 In my video yesterday, I talked about what would happen if the Steam Deck ended up being a success. And my conclusion was that if the Steam Deck turns out to be very popular, that more people will be exposed to Linux, gaming on Linux will get better, and everything is awesome. In today's video, I want to talk about the opposite end. And I don't want to be cynical. I don't want to be the negative naysayer guy, but I'm going to be that guy anyways. What happens if the Steam Deck fails? And we know that it could because Valve has gone through and tried this experiment before with the Steam Boxes back, I think it was like five years ago. And those failed spectacularly. Now the situation is completely different. There's a ton more games that work on Linux now, I mean just by an order of magnitude more than at that point. And they're actually going to be building their hardware this time instead of relying on third parties to come out with boxes themselves. So like before they had like Alienware and Lenovo or whatever coming to the party and trying to build weird boxes themselves, and then running Steam Software. And at this time, Steam is going through and building their own hardware. And that is just a way better way of doing it because they can rely on themselves to actually have this thing out on the market. But what if it fails? What if it comes out and it's terrible? The software is buggy. Arch Linux shits the bed. It's happened. People try to update it through Pac-Man or whatever, and a software bug comes through and it just fails. What happens if they aren't able to go through and enable 100% gank compatibility? If they can't get that anti-cheat stuff to work? What happens? And the scenario I'm going to pause it is that it's not good for Linux. And the reason why is because over the last few years this seems to have been Valve's goal. They seem to have had this device in mind. And the reason why I say that is because they've gone through and worked very hard to get as many games to work on Linux as possible. And the only reason why they would do that is because they had something that would benefit them monetarily and as a company that relied on those games. Because they sure as hell didn't do it because of the increasing Linux market share. The Linux market share hasn't increased in the last five years. It stayed about the same. Between 1.5 and 2.5% depending on who you ask. So the reason why they've been doing this is because they've obviously for whatever reason, in this case we know the reason, the Steam Deck, they need those games to work on Linux. That's why they've been working so hard to get gaming on Linux up to par. If the Steam Deck fails, what reason do they have to continue to develop Proton? That's what worries me. Valve isn't known for sticking with things that don't benefit them. The Steam Controller, people didn't like it so they never came out with a second one. Steam boxes didn't stick around for very long because they were horrible. They didn't go through and do like a second generation of them. They just canceled the project. So if the Steam Deck doesn't become popular immediately and it doesn't work well immediately, I worry that Valve will move away from it very quickly. Could we see it this time next year, the Steam Deck's being completely abandoned? I don't think so. I think that even if they don't get 100% game compatibility right out the gate, I think that people will still enjoy the experience with what games they can play. The question is whether or not the software itself is going to be good and we'll have to wait and see. I think it will be okay, but we got to remember not a lot of people beta test SteamOS. So SteamOS has existed for the last five years or so and it's been based on Ubuntu. I think it was first based on Ubuntu, but no matter what it was based on, it has been around. But I don't think that it was very well tested because not a lot of people probably used it. Again, that is just a feeling. We don't really have metrics to know. We could go to Distro Watch, but we all know that Distro Watch doesn't have metrics. They just have page views. So whether or not they've been able to iron out a proper desktop distribution of Arch Linux basically and have that available to people on the Steam Deck to actually use and it's functional and it's awesome and it doesn't have any bugs, it's going to be a waiting thing because I don't think that really the gaming is going to be a problem. I don't think that the availability of games is going to be the issue here when it launches, even if they don't get those last 10% of games on the platform. The downfall is always going to be the software. I suppose it could also be the hardware. If the hardware comes out and it's just terrible, then obviously they have bigger problems than just the software because it's harder to fix the hardware than it would be to go through and fix some software bugs. So let's just say the hardware is good. If the software is not good, they have some issues. Now I think that they could fix those, but you don't get a second chance to meet those reviewers. So when this thing comes out in December, this stuff is going to be handed to the Verge. It's going to be handed to Gizmodo. It's going to be handed to Engadget and stuff again. They're all going to review this thing and if the software is horrible, nobody's going to want to buy it later on. I mean, you're going to get the Lytics fanboys who buy it. I'll probably get one eventually, even though I decided not to this time. Eventually I'll get talked into it despite my inability to game. So you're going to have a small community to buy this thing, but it won't expand into the non-Linux community, the actual gaming community, because the software would be bad and that's not a great thing, right? Obviously this is a whole bunch of doomsday talk because it's possible and I think it's actually quite unlikely that this software comes out. It's really good. The gaming availability I think is either going to be excellent or just the way it is now, which is really good anyways. And I think the hardware from what I've seen looks really good. It looks really capable. We know that you can game very well on AMD integrated graphics and AMD processors. So I don't think that the horsepower in it is going to be a big deal at all. Now I could see that that lowest end thing become a problem because it doesn't have an SSD in it. It just has a, I think they call the EMMC storage in it. That might be the wrong acronym. I don't know. But apparently you can actually get in there and switch that out if you want to actually put an SSD in. So if that thing's not fast enough, just change it out. But I think a lot of people are going to go for that lower end Steam Deck and that might be a problem. But even then they probably have tested it, right? They have to test it. And there goes my logo in the background. I'm going to change that. It's on Windows. Yeah. I have a Windows machine back there. It's going away very fast anyways. And tangent. So in conclusion, I really hope that I'm wrong, or I hope that this video was completely pointless at the end. The video, the logo is back. I hope that this video turns out to be completely pointless and that this Steam Deck thing succeeds. I really do because more games on Linux means more people using Linux. And more people using Linux, even if it's just in the form of a Steam Deck, means more developers and more games natively coming to Linux. All we really need is that one little push down the mountain and we get some momentum. Now I don't think that this means that the year is the Linux desktop is here. Okay, that's obviously wrong. That's not going to happen. But I could see this actually making it so that Linux becomes just a little bit more popular and that's always a good thing. So like I said, I hope that the fears that I have expressed in this video are wrong. And I hope that the more positive video from yesterday comes true. Because again, when Linux does better, we all do better. As cliche as that sounds. So if you want to get in contact with me, you can do so at the Linuxcast. You can support me on patreon.patreon.com slash linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons, Devon, Marcus, Megalyn, Donnie's Fen, East Coast Web, Chris, Mitchell, Mr. Fox, American Camp. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.