It doesn't bother with a keyboard, so personally, I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy navigating it, but it's a phenomenal thing and you can buy it right now. There are others out there, too, and on a hardware front, the Aya Neo is closer to the Steam Deck as it uses AMD for the CPU and graphics which makes it a potent little handheld. There are already Windows-based gaming handhelds on sale Be honest, how many times has a Windows update broken something on your PC that you've been quite cross about? Is it really worth the effort and the potential trouble just because you 'prefer Windows?' You won't get support on Windows, and there's no guarantee what your experience would even be. Valve will be supporting SteamOS on the Steam Deck, continually making it better, and working in tandem with the hardware it had custom designed. And by all accounts Valve is still pushing as hard as it can to make Proton work with everything on Steam, including that pesky anti-cheat. And for most people what it runs underneath doesn't mean a thing so long as their games work. Having total control over the software experience gives Valve what it needs to make sure that using a Steam Deck doesn't suck.Īs a consumer product that's what matters the most. Valve is responsible only for making that experience as good as it can be, and the simple truth is that Windows doesn't offer the flexibility needed to turn Steam Deck into a proper games console.

Source: Valve (Image credit: Source: Valve)

Steam deck windows os