They could have easily crammed the Steam Deck full of stuff to make it hard to use for piracy - locking down everything, making it usable only to play games you legitimately own, force you to go through who knows what hoops in order to play games on it. That’s what Nintendo or Apple or most other companies do.
But they didn’t, because they realized they didn’t have to. It’s 100% possible to put pirated games on the Steam Deck - in fact, it’s as easy as it could reasonably be. You copy it over, you wire it up to Steam, if it’s a non-Linux game you set it up with Proton or whatever else you want to use to run it, bam. You can now run it in Steam just as easily as a normal Steam game (usually.) If you want something similar to cloud saves you can even set up SyncThing for that.
But all of that is a lot of work, and after all that you still don’t have automatic updates, and some games won’t run this way for one reason or another even though they’ll run if you own them (usually, I assume, because of Steam Deck specific tweaks or install stuff that are only used when you’re running them on the Deck via the normal method.) Some of this you can work around but it’s even more hoops.
Whereas if you own a game it’s just push a button and play. They made legitimately owning a game more convenient than piracy, and they did it without relying on DRM or anything that restricts or annoys legitimate users at all - even if a game has a DRM-free GOG version, owning it on Steam will still make it easier to play on the Steam Deck.
It’s built on Linux. Specifically Arch Linux. So no, there’s nothing they could have done to lock it down to prevent piracy. Not even if they wanted to.
Tell me you don’t know how to administer Linux without telling me you don’t know how to administer Linux.
I don’t administer Linux, I use Linux. Unless you’re conflating being an end user with being an administrator, in which case I would say that’s a rather pretentious way to put it. Nobody walks around saying they administer Windows because they have a laptop. It sounds stupid.
Right, so you don’t know what you’re talking about and shouldn’t speak authoritatively on the subject.
I drive a car every day, but that doesn’t mean I can speak authoritatively on how its transmission works.
But, I am a senior SecOps engineer (like a systems engineer but also a cyber security expert) working mostly with Linux, and I can authoritatively say that you’re mistaken about Valve’s ability to block piracy in Linux.
The point is just using it gives you no experience to talk about how easy it is to lock down an OS, administering one does. EatYouWell is absolutely right in calling out that you don’t administer linux, as you say yourself: you don’t, you use it. And that difference shows in the falsehood of your comment: it is possible to lock down Linux to levels like a PS5 and anyone administering Linux would know that from their knowledge of the underlying components.
There’s a lot they could have done, locking down Linux isn’t that hard. Just look at Chrome OS, it’s based on Gentoo, yet it’s locked down completely. All they had.to do is lock the BIOS, enable secure boot and disable root access, and then it’s pretty much a locked system.
And instead of doubling-down in denial, they embraced the openness.
They could have not built it on arch linux. They made decisions that were pro-consumer and thus they did not need to make decisions that were anti piracy