Playtron : new Linux based platform-agnostic open gaming OS

[Cyan]

Playtron: the startup hoping to Steam Deck-ify the world

What if Steam Deck, but not just Steam and not just Deck?

www.theverge.com

The former CEO of Cyanogen has a plan for a platform-agnostic gaming operating system.

Handhelds are the future of gaming — but there are reasons the category hasn’t exploded yet. The Nintendo Switch is locked down, Windows can be cumbersome, and Valve’s pick-up-and-play SteamOS hasn’t yet escaped the Steam Deck.

What if there were an Android of gaming, an OS you could install on any capable hardware to get a controller-friendly PC experience? Imagine an “Epic Deck” that could actually play Fortnite, a “5G Deck” for cellular carriers, or maybe a “PlayStation Deck” for Sony’s growing PC ambitions.

...

They’ve already seen The Witcher 3 running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 smartphone — admittedly at under 30fps with somewhat potato-y graphics.
But while Qualcomm has been talking a big game about its Snapdragon X Elite chips coming this summer, both McMaster and Qualcomm exec Micah Knapp suggest it might take a couple more years for Arm to match x86 for gaming. “Have I seen faster? Yes. Have I seen better battery life? Yes. Not one example I can point to with both,” says Knapp.

...

A lot of things would have to go right for Playtron to succeed, and it probably won’t be the only company shipping a handheld OS. Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais now tells me the company’s finally working directly with other companies to bring SteamOS to its handhelds, and I’m currently testing a promising SteamOS clone called Bazzite. Microsoft also won’t sit on its hands forever.

But for the moment, Playtron sounds intriguing — particularly for anyone who wants to challenge the status quo of Steam PC gaming.
(.......)

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This would be probably what MS should do if they still want to become something in the PC space, but time is running and nothing changed over the years for MS in the PC space.

 

[arandomguy]

This would be probably what MS should do if they still want to become something in the PC space, but time is running and nothing changed over the years for MS in the PC space.

I'm not see the business proposition here for Micrsoft or how it would work for this company either.

The problem with Microsoft and PC gaming in my opinion is because the antitrust monitoring stemming from Internet Explorer likely put Microsoft on the back foot in terms of integrating what we know accept as common place in an intrinsic platform "app store." If Microsoft had the equivalent of the Apple Appstore or Google Playstore for Windows you'd bet that 30% revenue generation would be a huge incentive for them to focus on PC gaming.

But the reality is Steam makes the platform money for PC gaming, and PC gamers (well at least the vocal ones) seem to outright hate the idea of anyone else even trying to do so. If PC gamers want Microsoft to "take PC gaming" seriously they'd basically need to be open to the idea of Microsoft going hard for that per sale revenue cut.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Very cool and I hope it works. However, that name sounds like a joke name!

 

[Cyan]

I'm not see the business proposition here for Micrsoft or how it would work for this company either.

The problem with Microsoft and PC gaming in my opinion is because the antitrust monitoring stemming from Internet Explorer likely put Microsoft on the back foot in terms of integrating what we know accept as common place in an intrinsic platform "app store." If Microsoft had the equivalent of the Apple Appstore or Google Playstore for Windows you'd bet that 30% revenue generation would be a huge incentive for them to focus on PC gaming.

But the reality is Steam makes the platform money for PC gaming, and PC gamers (well at least the vocal ones) seem to outright hate the idea of anyone else even trying to do so. If PC gamers want Microsoft to "take PC gaming" seriously they'd basically need to be open to the idea of Microsoft going hard for that per sale revenue cut.

that's something they have to ponder. Windows nowadays is mostly about gaming, and certain programs that aren't on Linux, but even if they have to make some kind of revenue cut, it would be for the good of Windows as an OS, over time. PC gaming has been neglected by Microsoft, and they are trying to change that with pc gamepass -a service to which I subscribed yesterday once again, to play a Paw Patrol game with my nephews-.

That's not enough imho, and they could do a lot better if aside from a typical console, they had a concept like the Steam Deck and Steam Machines.

There are quite a few games I prefer to buy in the Windows store via pc gamepass and over time the collection starts growing. The app isn't that great but it's been always improving.

In regards to Steam, that core demographic you name value a lot what it offers. Even when I always preferred GoG, or PC gamepass, I am drawn to steam against my will because it is the best gaming ecosystem on PC. When a game like Divinity Original Sin 2 is also on GoG, I get that version, but Steam makes things like installing mods easier, so I also got the Steam version, to play it with friends, and so on.

 

[Cyan]

Very cool and I hope it works. However, that name sounds like a joke name!

something like this would make me really like Linux tbh. I have to work with Linux in some situations and for that it's an excellent OS, but it's an OS for working, for regular very simple use -a browser, or read email, etc-, is also okay, but for regular general use it's still Linux.

Why it sounds like a joke name, maybe because how you understand it in english? English isn't my native language and I can't think of any reference that makes me think how it naturally sounds like a jest, excpet for the autobots -transformers-.

 

[eastmen]

Playtron: the startup hoping to Steam Deck-ify the world

What if Steam Deck, but not just Steam and not just Deck?

www.theverge.com

The former CEO of Cyanogen has a plan for a platform-agnostic gaming operating system.

