The Steam Deck is a fantastic console for indie game developers, IMO. World class hardware, you can program your game on it, test on it, and ship on it.
I like little consoles like this but I never get one because I'm almost certain it would be novel and almost nobody I know would end up having one, unfortunately.
Update: and, importantly for the Steam Deck, you have a wide player base out of the box. Maybe not as much for the Deck itself (yet) but definitely on all three PC platforms.
It's the console equivalent of a musical groovebox. Selling the idea that you just need to buy this device and you can make music/games too! It'll be a lot harder but it'll be more "fun" because you're limited creatively.
It would be neat if it was easier to broadcast the experience of playing the game to more folks like how playing back a song recorded from a groovebox doesn't require much more than a device with speakers than can play an audio file.
The "fantasy" part of this things is the price... For that price I can get a full computer/ chromebook that supports Linux, I wouldn't put more than 100 bucks on something like this when ALL it can do I can do it with Termux on an Android phone...
Absolutely true, but typing on a screen is a royal pain in many contexts. I like this design because it looks like a moderately rugged industrial computer that's not a clamshell and has a useful keyboard (I grew up with things like ZX Spectrums so this isn't the negative for me that it is for many others).
It is indeed quite limited, but I like terminal environments and (again) grew up with very constrained menu-driven software, so this is less of an toy than a very customizable tool; I'm not really interested in the game console emulation. One that can fit in a cargo pocket and is surprisingly affordable. The lack of a touchscreen or camera are pluses for me.
As an alternative for people interested in developing on handhelds like this, homebrew for old consoles (PSP, 3DS, etc) is always fun. There are also hundreds of millions of those still floating around, so there’s a real chance people will actually play your game, and you potentially contribute to delaying their trip to the landfill.
Truth! I do homebrew on my N2DSXL and the developer tooling there is fantastic [0]. Same with NES and even older handhelds like the DMG-001.
The nice thing about the Steam Deck though is that you can carry around your development environment on the same machine. You still have to cross-compile to reach the 3DS and such.
Device wiki pages on Lineage are enough. The process isn't complicated, and boils down to a handful of steps after downloading the requisite files. Off the top off my head:
1. Enable ADB on device
2. Unlock the bootloader
3. Use fastboot to install TWRP
4. Boot into recovery and use TWRP to complete installation from zip files (Android ROM, Google apps)
Honestly, if someone could make an x86 compute module in the form factor, there's no reason the uConsole couldn't run Steam and Proton. The tech isn't quite there yet though, so it makes more sense to target low-power emulators for this form factor.
I like little consoles like this but I never get one because I'm almost certain it would be novel and almost nobody I know would end up having one, unfortunately.
Update: and, importantly for the Steam Deck, you have a wide player base out of the box. Maybe not as much for the Deck itself (yet) but definitely on all three PC platforms.