Wagner James Au / New World Notes

SL Redditor /RealEvilind recently posted this tantalizing image, showing Second Life running on Steam Deck, the handheld videogame console from Valve, and they report it gets pretty great performance:

This is Firestorm running on the Steam Deck pretty well. It pulls off 30 – 40 FPS in a normal crowded area, on high, with ambient occlusion on. It runs on Linux, and it's very easy to install. All I had to do is customize the controller, so that I could move and manipulate the camera. The device's trackpads can be set as mouse with click and right click.

We finally have a pretty cheap, truly portable solution for Second Life.

Maybe so! If you have a Steam Deck and the patience to set it up to run SL. As I'm not a Steam Deck owner myself, I'm talking with RealEvilind now, and will hopefully get a video to show their demo in action. 

As for the setup, here's their notes on that:

Firestorm must be added to glossi, then added to Steam through glossi, and launched through Steam, or the controller won't be recognized.

The performance drops on average 20% – 30%, if not more.

In London SOHO, at high with ALM and AO enabled I'm getting 7-8 fps. On medium with ALM and AO off, view distance at 32, I'm getting 19-20 fps.

On my sim, I'm getting 30 fps, compared to 40 on SteamOS.

The keyboard experience is crap, on both the Steam kb and Windows touch keyboard (it doesn't scale properly).

So not a great or full performance, but more than good enough for many applications. Caveat emptor and all that, but if you do have a Steam Deck and want to give it a try, report your results below!