[contrarian1234]

sorry, maybe i missed it. But how do you know the ecosystem is open?

from the link we don't know if the OS can be changed (might be locked like many Android phones) or if a connected machine is required to run their DRM/Steam. The drivers may also not be open source

[piperswe]

It's SteamOS and SteamVR - you can run arbitrary aarch64 Linux binaries that talk to SteamVR and they should just work

[bullen]

Yep, I'm back into VR with this move, specially if the price is closer to $500 than $1000.

Unless the lenses/displays are bad, but I figure we would have heard by now?

[contrarian1234]

from a cursory look . it seems SteamVR is intended to be used with their DRM platform and isn't open source. Maybe its a bit less limiting vs Meta's offering?

i wouldnt characterize this as an "open ecosystem" though

[bullen]

The key takeaway is that you will rebuild the drivers less often:

1) The stack is mature now, we know what features can exist.

2) For me it's about having the same stack as on a 3588 SBC, so I don't need to download many GB of Android software just to build/run the game.

The distance to getting a open-source driver stack will probably be shorter because of these 2 things, meaning OpenVR/SteamVR being closed is less of a long term issue.

[contrarian1234]

I'm confused. Why would you develop a game on a SBC (that's not powerful enough to do VR)? Why are you not just cross compiling?

It's possible that you can have a full open source stack some day on these goggles.. but I don't think that's something that's obviously going to happen. SteamVR sounds like their version of GooglePlay Services

[bullen]

3588 can do VR, just not Unity/Unreal VR. That is a problem with bloated engines not the 3588.

All mainstream headsets get open-source drivers eventually: https://github.com/collabora/libsurvive

[contrarian1234]

yeah but is foveated streaming and whatnot going to be opensource, or are we going to have to wait a decade for some grad student to reimplement a half broken version?

[theknarf]

It said its running Steam OS, which is just Linux.

[contrarian1234]

Android is also just Linux. But i cant install Debian on my phone

[tete]

Android isn't "just Linux". It's a heavily modified kernel, it's often an even closed source bootloader in many cases and it's completely untrue for userspace, where it incorporates stuff from other OSs (BSDs, etc.). There are huge amounts of blobs.

Yes, there technically is a Linux kernel, but if it's "just Linux" then macOS is "just FreeBSD", because grep -V tells you so, because it has dtrace, because you run (ran?) Docker with effectively FreeBSD's bhyve, etc.

If you wanna spin it even further neither are Safari and Chrome or any other Webkit browsers just Konqueror because they took the layout engine code from KDE (KHTML).

And you can totally install Debian and even OpenBSD, etc. on a Steam Deck and at least the advertisement seems to indicate it won't be all that different for the VR headset.

[surajrmal]

The problem is that you're talking about the Linux desktop ecosystem whereas the op could be talking about the kernel. Both are just Linux (and the fact we've not evolved our nomenclature to differentiate the two is surprising). Also, fwiw, the android kernel is no longer heavily modified. Most of the custom stuff has been upstreamed.

[oceansky]

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!

[wombarly]

SteamOS at its base is just Arch with Steam and some additional software installed.

[contrarian1234]

that doesn't in any way mean you can install an alternate OS. But i get your point that at least you can run Arch stuff. Isnt Arch ARM support unofficial? (its been ages since i tried) You dont hear of people running it on RPis for example

[mavamaarten]

Well. It doesn't say in any docs or specs, but for what it's worth, Valve's hardware has always been open like that. You're free to install windows on your steam deck, for example.

[embedding-shape]

> Well. It doesn't say in any docs or specs, but for what it's worth

They do hint that you can install a different OS on it:

> Just like any SteamOS device, install your own apps, open a browser, do what you want: It's your PC.

Every other SteamOS device does allow you to install whatever OS on the device, so seems Frame will be the same, judging by that landing page blurb.

[scheeseman486]

https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@li...

They're being a little vague about it but this collaboration to improve Arch's build service/infrastructure is being done in part to faciliate support of multiple architectures.

iirc it was in Tested coverage that Valve said the hardware supports other OSes. It'd be out of character for Valve not to allow for this.

[sensanaty]

If it's anything like the Deck, then the version of SteamOS on it won't be locked down in any way whatsoever. You can install Windows or any other distro you want on the Deck with 0 issues (other than regular ones you'd experience anyways on any regular computer, nothing to do with Valve locking anything down).

[surajrmal]

The steam deck was not arm. Unlike the steam machine page, the steam frame page does not insinuate you can put a custom OS on it. On top of custom drivers which are not necessarily upstreamed, qualcomm socs always require closed source userspace daemons which are coupled to the kernel.

[Andrex]

Great username for this type of comment.

[mmis1000]

Even just have direct access to hardware apis is already a big win. On Oculus quest. The closest you can get is running with webxr. But webxr suffer from all those performance problem of web platforms. (And bug of meta softwares. The recent quest browser have bug that prevent you from disabling spatial audio, rendering it not usable for watch video at all)