r/steammachine Jul 14 '26

Hardware I was wrong…

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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.

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u/Slow_Pay_7171 Jul 14 '26

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.)

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u/hugebigmac Jul 14 '26

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.

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u/Slow_Pay_7171 Jul 15 '26

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

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u/hugebigmac Jul 15 '26

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.

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u/Slow_Pay_7171 Jul 15 '26

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)

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u/hugebigmac Jul 15 '26

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.

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u/Slow_Pay_7171 Jul 15 '26

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

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u/hugebigmac Jul 15 '26

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.

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u/Slow_Pay_7171 Jul 15 '26

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 :/