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
Nvidia works flawlessly in my system, didn’t have to tweak anything.
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.
I’m sure it’s solvable but I call these example “death by a 1000 papercuts”. I don’t want absolute newbies to face these issues which will make them give up Linux forever.
I am not saying that Linux can’t be mainstream. I’m saying Nvidia is one of the blockades for Linux becoming mainstream. I have bazzite on my Rog Ally and it’s a fantastic experience, way better than windows, but it’s because of AMD.
If AMD can get an equal footing in the GPU landscape (unlikely in the next 5 years), maybe things can change. I just hope Nvidia comes to their senses and properly support Wayland.
Mine works fine, I knew nothing about linux and all I did was disable secureboot and copy paste some commands into the terminal. Now games that used to crash in windows don’t and games that didn’t run run. And yes spent tons of time scouting forums, going through dumb windows control panels and messing around in regedit to troubleshoot it without a solution.
Right, so since you had that experience, everyone else must also have it?
Previous commenter cited Nvidia support as a problem, I gave my singular experience of it not being a problem.
Not sure what you are on about.
Why did you feel compelled to give your anecdote, if not to undermine the idea that Nvidia support is not good?
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.
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.
Supports more hardware… But not gaming hardware… And not industrial hardware which is often windows only… But def more…
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
Most of the world computer hardware is running linux already. Linux is the most popular os by far since all the servers run it. Desktop linux is very new and has gone far in a short time. With more users being lured in (and the windows exodus might be able to lure in the vital tech people) more problems will get solved.
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.
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 😁
I would have understood the sarcasm. The surveillance state is gross.
“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.
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.
I had an issue with 2 4k screens through my dock, but that was apparently my docks fault.
Amd cpu and 4070ti super here without issues. I suspect intel being the usual dumpster fire.
I am happy going cold turkey to fedora. Windows is the less user friendly and functional experience considering i didn’t even need to scour the internet for my weird audio device or graphics tablet drivers. Also steam uses multible times more ram than the os and my phone messages are on the screen and clipboard gets shared.
I hope that SteamOS finds more of its way into desktop computers. Sure, I don’t trust Valve; just like I don’t trust any other corporation. But it’s like fighting a big cancer with a smaller meta-cancer, if they hurt Windows/Microsoft I’m happy.
Plus its current relationship with GNU/Linux is symbiotic.
Valve is the chemotherapy/radiation to Microsoft. Not quite a cure but both are still deadly.
Trust the Gabe
Eh, look into the exploitation of child gambling in CS. Gabe’s no saint sadly.
Noooooooooo not Gabe!
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.
Microsoft understood in the 90s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2V9TFrmQ_Q
St. John recognized the resistances for game development under Windows would be a limitation, and recruited two additional engineers, Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom, to develop a better solution to get more programmers to develop games for Windows. The project was codenamed the Manhattan Project, like the World War II project of the same name, and the idea was to displace the Japanese-developed video game consoles with personal computers running Microsoft’s operating system.
To get more developers on board DirectX, Microsoft approached id Software’s John Carmack and offered to port Doom and Doom 2 from MS-DOS to DirectX, free of charge, with id retaining all publishing rights to the game. Carmack agreed, and Microsoft’s Gabe Newell led the porting project. The first game was released as Doom 95 in August 1996, the first published DirectX game. Microsoft promoted the game heavily with Bill Gates appearing in ads for the title.
I know it’s correct but reading “Microsoft’s Gabe Newell” actually made my eye twitch.
Did you not know other people had jobs before their current?
Read the first four words of that comment again…
“Microsoft’s Gabe Newell”
Lol
He left Microsoft almost immediately after Doom 95 was released specifically because he didn’t like the direction Microsoft was going.
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.
It doesn’t make them money. Most of Microsoft is focused on business, enterprise, add AI. Everything edge is just part lip service.
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.
Unrelated tidbit gleaned from reading the entry:
the name “DirectX” came from one journalist that had mocked the naming scheme of the various libraries. The team opted to continue to use that naming scheme and call the project DirectX.
