Even gamers nexus’ Steve today said that they’re about to start doing Linux games performance testing soon. It’s happening, y’all, the year of the Linux desktop is upon us. ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ

Edit: just wanted to clarify that Steve from GN didn’t precisely say they’re starting to test soon, he said they will start WHEN the steam OS releases and is adopted. Sorry about that.

  • To anyone reading this thinking “once SteamOS comes out, I’ll switch”, you should know:

    Gaming on Linux is already here. Pick a distro and game. You can take advantage of Proton right now. You don’t need to wait for one specific distro.

    I’ve personally been gaming on Linux exclusively for about 3 years. Windows games, not Linux games.

    Edit: based on other commenters’ suggestions, I’ll give you some.

    I have gamed for those three years on PopOS. It is a distro based on Debian, ultimately, which means it’s also related to Ubuntu and Mint. Realistically, you can pick any of those 4 and you should have a nice experience.

    Arch is popular with the übergeeks, and I do use it on my laptop, BTW, but you shouldn’t use it as a first distro.

    The concept of “distro” doesn’t really exist for Windows, because you pretty much get one monolithic product. But basically, it is a specific mix of software that works together and relies on the Linux kernel. Imagine it as a “version” of Windows with specific goals, some of which are overlapping (e.g. Mint and Ubuntu tend to cater to the same audience).

    If you get far enough into it, the freedom that Linux allows means that you can turn any distro into any other distro.

  • A Linux distro with a great OOTB experience for gamers would go a long way.

    • Steam pre-installed
    • trustworthy Flatpak packages for popular gamer apps like Discord (not uploaded by some nameless rando)
      • TeamSpeak for curmudgeons like me and my friends
    • desktop environment tailored to Windows users
    • auto-install and configure graphics drivers for AMD and Nvidia
    • configurable automatic updates and system backup
    • choice between Chromium, Firefox, etc. for default browser during setup
    • included in Steam Deck compatibility testing
    • I’ve been using Nobara and its been awesome. I wanted a fairly standard desktop with a gaming focus and it fit the bill. It even managed to automatically get the power saving sorted for my laptop which has a nvidia GPU. Great distro.

    • As I understand it, there have been issues with distributing Nvidia drivers in a Linux distro. Some do do it, but it’s kind of a legal grey area due to potential conflicts with the license of the Linux kernel.

      I don’t really understand it fully, but it’s been an issue for a while. Apparently it’s less of an issue now because Nvidia partially open sourced its drivers. AMD’s GPU drivers apparently don’t have these issues.

      Wonder what the situation with intel’s new GPUs and its drivers is.

    • You’re just shy from describing Bazzite

      It’s got:

      • Steam pre-installed
      • trustworthy (?) Flatpak packages for just about everything, even encourages it
      • desktop environment tailored to Windows users (KDE, really)
      • auto-install and configure graphics drivers for AMD (Mesa) and Nvidia
      • configurable automatic updates and system backup (although I think you still have to click the notification for flatpak updates)
      • choice between anything for default anything during setup
      • included in Steam Deck compatibility testing (actually in not sure but they do offer Steam Deck builds)
  • When SteamOS releases on all devices people will say “I’ll switch when every peice of Windows software is compatible” or some other unreasonable and impossible accomplishment. Even if every peice of Windows software was compatible people would say “ill switch to Linux when it looks and functions identically to Windows”.

    • It helps to think about this as a spectrum, as more features become available more people will make the switch to Linux. Not everyone will be able to swich to Linux at the same time, and some people will never switch.

      Gaming was major bottleneck, even I, a person using Linux full time for the past 20 years, I used to maintain a Windows disk to play games. Only in the past couple of years I was able to sunset my windows setup, hopefully to never touch windows ever again. I had to drop a couple of games but it got to the point where rebooting to a OS wasn’t worth it, as most of my games worked flawlessly without any tweaking.

