Valve’s main success here will be establishing SteamOS as a de facto replacement for some 60-70% of PCs. Hell, I’ve built a gaming PC a little over a year ago, and am still running Windows on it, but only for one reason: no first party support from SteamOS.
Once that’s sorted… My need for Windows will disappear basically, aside from the very occasional ancient Windows utility I might need to use (old Rockchip flashing tools come to mind), but those usually run quite well enough in a VM.
Make a baseline Steam Machine, let people adapt their PCs to it easily, and you won over the gaming market. Expand that with support for third party launcher integration and you’ve literally got every single fanboy, gamer, etc., on your platform.
am still running Windows on it, but only for one reason: no first party support from SteamOS.
For the most part, it SteamOS isn’t really necessary to get a serviceable desktop gaming experience. Pick a well-supported rolling release distro or a derivative, install Steam and Proton, and games mostly just work.
It’s not perfect, but it’s usable. The only real pain point around gaming is getting HDR working properly.
Closed-source software is a different story, however. Discord’s Wayland support is basically nonexistent and the AFK detection thinks you’re always in front of the computer, suppressing mobile notifications.
First party support here needs to include system drivers (including GPU) from primary sources (aka no “just add this repo and install this DKMS and run that installer”, it should work OOTB for the most common hardware).
Most definitely.
Valve’s main success here will be establishing SteamOS as a de facto replacement for some 60-70% of PCs. Hell, I’ve built a gaming PC a little over a year ago, and am still running Windows on it, but only for one reason: no first party support from SteamOS.
Once that’s sorted… My need for Windows will disappear basically, aside from the very occasional ancient Windows utility I might need to use (old Rockchip flashing tools come to mind), but those usually run quite well enough in a VM.
Make a baseline Steam Machine, let people adapt their PCs to it easily, and you won over the gaming market. Expand that with support for third party launcher integration and you’ve literally got every single fanboy, gamer, etc., on your platform.
For the most part, it SteamOS isn’t really necessary to get a serviceable desktop gaming experience. Pick a well-supported rolling release distro or a derivative, install Steam and Proton, and games mostly just work.
It’s not perfect, but it’s usable. The only real pain point around gaming is getting HDR working properly.
Closed-source software is a different story, however. Discord’s Wayland support is basically nonexistent and the AFK detection thinks you’re always in front of the computer, suppressing mobile notifications.
Actually, you can get most of Valve’s work without SteamOS. I’m running Mint and it works great.
Actually, that’s not what I want or need.
First party support here needs to include system drivers (including GPU) from primary sources (aka no “just add this repo and install this DKMS and run that installer”, it should work OOTB for the most common hardware).
Bazzite did that for me. Installing and getting a game up and running took me 20 minutes. No fuzz. All drivers and software self update.
That’s what has happened to me. I haven’t installed a single driver yet, in about a year.
But I dunno. Maybe I just won the lottery.
I’ll give it a go sometimes, but the AMD CPU + Nvidia GPU combo wasn’t exactly winner the last time I tried.
Yeah, that might not work as well. I’m on a Framework laptop that hasn’t been modified much.