Handhelds are the future of gaming — but there are reasons the category hasn’t exploded yet. The Nintendo Switch is locked down, Windows can be cumbersome, and Valve’s pick-up-and-play SteamOS hasn’t yet escaped the Steam Deck.

What if there were an Android of gaming, an OS you could install on any capable hardware to get a controller-friendly PC experience? Imagine an “Epic Deck” that could actually play Fortnite, a “5G Deck” for cellular carriers, or maybe a “PlayStation Deck” for Sony’s growing PC ambitions.

...

They’ve already seen The Witcher 3 running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 smartphone — admittedly at under 30fps with somewhat potato-y graphics.
But while Qualcomm has been talking a big game about its Snapdragon X Elite chips coming this summer, both McMaster and Qualcomm exec Micah Knapp suggest it might take a couple more years for Arm to match x86 for gaming. “Have I seen faster? Yes. Have I seen better battery life? Yes. Not one example I can point to with both,” says Knapp.

...

A lot of things would have to go right for Playtron to succeed, and it probably won’t be the only company shipping a handheld OS. Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais now tells me the company’s finally working directly with other companies to bring SteamOS to its handhelds, and I’m currently testing a promising SteamOS clone called Bazzite. Microsoft also won’t sit on its hands forever.

But for the moment, Playtron sounds intriguing — particularly for anyone who wants to challenge the status quo of Steam PC gaming.
(.......)

...

This would be probably what MS should do if they still want to become something in the PC space, but time is running and nothing changed over the years for MS in the PC space.

MS just needs to make a modified windows that launches the xbox pc app as the gui instead of the windows desktop and 90% of the mobile problems will be solved

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Why it sounds like a joke name, maybe because how you understand it in english? English isn't my native language and I can't think of any reference that makes me think how it naturally sounds like a jest, excpet for the autobots -transformers-.

It's the kind of name we make up on the spot to talk about things. eg. In Apex there are 'Replicators' but we just call them 'makeatrons' when we couldn't remember their official name, and just put 'tron' on the end of what they do.

 

[Cyan]

MS just needs to make a modified windows that launches the xbox pc app as the gui instead of the windows desktop and 90% of the mobile problems will be solved

that would be a great start. I am not saying they should abandon consoles, but give PC some love, 'cos other companies are having excellent ideas while eating their lunch. These Playtron creators basically want to revolutionize gaming starting from the OS, meaning something free, not controlled by Valve for instance.

Valve favours Steam and that's natural but I prefer something like GoG Galaxy, which tries to have a common interface for all your games, regardless of the store you got them from. John from DF also talked about a similar concept time ago, directly asking MS to try, but yeah, dunno if it will ever come into fruition, I'd be the happiest person if that happened.

 

[Cappuccino]

MS just needs to make a modified windows that launches the xbox pc app as the gui instead of the windows desktop and 90% of the mobile problems will be solved

As someone who plays on the couch primarily, sometimes without a keyboard and mouse but with a controller instead, you can kinda replicate this by having Steam launch Big Picture Mode on boot.

The issue is some games like to open strangely and it leads to it being alt tabbed into limbo where you can’t easily tab back in due to the way Steam Input changes controller mappings when a game is detected as running. This usually means I have to have a spare keyboard and mouse nearby to intervene and it means you can’t really emulate a true console-like UX.

On handheld though I feel as if this is mostly alleviated by the fact it has a touch screen and a trackpad (or at least the SD does, I guess the others don’t which imo is a mistake).

The other issue is Windows does not handle SDR content while in HDR mode elegantly, an Xbox or PS will shift the entire rendering mode to SDR (and my TV will recognize it as such as disable tone mapping, etc as it would with an SDR signal) when an SDR game launches and vice versa for HDR. Idk how much that matters for handhelds though.

 

[eastmen]

As someone who plays on the couch primarily, sometimes without a keyboard and mouse but with a controller instead, you can kinda replicate this by having Steam launch Big Picture Mode on boot.

The issue is some games like to open strangely and it leads to it being alt tabbed into limbo where you can’t easily tab back in due to the way Steam Input changes controller mappings when a game is detected as running. This usually means I have to have a spare keyboard and mouse nearby to intervene and it means you can’t really emulate a true console-like UX.

On handheld though I feel as if this is mostly alleviated by the fact it has a touch screen and a trackpad (or at least the SD does, I guess the others don’t which imo is a mistake).

The other issue is Windows does not handle SDR content while in HDR mode elegantly, an Xbox or PS will shift the entire rendering mode to SDR (and my TV will recognize it as such as disable tone mapping, etc as it would with an SDR signal) when an SDR game launches and vice versa for HDR. Idk how much that matters for handhelds though.

I find that once the xbox app is open navigating on the tv works just fine for me and same with my steam deck. When I load into windows it sucks until I get into the xbox app. The app is kind of tile based which makes it easier to navigate via touch.

The HDR content stuff is a pain in the ass. But it is something they have been working on. HDR in windows 11 is leagues better than windows 10.