[…]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
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
Microsoft recently announced a handheld for Xbox. They’re going to half ass this they way they did with windows phone.
They are always late to the party and they have an image problem
And they haven’t managed to come up with a decent product in decades.
I like some of their developer products that said… Wtf is with their marketing department? I’m a techy and play some games but if someone asked me to buy them a Xbox I honestly don’t know which one is best… Xbox one series S? I think??
Now atleast on Playstation I know it’s ps5 as it’s the biggest number.
You want Nintendo… Switch as it’s a different enough name to make it stick.
Imagine going to but a truck… Do you want a Ford f150, a Ford f150 series x or a ford f150 series s? Now keep in mind a Ford f150 can’t go on any roads built in last 5 years and if you pick the wrong series letter your speed is capped at 30mph…
Don’t get me started on visual studio vs visual studio code…
To be fair, cars do kind of have that problem. Nissan has cars like the Altima S, SL, SV, SR. We can assume the S is the base model, but what the hell do the rest mean.
I mean this is basically ford. What is XL XLT and LARIAT even mean for example.
but if someone asked me to buy them a Xbox I honestly don’t know which one is best… Xbox one series S? I think??
Aaaand they’ve already failed. Series S is barely better than the previous gen, it’s Series X that you want.
The only real benefit of having an xbox is that you cross-own the games with PC. BUT you’re restricted to the Windows Store versions, so you can’t play on Linux, so for me at least the benefit immediately washes away, as I no longer use Windows. Oh well, I’ll just buy my games on Steam and sure, SOME of them will be Microsoft games, but only titles in the like 2 or 3 franchises I care about, Forza and… Oh wait, it’s not like the next TES game is ever going to come out. So it’s just Forza.
Car companies like Ford do that sometimes; what the fuck does the LS badge on my S10 mean? I think it means it has carpet.
Ps5 has the same problem. Is it the latest more powerful version? Can it take discs?
Teams vs Teams for Work or School vs New Teams. .NET Framework vs .NET Standard vs .NET Core vs what they just call .NET now. Office vs Office 365 vs Microsoft 365. Microsoft is never not confusing.
If it ran SteamOS, I’d have died laughing.
Steam needs to drop a whole OS for PC.
https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown
You can install it yourself on PC.
Note that the SteamOS download on that page is NOT the current version of SteamOS used on the Steam Deck, it’s the 2-3 year old version that Valve released a while back and doesn’t have most any of the actual improvements to SteamOS that make it worthwhile. The only way to get the current SteamOS is to download the recovery image for the Steam Deck at https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2BB3 and install from there.Linus from LTT did a video about getting it up and running here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdR-bxvQKN8
EDIT: As per usual, Linus didn’t do good research and was incorrect about the SteamOS version available at that link, updated to strike the incorrect info.
Yeah, Linus didn’t actually bother clicking the links. The old OS download links redirect to the arch based steam deck os
Yeah, Linus didn’t actually bother clicking the links.
Ya know, somehow I’m not surprised to hear LTT didn’t do their research
Why anyone ever watched their garbage videos is beyond me.
I’d like to think they provide a useful service. “useful” as in entertaining and a sense of community. They get things wrong but I’d like to think that they try and in the “churn” of making videos and running a company you screw up every now and again.
I haven’t watched an LTT video in a while though. I just hate their thumbnails (I get the algorithm forces them) but over time I think their content just isn’t for me, but I can see why others would.
It’s entertaining.
Tbf, I only know because I watch too much YouTube and bringus studios mentioned it a couple months ago.
Bringus needs more love around these parts
They were talking about SteamOS 2.0 being Debian and made for general hardware and SteamOS 3.0 being Arch based and really only meant for the Steam Deck, though it’s unclear if there’s drivers enough to put it on other hardware, but we’re looking at Powered By SteamOS devices coming out. So, am I to take it that SteamOS 3.0 is implied to be capable of installing on alternate hardware now?
