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.
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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I thought that was still not officially available, only forks or rebuilds of sorts?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Microsoft recently announced a handheld for Xbox. They’re going to half ass this they way they did with windows phone.
If it ran SteamOS, I'd have died laughing.
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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.
[...]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.
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?
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.
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