This entire post and especially this bit: well said

I also buy from both stores(GOG a bit more), and (as allowed in my country's laws) I "backup" my DRM laden steam games whenever I buy any there. As you said, it takes a bit of work, but it can be done.
(of course, GOG games are more easy to backup...as I just need to DL them from my library)

Small nitpick: regardless of what Steam's EULA says, the laws of one's home country(specifically concerning backup and archiving of owned software) might allow one to "crack" out said DRM and make a backup copy(if they do it themselves, that is).

Of course, GOG is better in this regard as one doesn't need to do such steps for the games sold here....which is part of why I have bought mainly from GOG for quite some time.

That GOG's user agreement, though... I'm not sure if every game does but a lot of games have their own separate EULA... all GOG is saying is "hey if we no longer exist we will try (keyword) to give you notice so you can download everything" and that basically you are free to do so. I just downloaded Aladdin from my library because it is small, has Disney's EULA attached which is vastly different then GOG's user agreement. It's all a grey area... i would argue the EULA attached to the game supersedes GOG's user agreement. But I agree GOG agreement is better then Steams. But let's be real here, it doesn't matter what Steam or GOG user agreement says or what the game EULA says, to the vast majority of us what matters is what can be enforced. Nobody is mass deleting their DRM steam games if Steam goes belly up... nobody.

However, let's get back onto the topic of the Steam Deck because I do think this is an interesting device and I really do want to talk about it...

Careful what you wish for. OLED phones are experiencing some severe screen burn, right now. Particularly on interface parts that don't move (so health bars and things like that for this device). The thing i like about APUs is their increased bandwidth between GPU and CPU. That is something severely underestimated, and i suspect this is what is behind games like Horizon: Zero Dawn running horridly on some computers despite running so well on others (including the PS4).

As for clock speed, either i'm misinterpreting what you're saying or it's a non-issue: the clockspeed and the voltage are not necessarily linked. To the contrary, a lower voltage means you can clock it higher since it won't generate as much heat, though you may need to keep a CPU lower for reasons other than heat (result stablization of individual instructions). It sounds like a great idea, especially with the huge difference between PC games and mobile games, and with the mobile stores getting trashier and trashier and harder to navigate (which i think is intentional on android's part 'cause google makes money off of ads mostly), so finding what you're looking for is low difficult. Getting a mobile phone that breaks away from the f2p model is naturally incredibly tempting. That said, there's very little, other than ad incentives, preventing mobile markets from getting those things. ARMs are competitive with x86, at this point, and it's just a matter of what gets compiled to what CPUs.

EULAs you only get to see after you bought the product are not part of any contract in Europe - a contract is an agreement between two parties, and you can't agree to things you don't know. GOG is a European company.

When will we see the announcement for GOGDeck, the optional handheld?

I'll stick with my GPD Win. I'm still playing on it (first one!), and already finished plenty of games from my GOG library :)

A real shame though, that GPD in last years went into extremely expensive devices. I've thought that GPD Win 2 was expensive, but I've changed my mind after WIn MAx/WIN 3 were released. Now THOSE are really expensive devices!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but probably that Steam Deck won't be too useful for playing older Windows games outside of Steam?

Someone could say that Windows 10 is not ideal for playing older games, but you would be surprised how many classics from older Windows I've completed on my GPD Win* :)

*All GPD Win devices have Windows 10 pre-installed.

(no need to reply to the EULA bits below....I just wanted to reply/weigh in a bit on that, and don't want to make the thread go any further offtopic. The ontopic bit about steam deck is at the bottom)

A country's laws supersede both, though, no matter which supersedes the other.......and a number of countries have laws that render chunks of said EULAs unenforceable/etc.

I am guessing that some might, if they overly worry about and/or like to follow EULAs/etc. As for me: I already have DRM free backups of all my DRM steam games....as such is allowed under my country's laws.

Agreed.

