> I realized that it'll be years before I can buy a Steamdeck where I live.

There are mail forwarding services and unofficial resellers. Even in Russia, you can buy Steam Deck with next-day delivery. At a premium, of course, but it's not that bad.

I guess that the main selling point of the Steam Deck is its portability and unthetheredness... which obviously does not seem to cater to you.

The main selling point might be its price. The GPD Win4 with 32GB RAM looks pretty sweet, runs SteamOS, but is in a whole different price category altogether.

Yeah, the latest GPD Win looks superb, like a large N900. 6800U should survive a bit longer than Steam Deck.

The other aspect is latency, even streaming from a wired ethernet connection to a wifi phone or tablet makes platformers especially feel frustrating to play

Not really. I stream wirelessly with Moonlight (NVIDIA software streams on my PC) and it’s not noticeable at all, even for shooters.

You're right, but personally there are no situations where I would travel with a Steamdeck and not a laptop. Maybe if I was going on vacation but I don't think I'd bring a Steamdeck then anyway.

It's a bit more work to just pull out and play - I need to turn on the laptop too, such effort!

I forgot to mention in the original post - I thought I was going to only be able to use this in places with really fast wifi. But it turns out I can just turn on a 5g hotspot on my laptop and connect the tablet to that. As long as I'm in the same room, it's fast enough for the max quality settings in Moonlight and I get around 10ms latency.

So it's not as portable as a Steamdeck. But it is "fits in a backpack" portable.

I wanted the SteamDeck, but I was concerned about the fan noise when gaming next to my SO in bed at night.

I have a Gamesir X2 Pro on a Samsung A7 Lite 8.7" that cost me about $150 to put together.

The X2 Pro doesn't normally expand out that far, but you can take a pocket knife and just cut off the two clips preventing that expansion. Super easy to do. The only down side is the USB-C passthrough charging doesn't work.

I also use moonlight, but the best part is installing PSPlay and connecting to my PS4 Pro. That gives me the suspend/resume/sleep capabilities that make the SteamDeck so popular for quick sessions and Ghost of Tsushima on this setup looks unbelievable for a 6 year old console.

Although not too relevant to you now, just want to add that the fan noise is essentially imperceptible nowadays. I usually only even notice the fan if I put my finger over the vent. Put differently, the sounds from pressing buttons and generally moving in bed will be louder than the fan.

That's the other gamepad I was looking at for this. Do you think it would be as easy for a 10 inch tablet?

A Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1" is 33mm wider than my A7 Lite. I think it could handle a tablet that was 40mm wider, so I think it would work.

It is also 100g heavier, but you seem to be used to that. And on the A7 at least, the gamepad blocks the headphone jack so you need to use bluetooth.

Yeah, also the Steam Link is quite nice, and I have used it with XBox, PS and Steam controllers.

Now the issue here is that I am trying to boycott Steam, what kind of open source support is there for Valve's hardware : Steam Link, Controller, Deck, whatever their VR headsets are called ..?

I think the most unusual driver you'll need for the Deck is the controller. There's upcoming mainline Linux support[0], which Steam Controller already has. The default behavior either has it emulate a mouse/keyboard, or requires Steam to act as a driver. There's an open source project to do gyro mapping and all that the Steam client does, and they're working on Deck Controller support[1]

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-HID-Steam-Deck-Linux-6.3

[1] https://github.com/kozec/sc-controller

> Bonus: I now have zero interest in buying a Steamdeck.

It's still an absolutely amazing piece of hardware. So definitely play around with it, if you ever come across one.

Interesting, where do you live that you can't buy a Steamdeck but can buy a 10 inch tablet? Those typically don't come cheap and Valve does deliver worldwide don't they?

Valve does not deliver worldwide. A few select countries. They added a few more since launch like Japan and South Korea but it's not available in a lot of Europe, Australia, etc.

> it's not available in a lot of Europe

Since they do sell to some parts of Europe you should have no trouble finding a reseller that ships to the rest.

Vietnam. No, they don't deliver here or many other places in the world.

I was considering getting one next time I go back to Europe for a vacation but even there it's a many months waiting list. Sure, I could get one second hand but I decided to jump off the hype train instead.

Switzerland, for example. There will be no Steam Deck in Switzerland before at least 2024. :(

As an example, they do not deliver to Switzerland.

Couldn't you buy it from a reseller e.g. in Germany then?

Tell you what I had to do: create a Steam account domiciled in Ireland, attach an Irish bank pass to it, order and have it shipped to my place in Ireland, then throw it in my bag and bring it with me back to Switzerland. What a pain. At least it works on my Swiss Steam account.

There are guys on the Swiss classified sites who claim they'll order for you (at a noticeable premium of several hundred CHF) but that Valve will ship "gifted" decks direct to recipients in Switzerland. I do not think this is true. I cannot personally do this with my Irish account.

My takeaway from this is that it somehow costs less than several hundred CHF/EUR to fly to Ireland and back.

I had to go anyway :)

> However, the frustration led me to discover something even better: it's possible to stream games to a tablet from my laptop (which is way more powerful than a Steamdeck).

How do you stream?