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!
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
We might not have the year of the Linux Desktop, but we can expect 2025-2026 to be the year of the Linux handheld.
I would argue that year of the Linux handheld has been since the deck dropped. There’s been nothing that’s anywhere near the solid experience of a Steam Deck. Every competitor is releasing with windows, and all I ever hear from the people I know who bought one of those is that they like it…now that they’re running Bazzite. The ones that aren’t releasing with windows are doing android, and while I get a whole bunch of gaming from my various android devices, until I can play pc games unported they aren’t competing in the same space.
“It erased pictures of my nana, Im going to sue Gabe Newell!” Windows users 🙄🙄
(I am that user)
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.
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.
If Linux had better nvidia support I would swap in a heart beat.
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.
I have been running OpenSUSE with nVidia for 7 years. No issues here.
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.
deleted by creator
I had an issue with 2 4k screens through my dock, but that was apparently my docks fault.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Valve is the chemotherapy/radiation to Microsoft. Not quite a cure but both are still deadly.
deleted by creator
Eh, look into the exploitation of child gambling in CS. Gabe’s no saint sadly.
deleted by creator
Yeah, I don’t think Microsoft has ever understood or cared how much pc gaming has added value to windows.
Which makes the strategic defeat here of failing to understand they are fucked longterm all the more satisfying.
deleted by creator
It’s kind of wild how much Microsoft failed to capitalize on PC gaming over the last 20 years. Arguably PC Gaming has thrived in spite of them, not because of them.
Valve was smart to understand how Microsoft could threaten their business model but it barely mattered considering how many rakes Microsoft stepped on over the years. Don’t even get me started on Games For Windows Live.
Microsoft prevented PC gaming from dying and moved the industry from “sometimes there are pc games” to “occasionally there is a platform exclusive other than Nintendo”. That was all Xbox. Valve did a much better job of sitting back and raking in 30% for their glorified downloader, but the games existed because of the compatibility efforts of Xbox.
Yeah, Microsoft has had brief moments like this but systematically they have behaved consistently like the only thing that matters to them is enshittifying the work environment of office workers.
The examples you gave are interesting precisely because they are a brief departure from the norm.
Microsoft made Flight Simulator before they made Windows, so I’m sure they must have cared about games more during that time period.
I am not saying microsoft hasn’t dipped their toes in to pc gaming but for a company of that size that is really the most you can say of their efforts compared to the immense solidity, staying power and loyalty pc gaming embued in windows for younger people growing up with computers (not saying this category of people liked windows just that they valued it).
This is ALL gone and microsoft is about to figure out that while business tools are their main industry the supposedly impenetrable moat they thought that gave them was far more a byproduct of a generation of nerds growing up pooring time into windows before they ever even entered the workforce than it was a dynamic of their dominance in corporate business software.
Whoopsie!
Sometimes empires fall. It doesn’t mean it’s for the worse https://youtu.be/A17oUv0E-N4
[…]codenamed the Manhattan Project, like the World War II project of the same name, and the idea was to displace the Japanese[…]
a bit on the nose huh
Steam needs to drop a whole OS for PC.
https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown
You can install it yourself on PC.
deleted by creator
SteamOS 3.0 should get out there for generic PCs pretty soon, in the meantime there’s Bazzite.
It’s in the works. Valve is working to develop SteamOS for other devices, including PC.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/6/24315098/valve-steam-machines-steamos-steam-deck-vr
It’s been “in the works” for years.
Good things take time. But it seems close enough to ready if you didn’t accidentally by a
Nvidiagarbage GPU. You can already run the Steam Deck image on most AMD hardware just fine.
If they do it this year, it might finally be the Year of the Linux Desktop!
I hope they bring SteamOS to ARM eventually.
It’d be great, but they haven’t even ported the Steam desktop client to 64-bit x86 yet*, I feel like we’re going to wait a while for that.
* and that’s not even true, they were forced to port it for the Mac, so they’re just sitting on the 64 bit builds for the other OSes for some reason
64-bit brings a lot of benefits - can use more RAM directly, more opcodes and lots more registers allow code to run much more efficiently - but for a programme that I just want to open, click on a couple of times and then for it to be almost completely out of the way, those aren’t the biggest selling points. In fact, definitely supporting 32-bit for older games might be better. They might just not want the maintenance headache of supporting two builds.
A 32 bit client means even if the game you want to play is 64 bit, you still have to install all the 32 bit system libraries to make it work.
This is a dumb headline and a dumb article. Valve is making ripples in handhelds, yes, but to say the same on PC is moot. Microsoft still has an iron grip on a large amount of PCs. There’s so few that will bother with SteamOS as OS of choice since it is a one-trick pony compared to Windows, even though it is shit right now. They still need Windows to run nearly 99% of games.
They still need Windows to run nearly 99% of games.
No you don’t? Literally that’s what proton does
The biggest holdouts are specific kernel anticheat solutions.
honestly steam os is in many ways better at running old ass windows programs than windows.
Case in point, Steel Panthers (WinspMBT or WinspWW2) is an ancient DOS game that can’t run in fullscreen without crashing on Windows and honestly I prefer it on my deck because it inherently runs the game in fullscreen and overall seems to run it better than my windows computer ever did.
It is very strangely worded and structured. I mean, the point is fairly obvious and by extension not… wrong, but the analysis and the writing aren’t great.
Which I guess is on par for what’s left of Kotaku these days.
In my own personal experience, as a gamer and having switched my main machine at home to Pop!OS some months ago, it’s more like “need Windows to run nearly 5% of games” thanks to Wine and Proton which work as adaption layers to let Windows programs (not just games) run in Linux.
(Curiously I use a lot more Wine with Lutris than Proton and Steam, so my success rate is even down to how far the main Wine project got, rather than any special juice that Steam might have added on their Proton branch of Wine - you don’t really need Steam or Proton to run most games in Linux and the success rate for just running games from GoG or even pirated ones is just as good and from some games it’s even the case that the Steam version won’t run but a pirated version runs just fine, probably because it was the DRM that the pirates cracked that caused the problems).
Mind you, at least in my games collection only maybe 1 in 20 have native Linux versions (which is still better than 99% of games being Windows only), but because of adaption layers like Wine and Proton, for most games you can run the Windows version of it in Linux.
Absolutelly, in the old days it definitelly was the case that Windows was needed for nearly 99% of games (I should know: I’ve been trying to switch my gaming to Linux since the late 90s), but that’s not at all the case anymore.
Your idea of how hard it is to game on Linux is at least 1 decade out of date.
So true bestie, everybody I know is buying all their games from the Windows store /s
deleted by creator
