Additionally, it's devices like these, that have proven successful in the market, that incentivize Valve to continue Proton's development. It's hard to see given the already insane trajectory Proton's development was on before the Steam Deck, but now that getting games running on Linux (in at least some form) is desirable by many game developers in order to gain Steam Deck support, Proton compatibility guarantees, and the corresponding development to make that happen, have shifted to before the releases of many major AAA games, and that compatibility work has cascading effects for many other games as well.
sudotstar
joined 1 year ago
The reason this is known is because this supposed device is using the same AMD APU used in the Steam Deck. It's unlikely that a standalone controller would have a dedicated APU like that without becoming a full-on portable gaming device of its own.
I haven't adopted this kind of setup, mainly because Proton just does such a good job I have almost zero need for Windows, but my plan for eventually doing something like this was to also maintain a passthrough Linux VM for any GPU-intensive work on that side.
When I realized that the practical end-state of my system would mean I'd just be running things from within the Linux VM 98% of the time (games that can run on Linux) I kind of dropped the idea.
For me it's always been after I tried to resize a partition.
I recommend using whatever is the "least hands-on" option for your boot drive, a.k.a your distro default (ext4 for Debian). In my admittedly incompetent experience, the most likely cause for filesystem corruption is trying to mess with things, like resizing partitions. If you use your distro installer to set up your boot drive and then don't mess with it, I think you'll be fine with whatever the default is. You should still take backups through whatever medium(s) and format(s) make sense for your use case, as random mishaps are still a thing no matter what filesystem you use.
Are you planning on dualbooting Windows for games? I use https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs to mount a shared BTRFS drive that contains my Proton-based Steam library in case I need to run one of those games on Windows for whatever reason. I've personally experienced BTRFS corruption a few times due to the aforementioned incompetence, but I try to avoid keeping anything important on my games drive to limit the fallout when that does occur. Additionally if you're looking to keep non-game content on the storage drive (likely if you're doing 3D modeling work) this may not be as safe.
The reality is that the number of games, even AAA ones, that are releasing at that high a "minimum" performance requirement is incredibly small compared to other games that do release with more modest system requirements. Games that are "just good enough" graphically to go along with their gameplay tend to be the norm, I think, with the few games that really go for pushing visual fidelity being respectable in their own right but not frequent enough to fret about. What will matter the most is what games you want to play and what their requirements are, and that's basically impossible to project out 1, 3, 5 years out or however long you expect the hardware to last.
For what it's worth, I have a Steam Deck and spend a lot of time playing on it, but pretty much every "AAA, big budget => big graphics" game I want to play I'd exclusively do so on my gaming desktop (or remote play on Deck if I want to play it there at all), while sticking to 2D and lighter 3D games on the portable device directly. This is mostly due to what kinds of games I enjoy playing on what form factor, as for example my decision on what to play docked vs portable on the Switch is much the same way, and for about a year after buying the Deck, my desktop hardware was so out of date it was getting generally worse performance than the Deck yet I'd still use the desktop for "spectacle" games, but the necessary graphical quality to go along with that tends to correlate well.