Doing it yourself would mean visiting one of those build your own pc forums for help, and I think most people would rather kill themselves.
Doing it yourself would mean visiting one of those build your own pc forums for help, and I think most people would rather kill themselves.
I don’t think you really need those forums. However, why not just slap Ubuntu on a second hand PC, put a decent GPU in and install Steam from the app store? Isn’t SteamOS Linux-based anyways?
Lol, have fun with the metric ton of shit that is the Snap Store and Ubuntu. You’d immediately run into problems doing what you just said, and the performance wouldn’t be the same either (assumming similar hardware). Not even mentioning the metric shit-ton of garbage you may run into with Nvidia.
So many enthusiasts don’t even realise how much work and knowledge goes into setting something up that works as well as the Gabecube. If you believe it’s just “pick random distro and install Steam” you’re painfully mistaken.
I myself run CachyOS on my daily driver and have the Gamescope Session installed which they provide, which is as close as you gonna get (as Cachy brings most kernel optimizations, better scheduler yada yada yada) for when I want to game on my TV. But that still led me through the CLI and has some caveats, which is absolutely 100% nothing most gamers want or even have the time to inbetween e.g. family + job.
OP may be out of line with language, but they’re right.
Can confirm, if you search steam in Ubuntu, it automatically gives you their buggy 3rd party snap. I didn’t realize it until steam link didn’t work, and all the file paths for debugging were really weird.
Also installing Ubuntu on hardware runs the same risk as installing windows on hardware: hardware may or may not be supported or easy to get going.
CachyOS is most definitely not “as close as it gets” to SteamOS. Cachy is performance driven whereas SteamOs much like Bazzite is compatibility driven. Valve’s main goal is for their distribution to run on everything, performance is a low priority.
That’s not a thing, the words you’re looking for are “scheduler optimized for gaming at the cost of performance in other domains like power consumption”, you also don’t need it because common programs like gamemode already do this.
Are you trolling or something? This is categorically false, Gabe Newell himself expressed that with the Steam Deck (and therefore SteamOS, which was designed specifically for it in this modern version) their focus absolutely was performance as well as user experience. It had to so they could squeeze every last frame out of the AMD SoC. They literally developed their own micro-compositor (Gamescope) instead of utilizing e.g. Plasma (despite it being pre-installed for Desktop mode) for higher performance and quicker feature availability. Not to mention Nvidia GPUs still not being fully supported by SteamOS despite it being technically possible if they wanted to. Your claim about SteamOS’ priorities is nonsense.
So a better scheduler for gaming distros, which indeed was the context. Though I’d argue there are schedulers who’re even objectively better for general desktop and gaming use as the one that treats every process equally isn’t optimal to make either a GUI feel snappy or prevent microstuttering in games, but rather optimised for server workloads.
Gamemode is cool, however if you want to build your own Gabecube with some random distro it’s absolutely not guaranteed to run during a Gamescope session or even at all, not all distros ship or enable it by default or you have to put “gamemoderun %command%” into every game’s start parameters. Not to mention most users most likely neither know what that is nor do they want to, they want to play games and just use the computer.
CachyOS is not a gaming distro, it is a performance distro, and this is from the mouth of its own developers. Everybody thinks their scheduler is the best - there’s probably a meme about it somewhere, you’d probably get more aggressive scheduling with gamemode than regular cachy because gamemode expects you to be playing a game when you use it… and fyi gamemode is used by default in applications like lutris.
SteamOS is a desktop distribution now, that means full compatibility - at least once they start supporting nvidia. Maybe when they supported only the steam deck they could afford some targeted optimizations, but the more systems start running SteamOS the wider the target will have to become.
Yea but how would someone who isn’t into PC hardware know what a decent GPU, nevermind a decent second hand PC would be, without going to forums, watching reviews, etc.
The whole appeal of the steam machine is it being a console-like PC for people who don’t have the knowledge and/or patience to build their own.
I wouldn’t buy it because I enjoy building myself a bang-for-the-buck PC from used parts and ain’t scared of installing Linux myself. But if you want the benefits of a PC (game availability and prices, flexibility, compatibility) with the benefits of a console (plug-n-play, couch game friendly), a steam machine is pretty much it.
the guys from the forums don’t know those things from the forums themselves. those things have specs. most in numbers. you can read system requirements of games you like to get an idea and then look up PC parts or complete PCs that exceed them. there are standards that say what parts generally fit together. when you know one part you want, that narrows down what other parts can be connected to it. for example, if you think the GPU is most important, it will determine the mainboard must have a certain connector for the card and also the power supply needs to fit, as well as the case dimensions to fit it inside. this is how you build/upgrade a PC. Some stores let you select only components that fit together for a configuration, like this German store for example will only let you choose a mainboard with an AM5 socket, if you selected a CPU that requires one and so on: https://www.alternate.de/PC/PC-Konfigurator
I know, I myself enjoy building PCs. But I know a lot of people who don’t. And they’d rather pay some amount of money more to not have to look up hardware comparisons, find out what works best together, install operating systems, etc. It’s a hobby not everyone enjoys and for those people a pre built and configured system with manufacturer support is great, even if it might cost them a little more.
How are you supposed to learn anything if you don’t make the effort of actually learn anything? Do you expect to get everything served on a silver plate? :)
You don’t have to learn everything. People have all kinds of hobbies and not a lot of time.
And I don’t expect anything to be handed to me. I expect to pay extra for people who know what they’re doing to do it for me.
I personally would never do that for a PC because I do have the know how because I enjoy bargain hunting for hardware and building my own rig.
But when I have an issue with my car, I bring it to a mechanic because I don’t have enough time and interest to teach myself how to repair it myself. I‘d rather put my little time into my existing hobbies.
Idk, I still think it has some merit. It can reduce a lot of troubleshooting when something not playing right. There’s 1001 things that can go right and wrong with PC gaming. Reducing the hardware to near zero with a standardized rig takes a lot of headache off IMO.
Some people just want to play games from Steam without all the pc gaming hobby’s baggage. They probably already have other fulfilling hobbies they learn from. What’s wrong not adding another hobby to go down a rabbit hole?
Maybe I’m too optimistic