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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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Love the fact that it's completely missing the point of the Steam Deck which is to make games running on something else than Windows.
I think it’s at least partly valve’s fault, they promised to make steamOS open for other manufacturers, but they just haven’t.
Correct me if I’m wrong
SteamOS is almost entirely open source software, except for the handheld's specific proprietary drivers and Steam itself. Vendors are free to use it via its open source license if they choose.
The hardest parts (i.e. proton) are fully available to anyone who'd like to use it under an approximation of the MIT license, even for commercial use.
the steam deck drivers are being upstream to mesa and the linux kernel, no?, meybe they are using a pre-build before the code get merged, but every steam deck fix is being merged(mesa, radv, even the kernel got a lot of fixes for it)
Here's a list of the non-free software packages used in an older version of the OS.
Briefly: graphics, wireless drivers, firmware etc. The hardware is non-free although designed for to be user servicable, which is a great first step.
You're right that open graphics support exists, but they're using proprietary binary drivers.
You can install wine or steam and run games on pretty much any distro. SteamOS is just tailored for the Steam Deck and is open source and under GPLv2, so anyone can fork it or contribute (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steamos_kernel).
I think the confusion is Proton, people think it’s a some Valve secret that saves Linux but anyone can make their own implementation of Wine (Even Apple made a big announcement for their implementation of Wine)