this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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What is the experience of running FOSS games on the Steam Deck? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by ambitiousslab@lemmy.ml to c/steamdeck@lemmy.ml
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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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[–] ambitiousslab@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] kadu@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ambitiousslab@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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.