If Valve really wanted to make a splash, they could release a desktop version of SteamOS in October, right when support for Windows 10 ends. For additional damage, they could bundle in Half-Life 3. Just imagine the coverage this would get.
What do people expect out of a desktop SteamOS that they can’t already get from any other distro?
Brand recognition. Which apparently is the only thing that matters these days.
For the average technology user yes. Software needs to come packaged in a way people recognise and can use without much setting up needed. I know there are many distros out there that do this. The average person using a computer however does not.
not going to be a steam OS user, but its less what you can’t, and more that any changes that valve patches in via their efforts on AMD drivers, users would get it first and without any fuss.
One example is HDR support. various distros and DEs kinda sat on HDR for the longest time, with mixed results on implementation. Valve just walks in and implements it.
Yeah but Valve also made that open source at the same time.
and even while open source, its implementation on various DE is still spotty, which is kinda the point.
Approachability. Valve is a recognizable name and the Steam Deck is notoriously usable in the sea of Linux uncertainty.
Before you say “Linux is totally usable, just look at <examples>” the first question people are prompted with is “What distribution do you want to install?” and there is no singular place that says “this is what you want for this specific use case.”
Valve is not the first name in Linux gaming, but they are a known and trusted name. It’s not just about brand recognition but about trusting a name to guide you through something brand new and extremely daunting. For the vast majority of PC gamers, SteamOS offers a guided introduction to something that previously was stereotyped as complex and difficult to learn.
Is it the best distro? Probably not, but then again it’s extremely easy to migrate from SteamOS to something else when someone discovers they want something else. Until they understand enough about Linux to find that they want something else, SteamOS is currently one of the best ways to get them there
Approachability. Valve is a recognizable name and the Steam Deck is notoriously usable in the sea of Linux uncertainty.
It’s very usable for a handheld gaming platform. It really isn’t any better for a desktop platform. The thing that makes it so usable is that you boot it and it boots into Steam Big Picture, and you don’t see the desktop. Most users never will. Is that how people are going to want their desktop to work though? Probably not. They probably don’t want to only use Steam. They probably want to use other applications too.
Plus, Valve is known for technical things!
It needs to be at least as easy as Windows to install and have good support.
Extra bonus points if they preinstall/bundle it on gaming PCs.
Both of these are possible with many other distros.
A plug and play system.
I don’t think it’s about having extra functionality to no one else has.
SteamOS is more restrictive than other distros out of the box. A user with no experience whatsoever would have a harder time messing things up because rootfs is RO and gets wiped on every update. Kinda forces the average user into using flatpak/Discover to mimic Windows and Apple app stores. In other words, it’s all about the psychology, not the distro itself.
Not to mention there is an actual company with an incentive to maintain the distro, with a massive focus on gaming. They have a ton of testing resources that a lot of distro maintainers do not have in that regard.
Having said all that, installing a distro other SteamOS on my Steam Deck was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’ve been using Linux for 32 years, I do not like SteamOS because they are trying to make it dumb for general consumption. Similar reasons why I despise Windows, besides the whole being owned by Microsoft thing.
I would probably use it over bazzite for my HTPC, but yeah, I don’t recommend either for a daily driver PC.
I see all of these “Why SteamOS and why not another distro?” comments and it kinda blows me away how much the idea of approachability designed by a trusted name seems like a foreign concept here.
Then again, we’re talking about Linux fanatics who probably also argue over whether emacs, vim, or vi are the best text editor lol
real linux users don’t need a graphical session!!! everything can and should be done on the terminal!
/s
I love running Elden Ring in the terminal. Hells yeah, foul tarnished
the ASCII graphics are stunning, aren’t they?
You guys are getting graphics? Mine is just a Matrix-style series of special characters.
That’s called dwarf fortress
It’s actually
ed.
OP clearly overestimates how many people would use SteamOS or any other Linux distro for that matter. Most users are casual gamers these days, they are not changing OS just because there is a forced Windows update.
This isn’t about people not wanting to use Windows 11 this is about people not wanting to purchase a new computer
They don’t have to purchase anything if they just keep using an unsupported OS.
Most people don’t care enough to change.
They are if they can’t afford a new computer.
Windows 10 won’t just stop working. I still see businesses rocking Windows Vista occasionally.
No one is trying to play games on those vista machines, though. Valve pulled steam support for win 7 and 8.1 over a year ago because they were EOL. If they also pull support from win 10 once it’s EOL, then people will need to make a change to keep playing their games. If msft refuse to support existing hardware with win11, then many people will be forced to choose between buying a new laptop/PC, or trying Linux.
They won’t stop supporting 10 unless its use drops significantly. They’d not shoot themselves in the foot.
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SteamOS would be a particular poor choice as a desktop operating system compared to basically any other Linux distribution. It uses an immutable file system and reverts all system changes upon every update. That’s nice if you don’t want to fuck up your handeheld gaming device with some dumb changes, but it’s generally not what you will want on a device you use for all kinds of things. Of course, with some effort you can work around this, but then, why don’t use a system that doesn’t just use such a paradigm in the first place and won’t roll back your workaround to make it usable with the next update?
As someone who uses my desktop for gaming (and maybe web browsing) exclusively, and as someone mildly but not very familiar with OSes, I read this as “SteamOS is bad because of reason I personally don’t like that many people don’t understand, so do more research about Linux”
The barrier to Linux as an OS is not how good it is but how understandable it is. After Pewdiepie’s video went up I’m confident the search phrase “Linux OS download” skyrocketed in popularity because people don’t know let alone understand what a distribution is.
SteamOS is a great intro to Linux for the majority of PC gamers because it’s not only basically ready to use as soon as you boot it up, but also because it is being maintained by a team of people intent on making it the optimal PC gaming platform.