      There are many major pros to the Linux desktop environment, but we still need major software applications to become portable. The workflow of an average office worker is still not Linux compatible. Of course there are office alternatives, but they are not as easy to use. Though, IMO the oss world is hurting by trying to copy ms when their products are so horrible… Hopefully, the EU will drop some major cash at the issue with all these talks about digital sovereignty.

    • Yep. I recently started using bluesky and it’s filled with linux hate posts farming likes. People just complaining about random things that don’t even make sense.

      I believe fomo is a real thing. Even if one doesnt play fortnite or valorant or kernel level shit, they still are afraid of missing out. So unless and until Microsoft goes bankrupt, I doubt Linux will replace it.

      • Man that’s sad, because I was considering it just because it had a stronger “Network Effect” than Mastodon.

        That FOMO is pretty real though. These multiplayer service games are a flash in the pan sometimes, where once their heyday is over, they become “Hey remember that old game?” and there might be some reverse-engineered private servers running from like, Lithuania, with 4 people online after that lol.

        I feel this pretty hard with Helldivers 2. I had a BLAST with the first game! Loved it! And apparently this one is good too!

        But Sony is determined to be Sony, and it’s got kernel-level requirements, so nope, I’m missing out. It does suck, because before all the drama I really looked forward to it. It genuinely looks fun. I see my friends playing it. Oh well.

        Watching Arcane made me almost wanna fire up League of Legends again, but once they announced their anti-cheat, I quit forever. (Probably for the best, let’s be honest lol.)

        So yeah with an OS, I think people feel like some killer app will come out and if they’re not running a system it was tailor-made for, they’ll miss out on it entirely.

        • Yep. I thought it was filled with left but it’s mostly liberals. They get very easily offended when any of their capitalist hobbies or tools are endangered in a conversation.

          About the arcane part agree. For me its esports. Watching it makes me want to play but I know none of the things I enjoy watching will be in ranked lol(teamwork). Linux not supporting kernel level anti shit is a feature for me lol. I would jump right back to my valo addiction otherwise.

  • I saw a post on bluesky saying Steamdeck can’t be widely adopted because of linux. I asked why is that the case? He says "Linux doesn’t run as many games as windows ". I said “only a few and the anti cheat ones”. He kept arguing. I asked him about nintendo and he goes “It has the games to back it up” and I blocked him lol.

    Millions of games are not enough because its FOMO.

        • Nintendo has fans and is an established brand. But I think what most people dislike is the uncertainty. With the Switch you can know for certain all games you buy will work, but with the Steam Deck it’s not guaranteed though it will scan your library and give you a rating. Though in my case I had many “unsupported” games actually work flawlessly.

  • I’ve been using Linux exclusively for ~14 years now. Heavily gaming on Linux only for the last ~8 years.

    It was possible (though sometimes headache inducing) to play most games back then (Wine and soon Proton to thank) the biggest change IMHO came with SteamPlay since it turned the headache into one click on most games (thanks to the amazing work of wine/proton developers and the tinkering of the community).

    When the SteamDeck released people seemed surprised at the breadth of games that were running on day one. To me it was not really a surprise since I had been Linux gaming with SteamPlay all the time and was almost expecting games to “just work” (though I still would and still am checking ProtonDB before purchase).

    What the SteamDeck changed in my view was

    1. Showing “everyone” that Linux Gaming is a thing that’s happening and been happening for a while. So maybe check it out?
    2. That a Handheld that doesn’t have to work around Windows but uses a purpose built OS just makes a lot more sense

    I feel that the SteamDeck with SteamOS has really put Linux, especially Linux gaming on the map. Even though I want to be like “Linux Gaming has been a thing forever, I was doing it before it was cool” ;) I have to recognize that fact. In the past years I’ve seen so many people setting up Linux especially by the way of SteamOS (using HoloISO, Chimera …) just to play/mess with it which is also why I think an Official SteamOS release will make a huge difference.

    Tl;dr: Gaming on Linux was a thing before. But the SteamDeck/SteamOS 3 made a huge impact nonetheless.

