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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I would have understood the sarcasm. The surveillance state is gross.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t 😁
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.
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.
You should check out bazzite
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
I have bazzite on my laptop since I was too lazy to set up arch, fedora, debian, etc for gaming. It’s ready to play installed with steam and everything.
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 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
Microsoft should go to HR about that lunch.