Once Windows users are introduced to a basic Linux experience why not let them take their time learning more about the variables in distros?
Maybe SteamOS is not the perfect distribution because <list your gripes here> but is there a perfect distribution?
Maybe you don’t understand it, but that doesn’t mean you don’t rely on it. If I said an OS was unusable by 99% of people because it didn’t support multithreading, it doesn’t matter if 99% of people know what multithreading is, that’s clearly a true statement. Similarly, if you’ve ever expected your PC to have the same files on it tomorrow that you put on it today, then you might find it annoying when that’s not the case.
It doesn’t revert things stored in /home according to my experience, that’s good enough for most users
Yeah anything I put in /home has always stayed there, and things like customizations to KDE and whatnot always persist. I’m sure it changes a bunch of system files being an immutable OS, but I really don’t think it’d be anything a layperson coming fresh from Windows would ever really notice.
Not true. Steam OS is not the only immutable distro. Lots of people actually prefer that for their desktops.
I’d personally prefer to have an OS dedicating to playing, one I can’t broke by installing too many stuff or, on the hand, I could reinstall quickly without having to reinstall all the other stuff (printer, cloud syncing, etc…)
So having a multi-boot for gaming and regular (although rare) computer use. There’s a good chance I’ll still sadly have a Windows boot option for some multiplayer online games (anticheat 😐)
Fedora bluefin is a much bigger project and a much larger paradigm shift in how Linux distros can be understood than what you make out to be. Tweaking system files might be a good choice for users who need to go beyond what comes with the standard, but it’s not something a wide majority of users will or should need.
When you can easily spin up virtual operating systems with distrobox, you never need to. You might, for some hardware support reasons, need to layer in some additional packages, but I’m curious how true even that is.
Reminder that supporting a single GPU is a lot simpler than supporting all of them…
Also, SteamOS would make a dogshit desktop OS. It’s designed specifically for Steam’s Big Picture Mode. It has Arch running in the background, but that’s not the primary focus of the OS.
It would be great for something like an arcade cabinet or a family TV, but not so great for a desktop.
They can make SteamOS Lite at any point.
My point is that it already basically exists… It’s called Arch.
Yup.
I’ve spent a good while running Deck in desktop mode compared to my laptop running Manjaro, and so far the only thing I’ve noticed is that the Deck has that handy “add to steam” context menu item that automatically sets a 3rd party game to run in proton through steam.
And there’s an AUR package for that.So unless there’s something major I’ve managed to miss, Manjaro + that package gets you the entire desktop SteamOS experience on any device.
The thing is, I don’t think valve wants to become a desktop OS provider. Becoming the provider and maintainer of an OS for hundreds of millions of users is so far beyond their scope as a company. They’ve got a third the employees of Canonical and a fiftieth the employees of RedHat, the companies behind Ubuntu and Fedora. Maintaining a limited scope console/handheld OS that runs on a handful of hardware set ups is one thing, but supporting a fully fledged daily driver desktop OS meant to operate on any system is something else entirely.
Right now, most of their users are on windows, which makes them nervous because Microsoft is a known monopolist and has been slowly creeping deeper in to the PC games space. That’s why Valve has put so much effort in to software to support compatibility on Linux, so there is a viable alternative if Microsoft try’s to push them out. I think the steam deck and steamOS were a means to that end, create a business reason to develop and support those tools, not a first step towards becoming an operating system developer.
A better route forward for them would be to use their reach and public trust to help people make the switch to other extant distros. For example an all in one utility on the steam store that helps people select the right distro for their use case and set it up, have a hardware scan and a little quiz to choose a distro, a hard drive partitioning tool to set up dual boot, a tool to write the ISO to a USB drive (or maybe even just set up a bootable on the disk using the partitioner IDK), and migrate important files over using their cloud system.
If the issue is that people trust stuff with the valve branding on it, but are not willing to try Linux on their own, then Steam acting as a guide is much more practical than Valve taking on all the work needed to maintain a proper distro.
That is an excellent suggestion!
I recognise that for almost any one task, Linux has a solution that works better than Windows. My issue is just getting Linux to run not only one specific thing but all the dozens of programs with each having their own dependencies and possible quirks without losing my mind, weeks of my life, data or all three.
If Valve (or really any other large entity capable of handling this for tens of thousands of users) stepped in to act as the guide for setting it all up in a safe manner and such that it just works without constant need for tweaking (unless you want to stray from the “installation wizard”), I could see Linux gain a big surge in users.
If they wanted to “make a splash” they could have released it 3 years ago. I don’t know what they’re waiting for. With the launch of Steam Machines it was made available to everyone on day 1.
They are actively monitoring for “HL3 confirmed” and adds a hour to the release time for each they find.
The current release date is in the year 252525.
SteamOS is a nice modified version of Arch, however and for good reasons it has its limits regarding installing new packages/software. I am not sure this is the best for linux newbies.
I would argue that using an image based system with flatpak is one of the best ways for newbies to transition to Linux. Whether that’s SteamOS, Bazzite, Bluefin or Aurora, that doesn’t matter all that much.
They should go for it.
The Commodore 64 was the highest selling computer model of all time, until around 2020, because of it’s game library.
SteamOS probably has the best easily accessible game library of all time.
The Commodore 64 taught us that games will carry a personal computer to massive popularity and sales, even if the computer has trade-offs.
I agree with others who have commented that there’s better versions of Linux for the average user.
But I don’t think it matters.
A Steam machine with a cheap keyboard and mouse would be hugely popular this Fall, and would make it’s users fall in love with Linux, in spite of issues - because we all love video games.
