Steam Deck OS occupies 10GB, leaving about 50GB free for games in the base version

I assume some space reserved for swap files and caches (shaders, ...). Probably some place reserved for temporary download. Some place reserved for future update. Steam itself, the OS itself, maybe Java in case there's some java games/apps on the store i would be surprised if java is not installed, not sure how Proton works but i guess it involve some kind of windows files or image or something? I highly doubt Proton takes less than 1GB i think Wine takes 1.5GB minimum or something like that. I would not be surprised if Proton takes close to 2GB. From what i've seen it's quite good. Maybe Source is pre-installed.


Y'all seem to forget it's 2021 and 10GB is like nothing nowadays .

 

It should have enough RAM to not need a swap; Unlike Windows, Linux by default doesn't use swap unless you're running too low.
I thought of the temporary download space, but, Steam I think downloads and decompresses the files on-the-fly, and it checks how much space you have left before you begin a download, so I don't see why it would need to do that.
If there are any games that use Java (not sure if there are any), they would be packaged with a JRE. Same goes for Flash games.
Yeah, Proton uses about 1.5GB. Though, I guess where it really starts to take up more space is when you have multiple versions, as some games only work with a specific version. So, having a few versions installed would rack up some of the space used rather quickly.
I don't see why Source would be installed, but who knows, Valve might have their own reasons for putting it in there.

Not when you've got a 64GB drive and when a single game can often be triple that.
There's no need to needlessly waste disk space. That isn't to say Valve is wasting it, but, they apparently have cleaned up a lot already.

 

Oculus with the Quest 2 discontinued their 64GB model after (presumably) realizing it's not enough for most people. There's no expandable storage on Quest 2 headsets though. There's been problems multiple times when updating larger games (you needed like 20GB of free space to update a 8GB game), and the largest game currently (MoH) is 40GB. This is with a platform that is relatively optimized for small storage sizes. Presumably this also made sense from a business standpoint since people aren't going to buy more games if they're out of storage

For Steam Deck, I think a 64GB base internal storage is ok, as long as the price and availability for SD cards isn't an issue. But 64GB by itself is largely not worth it for most people interested in Steam Deck I assume who would want to play actual PC games (emulation can already be done on a bunch of other handheld devices like PSPs and Vitas, or phones with controller clips/grips). I'm unsure what other hardware like this does for storage.

 

Pretty amazing that they have got thousands of windows games working on linux to be fair. Makes you wonder what native linux could do if developers werent tied to a resource hogging OS right now