Steam Deck just turned 4 years old, and I can't believe how bleak the future looks for Valve — will SteamOS ever rival Windows?

Valve could have celebrated another birthday of its iconic, still beloved Steam Deck yesterday, as the Linux-based PC gaming handheld turned 4 years old on February 25. However, ongoing storage and RAM shortages have affected Steam Deck OLED production, and there are no significant signs that the issue is easing for you (or me) as average PC gamers.

One of the original Steam Deck LCD models, with 256GB of storage, has already been removed from sale. To be fair, it hardly appealed to modern audiences for its comparatively tiny storage capacity for installing games, and its removal seemed to be part of Valve's plan — one I'd agree with.

However, future strategies for the upcoming Steam Machine, Valve's gaming PC, have been disrupted by surging prices for critical memory and storage parts, reportedly driven by the gargantuan rise of enterprise-driven generative AI. As a regular Steam Deck user and general fan of Valve, it's hard to feel as optimistic as when we ran a speculative Steam Machine price analysis last year.

I already had reservations about whether the upcoming Steam Machine would handle graphically intensive modern games with its 8GB of VRAM, despite Valve's claims that it targets a 4K resolution running at 60 FPS by relying on AMD's FSR upscaling technology. If it's on a lower GPU limit and we end up paying over the odds for the hardware, then I could predict a negative backlash.

Is Valve's Steam Machine in trouble or not?

Interestingly, AMD's CEO claims Valve is still on track to release the Steam Machine on its original, yet publicly obscured, launch date. We already know that a "semi-custom" Zen 4 processor from AMD is inside it, so it's reasonable to expect that mass production of that chip started months ago (via PC Gamer).

What that doesn't reveal is what's happening with plans for pricing the Steam Machine, and whether Valve will (or can) subsidize the rising costs. I've personally watched the price of popular desktop memory (RAM) rise from around $98 to $250 for 16GB of DDR5-6000, and I can't imagine it would be easy for Valve to offset the cost of memory chiplets inside AMD's processors.

🗨️ So, what about SteamOS vs. Windows?

The age-old "Year of the Linux desktop" discussion oozes back into popular culture every few months — like a gas leak — though I still firmly believe dual-booting gives you the best of both worlds anyway. Linux and Windows play well together, but the topic of a new distro dethroning Microsoft's PC gaming rule never goes away.

Then again, I'm still bothered by the bickering that happens with some open-source options. Essay-length explanations of developer drama leave me uninterested in booting into otherwise exciting gaming distros like Bazzite, and it feels like I'm back to waiting for Valve to better support SteamOS on any PC — while I stick with Fedora KDE for low-power productivity.

Valve is the only recognized brand that has a chance of making Linux appeal to the average crowd, using the Steam Machine as the Trojan Horse that sneaks it in. Still, if this cube-shaped gaming PC launches with a couple of hundred dollars over what I expect, then kiss those aspirations goodbye. At least SteamOS will stay a boon to the Steam Deck (if you can still buy one in six months).

Are you waiting for the Steam Machine, or are you happy with a Steam Deck? Perhaps neither? Let me know, I'm interested to see how many in our community are eagerly awaiting Valve's next move.

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