    • I haven’t run across a game that hasn’t run on The Deck yet. I know it’s capable of running quite a lot, but I got it to play indie games. It’s been great and does what I want it to do phenomenally. Additionallh if I ever wanted to do something more demanding on it, I could.

  • I jumped into Linux, via Mint, about a year ago when I refreshed my hardware. The transition was pretty easy, and I haven’t looked back. Steam runs fine and I haven’t had a modern game that didn’t work under default proton settings except for things I’ve run outside Steam and mods. Most of my personal PC’s workload is gaming and handful of web-based apps that are effectively OS-agnostic; Everything else has an easy equivalent in the apt repos.

    I would say that my decision to embrace Linux as my OS was primarily influenced by my Steam Deck. Gaming on it has been simple and the desktop UI was easy to adapt to. I replaced my laptop with the Steam Deck, bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and a USB-C dock with HDMI out (all things I already had for the laptop). I now just hook into whatever TV is handy as a monitor when I need a computer on the go.

    I was a tech enthusiast when I was younger, and am thus familiar with fucking around on the command line, but now I’m an old man who just wants his stuff to work and it just has… The barrier of entry for the Linux Desktop is effectively gone. We just need PR now.

    Also, I think I’d replace Mint on my primary PC with SteamOS, given a simple way to do so. About a year ago, the desktop/beta SteamOS was not fully baked.

    • You should give Bazzite a go on your desktop, it’s very similar to SteamOS and the desktop experience has been great for me. I didn’t have a Steam Deck and transitioned to it, and the smoothness convinced me to get a Lenovo Legion Go and install Bazzite straight OOTB.

  •  Kongar   ( @Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
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    14 days ago

    I don’t understand this tbh. It’s here already. SteamOS will likely be just like the deck - immutable arch running the existing steam package.

    You can totally do this today and it works great. Don’t want to mess with arch and that confusing command line? Use something easier like mint and install the flatpak - then you don’t even have to futz with nvidia drivers. Or use bazzite?

    What does steamOS offer that we don’t already have? (Serious question)

    • A few things:

      1. It gives manufacturers a blueprint for their devices. You will see a lot of handhelds running SteamOS from different manufacturers. You will also see a lot of small “gaming boxes” with SteamOS to plug in your TV. That’s great!
      2. Game Developers will have one distribution to test their games on. One of the bigger problems linux had before SteamOS was the big clusterfuck of different distros. Great for users, but a big headache if you’re developing for it. Now you can say “it runs on SteamOS”, test on SteamOS and you don’t have to deal with bug reports from people running RedStarOS
      3. It’s Valve. It’s a company. They are the biggest store selling games and they are building their moat to protect themselves against Microsoft, Apple, Epic & Co. That not exactly great for users, but also explains why Valve is doing this linux push. To prevent Microsoft from abusing their Windows monopoly to crush them
  • New to the Linux community here; why is a valve owned Linux OS better than any other massive company OS. Like if Microsoft released their own Linux OS, would it be good suddenly?

    At the end of the day, we don’t want our OS’s big company owned right?

    •  john89   ( @john89@lemmy.ca ) 
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      SteamOS is better than, for example, macOS and Windows because of licenses.

      Since you’re new (welcome!), I should let you in on a little secret: pretty much the entire free software movement is built around licensing. I know, it’s boring and seems insignificant. But the outcomes are profound.

      Because SteamOS is built to function within the free software ecosystem, it means users are never beholden to the decisions of one centralized entity (usually the company that owns the software patents.)

      If Valve ever decides to, say, include candy crush ads in SteamOS’ start menu (they’d have to make their own start menu, since right now SteamOS uses one that’s already made by the free software community), then users can choose to remove that part of the menu or replace the menu altogether without having to start from scratch.

      For wealthy people who can always pay the “proprietary tax,” this might seem like a non-issue. Practically speaking, these people only want their software to work without hassle. They don’t care about the true cost of that software, such as only one entity being able to modify/distribute the software. It’s not until, say, photoshop starts charging a subscription (which they can always increase the price of) that people start to see the value in free software and the importance of licensing.

