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....
I had an x86 Android tablet and that was exactly as locked-down as an ARM Android device.
But anyhow: I can lock down a x86 laptop or PC the way I was describing within a very short time.
So again:
Put a password on the BIOS
Set Secure Boot on
Wipe all Secure Boot keys and put your own in there
Encrypt the disk so that you can’t just plop the drive into another PC and modify its content
Set the root user to “Can only login with private key” and don’t give the key to the customers
Remove all users from sudoers
Use chown root:root and chmod 700 on anything you don’t want the user to touch
And if a company was doing this to their products (e.g. the Steam Deck), they’d replace the first 3 steps with a custom BIOS which just doesn’t let you change anything in regards to Secure Boot and Secure Boot keys. That way, removing the BIOS battery won’t help.
There are countless embedded devices using an x86 PC at their core, where they did exactly that. (E.g. ATMs or medical devices)
Also Chromebooks are exactly that.
And the Playstation 5 does the same thing, only it’s based on FreeBSD.
I did post an exact description a bit higher above, but you focussed on the one detail that really doesn’t matter in this equation (ARM vs x86, even though it’s exactly the same in that regard, and there are also x86 Android devices) and neither read nor understood the rest of my answer.
And you used that missing knowledge on your side to invalidate my answer without even understanding what it was about.
And you could, very big revelation, also just google before posting nonsense.
I feel like the Steam Deck is the best proof of Gabe Newell's quote that "piracy is a service issue."
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....