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Windows on a Steam Deck just feels like a crime.
Honestly I kind of wish Valve didn’t release the drivers. Make people actually work to get that abomination working if that’s what they really want.
If they want it badly enough they should have to write the drivers themselves.
Eh, I really like the hacker mentality that Valve has for their hardware. They just want people to use it, because they know that the best place to get games for the hardware - whether it’s running Linux or Windows - is Steam. And the more people find fun ways to abuse the hardware, the more press it gets, the more people want it, etc. etc. Great for Valve, great for the customers, great for the gaming industry.
You don’t even need to “pirate” Windows anymore. You can download an ISO from Microsoft’s website, install it, and when it asks for your license key, you click “I don’t have one”, and that’s the end of it. If you look in the activation settings, it’ll say “not activated”, but nothing will ever become of it. This even works if you install it as Pro. It’s not like the Windows XP/7 days where you’d get a 60 day scare timer. They just don’t seem to care anymore, or maybe all that telemetry they siphon up from you is just that much more valuable.
PSA
If you see Windows 11 online DO NOT DOWNLOAD IT!!!
It will install a virus called Windows 11 and it will run Windows 11 on your PC!!!
Which is known to BRICK YOUR SYSTEM in some cases.
Technically true.
TechnicallyLiterally true.only if you don’t know how to reset secureboot?
Hmmm. Yeah, I suppose. But I’m thinking of the weird alpha-release of TPM way back in the Windows ME days. Some laptops that were advertised as built for ME were bootloader locked, basically, and fighting that would almost guarantee you brick the thing.
So, I guess if I have a point it’s that these assholes have been at this for decades.
You’re right, they don’t care.
The very fact they no longer care about enforcing licensing anymore is itself the strongest evidence that selling Windows as a product is not where the money is.
They want you on their operating system for any price - including zero -because once you are there that’s when the advertising, cloud service upsell and data monetisisation can begin.
Even Windows 7 actually didn’t care if you had no key.
You could leave it unactivated forever and the worst thing that would happen is it would have a “Activate windows” watermark message bottom right over the desktop, and it wouldn’t let you change the personalization settings eg theming (oh no).
It’s way more profitable to audit corporations than fight Eastern European crackers and Asian “distributors”
I miss all those super weird XP editions seemingly made by colourblind and hyper 8 year olds (at least in taste). Like rockets, gold or muscle car themed distros.
Nowadays all themes seems so… adult and boring. Tried to find some weird stuff in Plasma but alas
JOIN TEAM LINUX INSTEAD
Does linux even work on steamdeck? Has anybody tried?
Nah, Valve would never allow it
Good joke, I did mean Linux on Desktop though.
I bet you can get some version of BSD running
More-or-less bog standard amd64 with amd graphics? Assuming the generic AMD video drivers work FreeBSD should be able to get to a graphical UI out of the box. Might not have controller or gyro drivers, but a keyboard and mouse should work fine.
Now I have a project. Thanks, Droechai…
I assume this is some joke about Steam OS I’m not understanding.
… no. I was dead serious about trying FreeBSD on the Steamdeck. FreeBSD supports almost all mainstream hardware you’d see on a normal desktop. Figured it’d be similar for the steamdeck. So now my weekend project is to try out booting FreeBSD 16 off a USB stick on my steamdeck.
After a small amount of duckduckgoing I found that it somewhat works already. GPU hardware is detected but can’t initialize. That’s a reasonable starting point for someone like me who isn’t afraid of kernel-level code :/
I mean, if you just absolutely had to play a Linux-hating kernel anti cheat game, then install a small-as-possible partition for Windows, dual boot, and stay in Steam OS every single moment you’re doing anything else but that game.
But most Windows-on-a-Steam-Deck people I’ve encountered just drive Windows all the time. I will never understand.
God says: hop rally embark fortify joy giraffe propose
