To be clear, this is just an alternative Linux OS. The hardware shown in the thumbnail and article is just a mockup meant to represent a potential handheld. Part of their goal is to offer equally good support for all PC game stores (epic etc) vs the “steam first” experience of the deck.
Dedicated builds for the Steam Deck and other handheld PCs are to come later this year.
Some TL;DR from the Verge’s coverage of this:
The following is my response copied from the original post in the Linux Gaming community:
Sounds very interesting, but I can’t shake the feeling that this company is looking to profit from Valve and the OSS community’s contibutions to Linux gaming without contributing much back.
On the plus side, at least the Box86 developer and a couple others they’ve hired from various Linux gaming projects are now getting paid for their contributions 👍. They also managed to get The Witcher 3 running on an ARM device which is pretty cool.
Seems likely that Playtron would follow Valve’s apprach where the client application/shell is proprietary IMO, with the rest of the OS remaining open source.
Hard pass for me, since the deck is also a partial laptop replacement in my case. The article also mentions wanting power users to debug the alpha version of the OS they’ll be releasing in 2 months or so - not too sure how they expect that to happen if they’re not providing a DE besides their Playtron shell.
I’ll be following the progress of their OS though, will be interesting to see if they’ll aim for Valve’s pretty tight hardware integration or whether they’ll keep things on the more generic side like we see with the current Windows handhelds
Edit: Fix quotes
Wow that is a name I haven’t thought about in ages
I guess this is fine if they’re targeting casual gamers? But I feel like by necessity the first people interested aren’t going to be anyone you could call casual. It’s a big loss of functionality in my book, steam deck with desktop mode is awesome