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?
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.