    • Because valve is a private company. They don’t have to answer to shareholders. That means, they don’t go through enshitifaction, they care about their product and their customers. Are they perfect? Absolutely not, are they good? Better than every single company out there that tries to be like them. Period.

      •  john89   ( @john89@lemmy.ca ) 
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        I’m glad people bring this up.

        Private companies are not intrinsically better than public ones, but at least they have the capacity to be.

        Valve is one of the very few examples of a company that sees the value in working with customers, not against them. This would be impossible if Valve were publicly-traded.

        •  penquin   ( @penquin@lemm.ee ) OP
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          Exactly. They’re (as far as I know) the only company that emailed me to tell me that I can take to court directly without an arbitration. Not that I’ll ever be able to afford it, but seeing how confident and pro-consumer (I fucking hate the word consumer lol) they are is amazing.

          • To be fair, that was in their own financial best interest. Since arbitrations are charged a fee per customer someone figured out that you can do an effective “class action” against valve by having many people submit the same arbitration claim against valve and costing them so much through the arbitration fees that it it was almost impossible for them to cone out on top regardless of the outcome of the arbitration (iirc).

            They changed to allowing lawsuits because they can request those to be merged, and therefore its cost-effective for them to fight them.

            • Since arbitrations are charged a fee per customer someone figured out that you can do an effective “class action” against valve by having many people submit the same arbitration claim against valve and costing them so much through the arbitration fees that it it was almost impossible for them to cone out on top regardless of the outcome of the arbitration (iirc).

              It’s not even that they’d have to pay for it; usually the filing party has to pay. Valve tried to be the good guys and while they did push for arbitration they said that they’d pay your arbitration fee for you, basically allowing you to file a legal complaint against them at their expense.

              And then some fucking legal company figured out it’s a neat loophole on how to bleed them through arbitration where the point isn’t really the result but the costly process. Guess that’ll teach Valve to try to be better than others. :|

    • Microsoft is deeply entrenched and has undergone decades of enshittification. SteamOS is at only the beginning of this cycle. And since SteamOS is linux-based, it’s likely to have ramifications for the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem. Furthermore, if there are two vastly different OSes that developers and graphics card manufacturers need to seriously target, they’re more likely to write more platform-agnostic software that everyone can benefit from.

    •  Zetta   ( @Zetta@mander.xyz ) 
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      Valve dosnt really “own” SteamOS. They maintain and update SteamOS, but SteamOS is free and open source

      Plus just about everbody who knows anything about valve would tell you they are probably the most consumer friendly billion dollar company ever, and have been for decades. So yes even if they owned it like microsoft owns windows it would still be better

    • Like if Microsoft released their own Linux OS, would it be good suddenly?

      It’s worth noting that steamOS, like any Linux distro has its issues and a bit of a learning curve. Especially if you want to go off the beaten track, it’s pretty much just using a stock arch distro.

      As for if MS switched to Linux, no it wouldn’t be good because the issues with Win11 overwhelmingly aren’t a matter of incompetence or anything inherent to the code, but of conscious anti-consumer business decisions. There’s nothing about Linux that would actively stop MS from cramming telemetry, bloat, etc. In their distro.

    • If it’s like the steam deck version, it’ll be based on Arch with a bunch of steam-specific patches/configs to make games run more easily (with the added bonus of making non-steam games run pretty well too). Steam exists to sell games, and if they want to make it easier for me to play games, that’s fine by me.

      Not sure what a Microsoft distro would look like, but if they make a distro that’ll run Xbox games with gamepass, I’d give it a shot.

      Another nice bonus for either/both of those situations is that it wouldn’t be too hard to incorporate those changes into other distros. That way people who want more of an “install and go” experience would have their official distros, people who like to tinker could work on importing the official code into their unofficial setup, and people who use arch btw can install it from the AUR.

  • This is so great to see, and the timing is perfect.

    My son already calls the PC Steam, as in “we played game A on Xbox and game B on Steam,” so maybe by the time he has a PC in his room Steam really will run the whole platform.