemented through some intermediate Steam layer. I was hoping there might be some way to bypass Steam and treat the trackpads as regular mouse input, and map the other buttons as if they are keyboard buttons or generic controller inputs, without having to go through Steam.
I guess this would mean the FOSS games I’m interested in playing would need controller support natively implemented, which I’m not too sure on for the games I’m interested in. Probably time to dust off an Xbox 360 controller and see how they perform!
The games run fine.
Gamepad support relies on the game but it’s v configurable on the deck. You’ll be able to play OpenTTD fine but games like 0AD are always gonna be better on mouse and keyboard.
Minetest is similar - You can configure really good fps controller configs using the steam input system.
You CAN use non-steam distros (it’s just a fancy single board computer after all) but you’ll have a worse time with support. Though The steam deck control drivers are in the linux kernel (and Valve has been very good with upstreaming as they use a bunch of linux contractors to develop SteamOS) so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. I’d recommend against it unless you were gonna use the deck for tinkering and stuff primarily.
Just buy and play, too many questions
