I expect Microsoft’s handheld to fall under the Xbox brand, so it’ll probably be incredibly locked down and not something you could use like a PC

They’re all still amd64 tho, so it’s fairly trivial to install linux on them. For the full Steam Deck experience you could get one of those SteamOS isos or just configure it to launch the steam console UI inside gamescope at boot

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in that has mainline Linux kernel support 👀, it might be possible to run full desktop Linux on it

I think sometime in the next few years an ARM based portable gaming PC could challenge the Steam Deck. ARM is a more efficient architecture, so it could have significantly more battery life, the only hurdle is getting x86 emulation performant enough.

This is false. All of the device drivers for the steam deck hardware are open source and included in the Linux kernel, and you can Literally just boot directly from a live USB and install whatever distro you want, it’s just a very small laptop inside a console shell essentially. I think Valve even worked with Microsoft to get the hardware working correctly under windows because from what I’ve heard, the Steam Deck experience under windows is much better than at launch (I’m not 100% confident on that tho).

It’s literally just a PC.

They really couldn’t, it’s just a Linux PC. Worst case scenario you could format the drive and install regular arch Linux on it (SteamOS is arch based, and you can add the repos for all of the custom steam packages to a standard arch install). Unlike the switch, you have direct, firmware level control over the hardware, which is why I bought it. I want to encourage more manufacturers to not lock down their hardware

Hell, you could install Windows on the thing if you really wanted to.

The steam deck library includes the entire switch library via emulation, so Yeah Obviously. (Ik they’re not counting emulation, but my point is that the steam deck is a PC, which makes it much more versatile)