Such as: I'm wondering how long it'll last before Steam shelves it like near every other HW venture they've done


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Don't you mean the "optional"(tm) handheld? ;)

I'm an OLED user for about a decade now, pretty much went from crt to plasma to oled, resorting to calculator displays only for office and casual stuff. First thing I did with the tv was to discard the factory settings and tune/calibrate it (esp. brightness) for dimly lit room. It is used primarily for movies and some gaming too. Some decluttering of HUD in games is a way to go with it to minimize risk of burn-in, which suits me as I dislike visual overload in games that go for mmo-style huds, with pointers, minimap, numbers flying everywhere nonsense. Btw I run it around 10% brightness as a sweet spot. I thought that me saying "If only papaGaben would offer an OLED model for those who don't play while out in the sun much" gave it away that I would run it at low brightness to prevent burn-in and fade of blue colours. Also screensavers were a thing since crt days for a reason. Btw this is just the very reason why I wouldn't consider a second hand oled ps vita unless I knew the person who had it and how they ran it. I know precisely what I wish for here, but I understand you meant it all well for a general user.

Interconnect between cpu and igpu is a nice thing for the low latency, however in reality it doesn't do such magical things as you might expect, esp. if you consider that they both share the same memory, its bandwidth and possibly the memory controller too which causes the latency bottleneck. Though with steamdeck I'm less worried since they at least use ddr5. Makes one think how it would perform with something like stack of hbm2, but the price would skyrocket.
APU as design is a compromise by choice, cpu portion of apus in general has a lower cache compared to desktop-only architecture, igpu part having fewer CUs and to top it off, they share the tdp envelope as I already said. There is only so much you can do with those 15W to play with. For mobile usage it's good enough, esp. the size and efficiency is great with lower clocks.
Console ports sometimes running like crap won't be solved with the low latency interconnect that apus have though (believe me, I tried with my APUs - heck my old kaveri apu doesn't even have L3 cache on cpu side, which hurts its performance). It all boils down to optimizations of a native version for 1 console vs a myriad of hw/sw setups and porting to them.

As for clockspeeds of apu in general, with mobile tdp and the cooling solution used, you likely won't reach max advertised clocks on cpu and igpu at the same time, because when the tdp gets reached, it will throttle one or the other or both down. Undervolting and over- or under- clocking as a practice was just my experience with amd products, since their gpus were notorious for coming overvolted out of the factory, where you could easily undervolt them and get much better thermals without any loss of performance. If you underclocked to boot, you would get insanely low power consumption, esp. on gpus with hbm of any kind. Sorry for confusion, didn't imply that voltage and clockspeeds were rigidly linked or whatever.

As for this device, I wouldn't preorder it until I see tech-heavy reviews, how it performs, what options it offers to prosumers, etc and then again I'm not much interested in handheld without oled display (or microled in a decade from now).

On the contrary, Wine generally has better backward compatibility than Windows itself. I finished dozens if not hundreds old games from GOG in Wine. Hard to say about controls though.

Yes, I keep hearing this, wonder who started this myth. As from other threads, there have been one or two games which have had issues, everything else runs perfectly in windows 10. Sure at the start when M$ (To the betterment of everything) removed securom support the there was an outcry, but get some nocd’s, turn direct play on and it’s fine. Having played 100s of games one various incarnations of windows 10, and all predecessors, and will likely play thousands more without a single issue.

Dunno, maybe GOG's marketing team so they can brag about how their games are adjusted to run on modern systems. /s

The steam controller was great but what screwed it up was being forced to use steam to have it working as a proper controller.

Steam was great but what screwed it up was being forced to use Steam to have games working.

Does that mean the game might run reasonably run better than expected on some integrated GPUs?

Has there been any reports of a system with both integrated and dedicated GPUs running the game better on the integrated GPU? (One requirement: The dedicated GPU must at least meet the stated minimum requirements of the game, to avoid contrived situations like a modern APU paired with an ancient graphics card.)

I've been wanting a device like that, but significantly lower end. Something like the following:
* Price: $200 or less
* CPU: Something low power, like a Celeron or even Atom
* GPU: Integrated.
* Input devices: Gaming controls, plus maybe a built in little keyboard.
* Size/Weight: Small and light. (I would prefer this over better performance.) Also, would like it to run cool without needing fans.
* Game compatibility: At least able to play Shovel Knight. Hollow Knight would be nice, though possibly at lowest settings and lower graphics frame rate (as long as it's consistent, not too low to be unplayable, and the game can run at its full physics framerate). There's other indies that would be nice to play on such a device, like Ikenfell and Celeste (with custom map support).