I mean the obvious answer is Proton
And SteamOS to some extent, is much more refined
Theres a few simple reasons that this steam machine is better:
- Game support: Proton plus significantly more native games
- Linux is significantly more mature than it was a decade ago (wayland + pipewire + advances in KDE)
- The controller is significantly less opinionated (full dpad plus two analog sticks)
- The Steam ecosystem and PC gaming as a whole is significantly more mature than it was a decade ago (more games support controllers, steaminput has advanced, and PC game ports are for the most part better than they were during 2015)
- This machine actually ships SteamOS and is made by Valve, other companies will make their own Steam Machines later on but this one is the gold standard set by Valve. In this sense Valve has the capacity to demand quality from OEMs rather than OEMs being able to make any demands out of Valve like before.
- Quite frankly as bad as the Xbox One/PS4 were they had significantly more games for a lot less money than the Xbox Series or the PS5, competition is simply weaker
They never really release a steam machine the first time. They were all windows PC’s that had decent specs for the footprint that the things were, and ran steam in big picture mode. The experience wasn’t bad but it didn’t give you anything a “non-steam machine” gaming PC that you could build yourself didn’t give you at the time, and building a PC yourself was both affordable and very much could provide a better product/experience.
I think it’s unfair to say they flopped the first time when it came down to PC vendors not really shipping them with steam OS because at the time it was not ready yet. It’s fairer to say steam OS flopped back then and the hardware didn’t sell as well as it could have as a result of them being sold almost entirely as windows PC’s.
At the time I fully remember (because I bought an Alienware Alpha for like $350) that there was supposed to be an option to buy a steam OS variant that never really materialized. Never saw it anywhere but in press articles and reviews.
I had the windows variant. There were some drawbacks: had to provide my own keyboard and mouse), the controller that came with mine was one of the old school XBOX 360 controllers, windows 8, and big picture mode sometimes not allowing me to leave it to return to the desktop. But all in all my experience with it was pretty good. Certainly comparable to the gaming PC I had built and owned before it (in that it ran the games I wanted to play, which were games of that time period at a decent frame rate and quality).
"Developers were kind of stuck between the equation of ‘Do I want to do a bunch of work to port my game? But there’s not an audience for it that justifies this work yet.’ So it was a little bit of a bootstrapping problem.
While Proton is an amazing technology I think it will also be a crutch and an excuse to not make native ports. Proton brought gaming to Linux, but it will also hold games on Linux back for decades.
I half agree. The more we get the masses away from windows and macOS the more likely they’ll be included in the dev process.
Performance and playability on Linux are effectively solved by Proton; therefore, the effort required to maintain a native Linux build is an unnecessary and inefficient use of development resources, especially for smaller studios. “Holding games back” on Linux feels like a semantic distinction if we’re moving to a world where every PC game is playable on Linux.
(this assumption relies on Linux marketshare growing and the remaining games that don’t support Proton due to anti-cheat software eventually are pressured to support playing on Linux, even if they don’t build a native linux port. I think we’re well on our way to that future and it’s probably just a matter of time.)
Relying on Proton just offloads development/optimization to the community instead of the actual developers getting paid to develop it. Sure it’s cool the game runs better. But like pay people to do that.
Valve does, they literally have teams dedicated to the work.
Also, do you guys (who can afford to) not have re-occuring donations going out to your favorite open source projects every month?
I guess my question is why pay people to solve a problem two ways?
We have an increasingly functional way to play on two platforms with a single build. I’d love to have both for completeness, but as long as Proton is actively being worked on, I feel like that’s good enough and will certainly not hold back gaming on Linux for years to come.
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If there’s a safe subset of the Windows API defined as a virtual machine for gaming on x86-64 machines, and running with next to no overhead on Linux, does it really matter that the binaries are PE-COFF . EXE files assuming their world to have DirectX rendering and drive letters rather than POSIX?
It’s a crutch until it isn’t. I’m guessing that the majority of Machine buyers won’t install windows on it.
