for me where valve is "the good guy" is having replacement parts available day one and having a decent enough queue system that might not of been perfect but helped to keep the scalpers at bay. then add in them not trying to lock it down, like letting you chose your own boot animation and making it easier to do when someone first did it, and it makes a great case for the device to me. all of that instills confidence in me to buy it.

valve isnt perfect, and no corporation is your friend, but thats a refreshing change from nintendo and sony and microsoft who try to lock the device down as hard as possible.

I kind of agree but you also have to consider the industry that Valve is in and the plethora of anti-consumerism taking place right now.

Valve could have made the Steam Deck with a proprietary OS. They could have locked you into big picture mode and/or locked the bootloader like so many Android and Nintendo devices. They could have done everything in their power to ensure you can't install GoG or Epic games. They could have glued the SteamDeck together and serialized all the parts together so you could never replace any of them.

And you know what? No one would have batted an eye because that's what society has come to expect in this day and age, and far too many fucking people will tolerate and accept it.

Instead they went out of their way to build it on a FOSS OS, even going so far as to add the "exit to desktop" right into the GUI. They obviously don't actively promote other platforms but they also do absolutely nothing to stop you from installing them, or making literally any changes to the device that you want.

Instead they made every single component available for purchase from a third party retailer, who also includes detailed tutorials and diagrams.

Now could they be better and lower their commissions and refuse to allow DRM? Sure. But at least they put those commissions to good use developing pro-sumer hardware.

Valve is a "good guy" only when you consider that everyone else in the room are damn near comically evil villains. Valve is decent when compared to that, but they also still do shit like the CSGO market soooo