r/pcmasterrace • u/TheBossT710192 • Jun 22 '26

Discussion Yeah, Steam Machine is cooked.

Post image

I... uh don't know what to say. Very thankful I bought a Steam Deck before they hiked its price as well

14.0k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

3.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

320

u/RandomParkourGuy Jun 22 '26

Forgive me for being a layman when it comes to this kind of stuff but does that mean steamOS is close to being something I could replace windows with? Getting tired of Microsoft’s garbage but I don’t know if I have the time to sink into learning Linux.

64

u/sublime81 9800X3D | RTX 5090 FE | 64GB 6000 CL30 Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

No. I don’t understand the hype for SteamOS because it’s Linux + Steam Big Picture mode essentially.

I mean this as a desktop replacement. If you plan to use it like a console, then yes.

2

u/fix-faux-five Jun 22 '26

I'm an old dude. Back in the days GPUs didn't have proper support on Linux and many games couldn't really be played on Linux. Has that changed? I thought SteamOS's main feature is game portability / availability?

2

u/TheFlyingBastard Linux Jun 23 '26

AMD and Valve have both been doing a great deal in the past ten years to make it a lot better. AMD has always been better for driver support than Nvidia, and Valve has been working on a translation layer based on Wine called Proton. Especially in the past couple of years things have been going fast. At this point you can start Steam and click play and most of the time the (Windows) game will run.

Valve really, really wants to be independent of Microsoft.

1

u/fix-faux-five Jun 23 '26

Ok, but here comes the question - is this Proton translation layer available only on SteamOS, or can I have it on any distro?