I wonder if the work on waydroid for the steam frame will translate into being able to easily run Android apps like SmartTube from big picture mode.

Edit: Apparently there is an unofficial waydroid installer, and it adds all Android apps to the big picture mode UI. So I would just install that and use the Android TV Jellyfin app and SmartTube.

https://github.com/ryanrudolfoba/SteamOS-Waydroid-Installer

Abandon “legal” streaming, it doesn’t work because of DRM.

Cable Matters sells plenty of different DP->HDMI 2.1 adapters that work with VRR. The main issue here is that you won’t get CEC if you use those.

Fun fact, all of the audio codes are proprietary too. You won’t find a HDMI surround sound splitter on Aliexpress. Say no to HDMI, say no to E-ARC.

Yeah i agree with you, but there is a limit to community support. The Steam Deck specifically has a big community, but most hobbyists don’t like to spend a ton of time maintaining ancient hardware drivers.

I believe my 11 year old Thinkpad T540p still runs mainline kernels too. The GPU is not supported by the 2018 Intel Iris userspace driver though, so I would need to run a legacy driver that does not support vulkan. Its still packaged by Arch, but it does limit my options.

I’d say 10 years until new games stop running with all features, and 20-30 years until it stops running mainline kernels and loses network access to Steam.

Other handhelds with closed-source drivers probably stop running mainline in 5-10 years.

It may work, but there are software dependencies that will become end of life. The first to go will probably be the GPU drivers. In 10 years or so, Linux will discontinue the GPU drivers and you will not be able to run the latest Linux kernel.