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.
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.
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’s easy to dismiss this as something that won’t ever matter to you, but this is something that can cause problems in all sorts of ways even for gamers. The first thing that came to mind is not being able to install custom drivers to support weird hardware, like a racing wheel or something.
I’m not vouching for SteamOS as a permanent OS. I’m just defending the strengths of a corporation-maintained distribution of Linux as an introduction to Linux, of which I think SteamOS has many. After being introduced, I think more people will get curious about other things they can do with Linux. It’s really just that starting hump that people need to get over
Btw I appreciate the brief explanation. I was actually having trouble with that sort of thing myself on Bazzite the other day and I was curious why SteamOS differed from Fedora on some specific things.
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.
I use Bazzite on my main laptop (basically SteamOS) and it’s fantastic.
It’s really not that difficult to learn his immutable works, and it’s really not that limited at all, just different.
Hows it work with rtx(looks supported now?) and vr? last time i tried and said i had nvidia it said “Go away!”
Not true. Steam OS is not the only immutable distro. Lots of people actually prefer that for their desktops.
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.
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 😐)