Like, I’m just going to stick with my Steam Deck but it’s interesting to think you can make Steam Machines again.
Seems like the instructions are still for SteamOS 2, they mention a file named “SteamOS.zip” while you get a bzip archive of an img file
To be fair it’s not exactly obvious that the downloaded file is generic enough to be used on something else than the Steam Deck when the file is named
steamdeck-repair-20231127.10-3.5.7.img.bz2
That’s still steamos2, based on debian 8 (current is debian 12). What’s on the Steam deck is much more recent, usable and stable.
There’s some user made distros that are basically just like steamos3 though, but at that point you may just as well install a mainstream linux distribution and simply install steam on it.
Nope, the download link actually redirects to the arch based steam deck os.
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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!
Huh. I never even considered the possibility of putting SteamOS on a laptop/desktop… I have a spare engineering laptop sitting around, might try it.
I completely advocate for it. It costs you nothing but time and disk space. You can still run games from other sources with only slight tinkering.
Open source is so beneficial for humanity and for gaming there aren’t really downsides for tons and tons of games.
You lose all the spyware from microsoft, the incessant mandatory patching and upgrade notifications and loads of other things that provide no value.
Nothing stops you from being able to dual boot windows or run it in a VM either.
AFAIK, VM gaming is still a pain in the ass. You need to jump through a lot of hoops for any kind of GPU passthrough.
SteamOS installs for laptops aren’t supported yet. If you want something alike consider Bazzite
Afaik SteamOS still only supports very limited hardware configurations similar to the steam deck, for example only AMD GPU are supported (Nvidia is in beta support as of recently, I think?).
I thought that was still not officially available, only forks or rebuilds of sorts?
They have to publish kernel edits,
As far as I am aware it’s just Arch with gamescope though so you aren’t gaining anything from using SteamOS 3 compared to a typical Linux build
What would be the advantage of installing it on a laptop? Can’t you just run steam on Ubuntu or whatever and use Big Picture mode?
Personally I can’t run steam and a game on a my laptops. They’re good enough to run games like subnautica and stalker on wine but steam requires like 1gb of RAM and runs like shit.
Edit: on older Ubuntu lts versions, not 24
Hm so SteamOS uses less resources that the steam app? I assumed SteamOS was just a streamlined way to run Steam?
SteamOS 3 is Steam big picture mode inside of gamescope (a standalone wayland mini compositor), without your KDE desktop running in the background. You still have bluetooth, wifi and whatever other background processes running, but if you want to use a video editor, use your terminal or something else not on Steam then you have the option to boot out of gamescope session and into desktop mode from the ‘Power’ menu option. In game mode you still have to deal with Steam being a webapp but with no other desktop programs running, aside from the game you’re playing.
OK, so the comment above mine is misleading. The difference in resources would be small as my DE and Compositor use negligible resources.
Wouldn’t it be the opposite if SteamOS is lighter? I’m already running things like i3 but having even more stripped out sounds like it might be something. Maybe I’m misunderstanding
You should check out bazzite
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.
I love my Steam Deck, play it all the time and I’ve discovered new games, that I wouldn’t have considered buying before had I been tied to a desk, like Visual Novels, I’ve played so many in the year I’ve owned my Deck
Hell yeah Visual novels on Steam Deck!
I finally got into Steins Gate thanks to Steam Deck. I wasn’t able to keep my attention going when I played it on PC.
I haven’t picked that one up yet, definitely on my list though
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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.
99%?
I’d say SteamOS/Linux is closer to running 99% of games. Mostly just anti-cheat standing in the way.
And what does the majority of players use to install and play games? Yes, Steam.
Also 78 of the 100 top games on Steam just run on Linux and 90 with some tinkering. Not really sure where that 99% comes from.
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.
You’re missing the point, while everyone plays on windows, valve makes all the money. Now with handheld valve is looking to own the OS and Marketplace.
In the first one Microsoft gets very little benefit for all the gamin on their OS, in the handheld it’s possible they’ll own nothing.
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
Microsoft should go to HR about that lunch.
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