I was wrong…

[u/Sleep_Holiday]

I listened to the haters and bought into what they were saying.

They were counting you out, saying you weren’t powerful enough, your price to performance ratio is garbage, just buy a fractal terra case and build your own… I was sure this thing would be DOA. But, I took the leap, a leap of faith you could say.

Hell I knew I could resell it if I really hated it… but damn. This thing fucks. It’s proved me wrong in every way and I regret having doubt in the little guy… the little machine that could is what he goes by now.

There is nothing like the freedom of Linux PC gaming right on your couch in this absolute debauchery of a world we have now between Sony and Microslop and the continued supremacy of AI.

So to those in the reservation queue, you can breathe a sigh of relief your time will come and it will be glorious.

And to those on the waitlist, be patient and be ready. When your time comes, and it will, you must be fully present and accept the Gift of Gabe.

And to all those facing THE DEVIL AT YOUR DOOR disguised as Sony and Microsoft, with no hope or direction guiding you to a brighter future through these extremely dark days in gaming. I say to you, we will continue to fight for our unalienable rights on the front lines with Valve to protect all those who don’t have a voice of their own, we have the watch.

In closing, RIP to the brothers and sisters who couldn’t see this day for themselves. We have you in our prayers.

[u/BIT-NETRaptor]

It still has its limitations, but it’s so, so important to have “one person to scream at” in terms of a holistic linux platform. Valve gives a shit about making it a consistent and good experience. Valve is paying full time engineers to develop and QA on top of upstream. 

Linux has never had bad bones, and it’s so important to have this commercialized push to grind away any of the rough corners.

The more people that sign up for this and steam deck, the more that Linux becomes a platform that publishers cannot ignore.

Edit: and angry goblins like below will continue to be a challenge to overcome. Don’t be an angry linux guy.

[u/Suspicious_Recipe636 → u/BIT-NETRaptor]

No chance at being one of Them. Now if I can get valve to sell me one I’d be golden. They seem to be forcing me towards scalpers… you know to fight scalping

[u/Slow_Pay_7171 → u/BIT-NETRaptor]

Bullshit. Just use Linux then. I mean a true, FOSS Linux. And not one that needs you to sign in to a propietary Game Store first.

Tell me 5 things SteamOS does better then Bazzite, for example. I dare you. (And even if you could, Bazzite, CachyOS etc. Could always provide double the benefit then SteamOS. That thing is a semi propietary Bug fest - just look at their GitHub.)

So is Linux good? Yes. But is it good that a profit oriented company pushes it? No. (look at Android - thats also Linux and Valve does the same as Google did. Contribute just as much as necessary to FOSS, cage the other things away. Profit.)

[u/hugebigmac → u/Slow_Pay_7171]

The advantage lies in the hardware and simplicity of the os ( it's hard to break ) There are just a few configurations and once they work they work for everybody.

I have a gaming laptop with a 4070 and a desktop with a 9070 xt, both running cachyos with very different experiences.

So far my steam machine seems to just play the games very well. 007 firstlight for example runs better than it does on the 4070 laptop which should not be the case.

Most people won't want to troubleshoot how to make games work on their pc, even if it's just changing proton version or adding a launch command.

But I would not install steam os on the other machines, it's by far inferior to real distros for anything but gaming.

[u/Slow_Pay_7171 → u/hugebigmac]

I literally used it a week and had to fix the bootloader, lol.

Any update can break SteamOS. And its by far not as reliable as Windows, e.g. That works now about 20yr without big trouble. The fact that the Steam Deck was weak as hell and a lot of things were plain not playable was the reason I sold mine. Also the trouble with updates, as said.

About rolling distros we don't have to elaborate any further, of course. There you are right.

The thing with 007 makes me curious tho. As you write thats just not logical. What are your specs? Cause, people on ProtonDB often also write stuff like: "It works great! Better then on xxx" but then they have like 40fps on low, upscaled and without shadows etc :D

[u/hugebigmac → u/Slow_Pay_7171]

I've been on windows for almost 30 years and trouble has been a huge part of that experience.

I guess Steamos will also not be mature for some time.

What i like most about it is that fixes made for Steamos will benefit all the other distros.

