I’m interested in buying a Steam Deck purely to run FOSS games, e.g. OpenTTD, 0ad, Minetest, Torcs etc.

What is the experience of playing these games on the Steam Deck? Do they work out of the box with the controllers on the device?

Additionally - does anyone have any experience running a standard distro (e.g. Debian, Arch) on the Steam Deck, without installing a lot of Steam Deck specific cusomisations?

I’m guessing there are a lot of patches that have not been upstreamed or not made it into certain distros yet - does anyone know of any resources to show what contributions have been upstreamed and which are still outstanding?

  • ambitiousslabOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Thank you for writing up such a detailed response!

    I run Debian on my laptop and tend to install FOSS games through the regular package manager. However, I don’t spend as much time playing these games as I would like, so when I was looking into the Steam Deck I was hoping that it would let me have a very similar setup, but as a portable device.

    I see through your reply that, if I want automagic compatibility out of the box, this is crowdsourced and implemented through some intermediate Steam layer. I was hoping there might be some way to bypass Steam and treat the trackpads as regular mouse input, and map the other buttons as if they are keyboard buttons or generic controller inputs, without having to go through Steam.

    I guess this would mean the FOSS games I’m interested in playing would need controller support natively implemented, which I’m not too sure on for the games I’m interested in. Probably time to dust off an Xbox 360 controller and see how they perform!