This is exciting! A gaming handheld from a great open source hardware company that makes SBCs like the RP5. It looks to have all the quality features and combines the best of all the handhelds I’ve seen. This has me really excited.
I am wondering though what gaming on Manjaro Linux is like if anyone knows. I’ve heard of Bazzite and Nobara as well as Chimera and HoloISO which are all focused around gaming. Does Manjaro ship with all the gaming features preinstalled?
Oh wow, a Steam Deck rival/imitator that’s actually listened to Valve’s suggestions on how to make it work, i.e. touchpads, Linux, etc. I will follow its career with great interest!
Exactly my thoughts! The touchpads were key
Cool, I wonder the pricing.
I feel like holoiso would be better for this, but maybe in this way it would entice more devs?
I wonder that too. What do these things normally go for? High hundreds to just over a thousand? I wonder if you were to install HoloISO if all the hardware features would still work properly.
The price ranges can truly vary pretty wildly, but based on the specs listed and the size I’d wager $499 barebones (16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) to maybe $650 for the maxed-out version (32GB RAM, 2TB SSD).
I just read this in their FAQ: “We can’t tell the exact price yet. However it will be at the lower end of Steamdeck pricing.”
Looks pretty good, glad to see another true Linux system. No weight listed though, and no backside buttons, so we’ll see how it turns out.
This is a good looking piece of hardware, but i hope they keep the price low. That’s the biggest thing that these sorts of systems have going for them is making a desktop ecosystem affordable, and if this is expensive I fear it’ll be fighting an uphill battle against the steamdeck bc it seems most steamdeck competitors tout their windows compatability as an upside, and as far as most consumers are concerned that’s true
Either way, if this is good (and I can afford it when it hits the market), this might be the handheld pc i pick up. Great looking chassis, good feature suite, hall effect sticks out of the gate, and it helps get me back to tinkering with linux more. Seems like a win all around
I 100% agree with everything you said. It seems like devices with the hardware that this tend to go for around a grand or a little more
Impressive! This might become a worthy competitor to Valve’s Steam Deck.
… Why is the Steam UI on the device in Portuguese? Are they implying something or am I reading too much into it?
Interesting, it’s running and immutable system so the core system would reset after a reboot. I’m using the KDE Manjaro and have been happy with it. A lot of software is available through Flatpack, so this would be a nice portable system.
It’s basically what the Steam Deck does, and for a gaming device it makes a lot of sense. The vast majority of games will probably be installed to the user’s home folder anyhow…
It might be that some games require additional libraries that don’t come with the immutable base OS, but you can always install them in a custom folder (like, the game’s install dir), or just install Steam and use the Steam Runtime for everything.
And, as you said, a lot of open source tools and games (DosBox for instance) are available as Flatpaks too.
Wow 1080 screen and hall effect joysticks. Since it’s 1080 I wonder how it will perform compared to the steam deck.
Check out ETA Prime on YouTube. He has lots of videos on the 7840U at 1080P. It can play modern games at 1080P at low to mid settings generally.