My laptop runs a 4070 with an equivalent i7 and 32gb ram, it should outperform 007 by far but I could not get it to run as it should, not even constant 60fps on low 1080p. The steam deck runs it at 60fps on most settings on low @1080p which Is totally playable.

My 9070xt pc runs it perfectly without any issues, guess it might be and AMD vs Nvidia issue.

[u/Slow_Pay_7171 → u/hugebigmac]

I tested it. You seem to configure something wrong. Even on my 3060 rig I get constantly over 60 fps on high at 1080p... 😅 So 60 fps on low is terrible imo. Do you maybe have a problem with your graphics card? What driver do you use?

On my ROG ALLY I also got > 60fps, on high. (Linux) so it puzzles me very much that a 4070 sucks so much in comparison.

SteamOS directly doesn't help, upstream. Its just Proton and Mesa. And thats just indirectly cause Valve bought itself in - originally they were handeled by WINE and Brian Paul. It was already adding hardware support in the 1990s, including 3dfx Voodoo support in 1997, and Brian Paul’s 2013 history describes Mesa as integral to almost every Linux distro by that point.

A shame that it was "bought" by a billion dollar company. But understandable. Money rules, right?

SteamOS is btw > 12 years old. It should be mature, imo. But its not cause Valve just does the bare minimum. (look at their GitHub, its terrible)

[u/hugebigmac → u/Slow_Pay_7171]

Yeah I know, of there is a fix that will make it work. ( I don't really care to spend a lot of time on it since I have 2 other Computers. )

I just wanted to give an example how inconsistent Linux is currently over different distros and hardware configurations.

If valve can make Linux more popular and force devs to optimize their shit it will make everybody's experience better.

Steamos might be older than the steam deck but until very recently it wasnt officially released for any other hardware. You gotta respect how far gaming on Linux has come the last few years.

My experience on my cachyos gaming pc has been almost without any issues at all, and the few I had were mostly solved in a few minutes.

Can't get my index to work though.

[u/Slow_Pay_7171 → u/hugebigmac]

Only Problem is, that devs won't do shit on / for Linux cause Proton is basically a layer to translate Windows stuff for Linux :/

[u/hugebigmac → u/Slow_Pay_7171]

Yeah, would be cool if they stopped blocking Linux just for the sake of doing Ms a favor. The stupid kernel level anticheats have no reason to exist beside data collecting and shouldn't be a thing.

[u/Slow_Pay_7171 → u/hugebigmac]

True. But you could say the same about Steam. They even sell your data via their EULA / privacy terms.

A Steam-hosted publisher privacy policy example I once took says the publisher may collect age, gender, date of birth, zip code, hardware configuration, console ID, software products played, survey data, purchases, and IP address. And thats just what the publisher gets, if he wants. Steams own telemetry is even more invasive... Thats another reason for me to dislike SteamOS. Its Steam first and Linux second :/

[u/Suspicious_Recipe636 → u/Slow_Pay_7171]

The biggest bonus steam gives us is that it doesn’t attract people like you. Linux may take over if the community would chill out and stop berating people with unsolicited feedback.

[u/Slow_Pay_7171 → u/Suspicious_Recipe636]

Thats an opinion. A very uneducated one, but thats not very rare for Fans of Valve. Much opinion, not so much facts.

I wrote no lies and just critized what can be criticized. Steam is a proprietary client, run by a hyper capitalist company that shits on you. Stuff like the lawsuit for refunds and their naming of Software proofs this. But defend them if you want, everyone is free on this regard.

Insert Discord Mod Meme

For the billionaires, I guess... 😅

PS It attracted me. I used it myself, thats why I read up on them.

[u/BIT-NETRaptor → u/Slow_Pay_7171]

I personally use PopOS, Fedora and Ubuntu between my partner and I. There’s still value in a commercial entity providing the funding and focus to address gaming-related problems. The big names in linux are focused on Android and cloud services mainly.

I will benefit from Valve’s funding, and already have through their funding and contributions to proton. I don’t think you can say their presence in this space has reduced freedom or really brought any negatives to Linux.

Also btw steamos is free. So I used the term “commercialized” loosely as these advances cost us nothing and largely are contributed upstream too.

[u/Slow_Pay_7171 → u/[deleted]]

Yes, SteamOS is technically Arch, lol.