SteamDeck, and my hopes for more portables

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Hi there! Just a short update here. I’d like to take a walk down memory lane relating to portable handhelds. Then I’ll mention some hardware I’ll mess with later. As this year was a difficult one for acquiring hardware, I’ve mainly stuck to paying off the Framework Laptop, ordering a used RX590 8G to replace my dying GTX 1080 and grabbing a cheapo iPad to test for dedicated VOIP requirements at the office.

Prior to 2013, I had played around with many handhelds while at the old Sony Style stores, mostly PSP variants and the VAIO UX line of handheld single-core machines. When I worked at a summer job around 2013, I got to play with a fun little VAIO UX380N that I repaired, swapped out ZIF-connector hard drive on and installed Linux on. This thing was a little beast with Ubuntu MATE and Manjaro XFCE. That said, I ended up selling it for food money a few years later on.

In 2020, I snagged the first generation GPD Win Max and played around with that for a bit. After updating all firmware and everything from the stock Windows install, I extracted the EDID firmware for the display and ran the script I wrote here to make sure grub was properly patched to handle the display in other Linux distros. I’ve been running Fedora 34 for a while on it, and now the GNOME DE flavor of Garuda Linux on there fine. This has been my main gaming PC handheld, prior to hearing about the Steam Deck.

The Steam Deck, with the RDNA2 iGPU from AMD, as mentioned by Valve’s own tech page, may actually have a performant chip in it for playing games. WIth similar, if not better-than specs of the PS4/PS4 Pro, but the ability to run any OS and any game store due to the openness of the gaming PC platform, has many excited. Me included. I’ll definitely be giving the stock SteamOS 3.0 a shot.

I’ve hoped for handheld gaming PCs with decent iGPUs for a long time. Glad to see we’re finally almost there, if not there already. In other news, here are some cool articles and videos I’ve found this week: