Steam Ate Microsoft's Lunch On PC, It's About To Do The Same On Handhelds
Steam Ate Microsoft's Lunch On PC, It's About To Do The Same On Handhelds
As Valve gets ready to bring Steam Deck's OS to more platforms, Microsoft is out of time
You're viewing a single thread.
Boots up gaming PC
Windows: "YOU IN DANGER ZONE! NEED WINDOWS 11! BUY NEW PC U SCRUB!!!111"
Load up Steam
Steam: "Hey, I see MS are being assholes - click here to install SteamOS instead"
Reboot PC
Millions of people never run windows again
I'm dreaming but that would be amazing. That would make this the year of the Linux desktop. C'mon GabeN, make it happen!
Are you sure you don't want to create a microsoft ID? Microsoft believes that you should only trust them with all of your data and credentials. They promise they won't hand over your information to the government unless the government serves them a subpoena or has an agreement to access the data that is lawful or they detect something they have been asked to report.
Well you wouldn't mind the government just checking unless you're a criminal. /s
You forgot the /s
I see people railing against it so often on here I tried not using it to see from their point of view for once. It appears to have been unwise
Damned if you do, damned if you don't 😁
Things which are holding this back
- Collaboration with OEMs to provide SteamOS OTTB (Lenovo is an exception)
- Nvidia support. Most gamers use Nvidia GPU unfortunately
- Certain industry-standard software which don't have a Linux port. PSA: Most people don't want to learn alt software. Johnny Mainstream is scared of new softwares. This cannot be changed
- End-users suffer from choice paralysis and Linux offers endless choice. Maybe SteamOS can help.
What we know so far, SteamOS won't be a general purpose OS, so it might not support every random piece of h/w.
We might not have the year of the Linux Desktop, but we can expect 2025-2026 to be the year of the Linux handheld.
SRC: Linux fanboy for the last decade
Nvidia works flawlessly in my system, didn't have to tweak anything.
Right, so since you had that experience, everyone else must also have it?
Let me tell you about my Nvidia experience.
I use an old Nvidia card and I'm using the proprietary drivers. My distro maintainer said they are switching over to the open source version (only supported for 20xx series and above). They said it will cause an issue. I updated my distro like usual. And boom! Can't boot anymore.
Since I'm more or less tech savvy, I could fix it but it took me few hours of my life to find the solution. I saw on reddit many people were having the same issue. If I constantly checked their Discord before every update, I could have avoided it but it's impossible for a layman.
A mainstream person won't be able to search & diagnose the problem. They will just think it's a Linux problem and give up. This is why it's impossible for Nvidia users to peacefully live with Linux. I know they are going to release a proper driver for Wayland but I am pretty sure that will take another 2-3 years. But till then, my stance remains the same.
There are a few things in your anecdote that are particular to your case and which should be solvable by an installer that focuses on gpu detection; those are the things that valve will focus on.
Choice paralysis is a surprisingly big issue. I'm waiting for the parts for my new gaming PC build to arrive, and the amount of time I've spent choosing a distro has been asinine.
But I did make the choice to leave both the NVIDIA and Windows eco systems on my desktop after seeing most my games run fine on the steam deck ( along with disliking windows 11, and NVIDIA ending gamestream support)Distro doesn’t really matter too much. Just don’t get some obscure distro that no one has heard of before.
Plus it’s pretty common for newbies to jump around to test out different distros anyway.
Most of the time, the differences you will see are just desktop environment.
After you have used Linux for some time, then you will understand the major differences between the distros other than the way they look.
If you have any questions about Linux feel free to send me a DM. I’m always happy to help.
Surprisingly for a choice that I realize doesn't really matter, it still ends up burning alot of time researching.
Intially looked at Bazzite, which seemed great other than I wasn't a fan of it immutability, I've had to remove the read-only property from my steam deck a few times.
Then I looked at CatchyOS/Arch, decided to avoid that as I know I'm too lazy to read notes every update, and while I don't mind tinkering and fixing stuff.. I want it to be on my schedule lol.
Avoiding Debian, my server currently runs it, but I remember it giving me headaches installing older JREs on it to run modded minecraft servers.
So I'm going to try OpenSuse, not for any real valid reason other than the last time I tried Linux as my daily driver ( 2004/2005) it was the first distro that worked smoothly without any driver headaches.
That’s great. I looked into that one before, but never used it for some reason. I forget why, but it was nothing major.
Intially looked at Bazzite, which seemed great other than I wasn’t a fan of it immutability, I’ve had to remove the read-only property from my steam deck a few times.
Fwiw, Bazzite handles its 'immutability' vastly different.
True, thats part of the reason why I didn't try it. Bazzite seemed much closer to being truely immutable, vice the "read-only" safety rails SteamOS gives you. I like to tinker too much to put it on my own machine, but I'll probably put Bazzite on my son's gaming machine next time I upgrade it.
Bazzite seemed much closer to being truely immutable
If you meant that it's even harder to tinker/change/configure etc compared to SteamOS, then I'd like to inform you that this is false. Fedora Atomic, and thus Bazzite, facilitates quite a lot actually. Of course, it's not as moldable as say Arch or Gentoo. To illustrate this, I won't bother you with all the things it can do. Because that would take a while. Instead, I'll only focus on the things it actually can not do. On the top of my head, the following comes to mind:
Rip systemd out and replace it with another init, but I'm unaware if traditional Fedora even facilitates this to begin with.Bazzite's founder came by and corrected me on this. Even this is probably possible as a custom image.- UKI
- Setup systemd-boot (or any other bootloader) instead of GRUB
- Kmods can be hit or miss; what's found here is accessible. What remains can be very finicky.
- 3rd party repositories can be hit or miss; for example, both Terra and Tailscale work, but e.g. ProtonVPN may not.
UKI is something we very much want to do in the future, but it's a long-term goal
As far as replacing the init system, I think even in traditional Fedora that would be extremely challenging, but it could probably be done as a custom image.
Thank you for chiming in and providing your thoughts!
While we're at it, I absolutely appreciate your work. Wonderful stuff! Thank you from the bottom of my heart!
UKI is something we very much want to do in the future, but it’s a long-term goal
That's lovely to hear!
As far as replacing the init system, I think even in traditional Fedora that would be extremely challenging, but it could probably be done as a custom image.
Aight. I'll change the list then. Thank you for enlightening me on this. The feasibility as a custom image is really encouraging; perhaps I'll give it a go 😜.
As the saying goes, you have to use arch or you have a small penis
Hey! Some of us manage both.
You forgot the endless pages of trick questions you have to periodically step through to get into Windows. One wrong move and you owe Microsoft money every month.
If Linux had better nvidia support I would swap in a heart beat.
I have been running OpenSUSE with nVidia for 7 years. No issues here.
AMD's RT performance is getting quite close to Nvidia. Each generation gets them closer and closer.
CUDA will always be proprietary but there's a ton of resources being put against alternative solutions.
Using Pop for almost 2 years on nvidia laptop and pc, no problem, whats the issue?
...Ok no problem is a lie, but it wasn't GPU related problems..
I had issues with my specific hardware combo of i9 14900k and 4090 and multi display issues that windows doesn’t seem to have. Though that could just be my ignorance.
Depending on the issue it may be fixed now that Wayland is better supported on Nvidia.
X.org always had issues running multiple displays with different refresh rate for example.
But don't know your exact problem of course. May be something different. I think there will be some big leaps made with nkv (the new open source drivers for Nvidia cards), but it gonna take some time.
You can always try something like pop_os on a live usb. They have the Nvidia drivers installed and use Wayland I think.
I had an issue with 2 4k screens through my dock, but that was apparently my docks fault.
That would be a massive headache because you'd have to make it work on any hardware. And if you bork your users' PCs you're in for a really bad time. It would be much better to come up with a new Steam machine.
i mean… any hardware is kinda just a matter of time imo
linux already works with more hardware than windows does, and often more reliably - not some of the complex stuff required for gaming of course, but again… matter of time. it’s not important until it’s important and then it really kicks off
Big old citation needed there
the point is that the architecture and development style of linux provides for a very robust and reliable platform to develop hardware for
gaming is a VERY new thing on linux, so it’s not at all surprising that support is in its infancy… but you look at things that linux has been doing basically since the internet has existed: servers, and hardware support is unmatched
… and there’s way more server hardware than there are most other categories of hardware
Does anybody remember Wubi? It was Linux that was installed on Windows just like a regular program. Gave you an option to choose Linux on boot. It didn't make any partitions, and if you didn't want it anymore? Then you'd go to Windows and uninstall like any other program. It had a few limitations but was an interesting concept.
Yeah, I remember Wubi! That was 20-ish years ago now. It kind of got made irrelevant by VM's I guess. I wonder if it's still around.
VMs are still slow unless you're talking linux on linux with KVM
Wubi was great because you got native speed to test Linux with, which was probably better than Windows for at least most versions of Windows.
There's WSL now in Windows 11 - a built-in, pretty performant instance of Linux. The recent versions run a proper Linux kernel I believe (the older ones were more of a compatibility layer over Windows APIs). I'm not sure what the limitations of WSL are. But there is already some kind of Linux in Windows. I use it for the odd utility and to avoid having to learn PowerShell.
There is. Wubi was more about giving 14 year old me the confidence to try out an entirely different os.
Of course! It's what got me started!
I love it as a concept, and frankly a dual boot installer (create partitions) that worked from Windows would be pretty useful I think. USB/disk installs add complexity that just hurt the chances.
"It erased pictures of my nana, Im going to sue Gabe Newell!" Windows users 🙄🙄
(I am that user)