Valve's plan to bring SteamOS to more devices is a promising sign if you want to stop gaming on Windows

"Pick a distro" is why they're waiting for steamos, presumably.

It's actually surprising how easy it is to use.

My wife was playing Baldur's Gate 3 on her windows laptop (GOG version, DRM free) and I just wanted to see if I can run it on my Linux laptop.

Just copied the game folder from her laptop to my external SSD, plugged it into my laptop, ran through proton. Everything works without any issues. Simple as that.

I was pleasantly surprised. We could even join via LAN and had some co-op fun. After trying it out I think I'm buying the game.

Tbh the vast majority of people who say "ill switch to (insert Linux distro here) when (insert accomplishment here)" will most likley never switch

Sons is mostly playing Valorant right now on Windows 11. I’m an old dude familiar with FreeBSD, and Debian. No clue about running games and stuff though. Would he be able to switch?

edit: thanks for the insight. Sounds like a no-go for now until anti-cheat stuff is supported outside windows.

For all the not super technically inclined people out there, I would recommend Linux mint with cinnamon, you’ll feel right at home and won’t face any real issues so long as you don’t want to play LoL, a few other big multiplayer games have anti cheat systems that don’t like Linux.

I'll switch when 10 finally dies, they state Oct 2025 but if even less people go to 11 they won't really have a choice but to keep 10 up and running. Make 10 the last Windows OS ever. Never go to 11.

Some game developers (AGS) won't turn on EAC for their games (Lost Ark).

Make sure your hardware is compatible. Otherwise you have to deal with kernel upgrades to get latest drivers, which is advanced linux stuff. My gpu (B580) is compatible with 6.12 and newer kernel. And I wasn't able to install newer kernel on linux Mint 22. Ended up installing Windows. And... It's not that bad. I haven't seen it for a while. Everything works better in my case. And you can uninstall all you don't need including edge. But I will go back when kernel I need will be shipped with distro.

I'm hoping that steamos will make Linux much more popular so that devs take notice. Whilst wine/proton are amazing anticheat still exists. If enough people move to steamos they will have to make sure they're not excluded

Hell yeah.

IMO, no one should be playing games with kernel level anticheat. There is no way I would let any big gaming company have that level of control over my PC. It's a security nightmare.

Or getting players & friends to stop playing those types of games when there are so many compatible games to choose from.

That will be more likely as more people start using SteamOS.
If SteamOS can get enough users, then not supporting it will start to hurt the game developers profits.

It will be the opposite. Even Microsoft hates kernel-level anti-cheat.

It does often feel like as soon as a significant hurdle is overcome, the industry just makes another one.

Hopefully SteamOS/Steam on Linux gets enough traction to force publishers to reconsider.

I'd rather kick them off the boat.

It's true that a big slice of gamers play games with anti-cheat solutions that don't work on linux. That said most of those aren't even on steam, which is the biggest pc game marketplace, so I'm not sure it's that big of a dealbreaker for that many people.

i have faith this will be resolved eventually/they will have to admit kernel anticheat isn't even meaningfully more effective and give up on it. anyway loads of people don't play multiplayer AAA so it's a no brainer already for them. as the mass of people migrating continues to grow devs/publishers hopefully will have to catch up. 2% of the steam hardware survey is linux now, it could be 5% within the decade. that's my optimistic outlook, i know i shouldn't underestimate how out of touch the epic games suits etc. are though

They'll come around when the userbase increases. We live in a capitalist world, and these fuckers will always follow the money. They have zero principles, they just want the money.

The reason why I can't try Marvel Rivals with friends.

Fuck kernel-level software from commercial companies, though!

Luckily for you this already exists, and it's effectively SteamOS:

https://bazzite.gg/

You can even put this on a Steam Deck as a drop-in replacement.

Bazzite

You're just shy from describing Bazzite

It's got:

• Steam pre-installed
• trustworthy (?) Flatpak packages for just about everything, even encourages it
• desktop environment tailored to Windows users (KDE, really)
• auto-install and configure graphics drivers for AMD (Mesa) and Nvidia
• configurable automatic updates and system backup (although I think you still have to click the notification for flatpak updates)
• choice between anything for default anything during setup
• included in Steam Deck compatibility testing (actually in not sure but they do offer Steam Deck builds)

Don’t forget real, well-tested HDR and VR support on all GPUs out of the box.

I've been using Nobara and its been awesome. I wanted a fairly standard desktop with a gaming focus and it fit the bill. It even managed to automatically get the power saving sorted for my laptop which has a nvidia GPU. Great distro.

As I understand it, there have been issues with distributing Nvidia drivers in a Linux distro. Some do do it, but it’s kind of a legal grey area due to potential conflicts with the license of the Linux kernel.

I don’t really understand it fully, but it’s been an issue for a while. Apparently it’s less of an issue now because Nvidia partially open sourced its drivers. AMD’s GPU drivers apparently don’t have these issues.

Wonder what the situation with intel’s new GPUs and its drivers is.

take a look at bazzite perhaps?

I'd also add automatic configuration for multiple monitors, perhaps as much as 3 or as much as tmmy laptop's GPU allows for.

I've been doing some research and it seems like arandr has the best GUI for doing this.

I was so impressed with Garuda that I adopted it for my primary workstation OS even though I’m using the “gaming edition”.

It helps to think about this as a spectrum, as more features become available more people will make the switch to Linux. Not everyone will be able to swich to Linux at the same time, and some people will never switch.

Gaming was major bottleneck, even I, a person using Linux full time for the past 20 years, I used to maintain a Windows disk to play games. Only in the past couple of years I was able to sunset my windows setup, hopefully to never touch windows ever again. I had to drop a couple of games but it got to the point where rebooting to a OS wasn't worth it, as most of my games worked flawlessly without any tweaking.

There are many major pros to the Linux desktop environment, but we still need major software applications to become portable. The workflow of an average office worker is still not Linux compatible. Of course there are office alternatives, but they are not as easy to use. Though, IMO the oss world is hurting by trying to copy ms when their products are so horrible... Hopefully, the EU will drop some major cash at the issue with all these talks about digital sovereignty.

These guys should not wait for Linux but support reactOS, lol

With bottles, boxes, and all the other small environment virtualization solutions available right now, switching to Linux with a few 'almost native' Windows application is easier than ever. The mileage will vary from distro to distro. I've managed to get bottles to run some annoyingly old statistics software I need for work. It works great. Sometimes it can be a bit of a headache to figure out where the software saves files but playing detective for a file somewhere in the system is better than enduring all that Windows imposes on the user.

Yep. I recently started using bluesky and it's filled with linux hate posts farming likes. People just complaining about random things that don't even make sense.

I believe fomo is a real thing. Even if one doesnt play fortnite or valorant or kernel level shit, they still are afraid of missing out. So unless and until Microsoft goes bankrupt, I doubt Linux will replace it.

Fedora was my first distro. But i hat issues with Hardware in my framework laptop, which should have good Linux support. But what was even more annyoing was that Video and audio codec die not work right away because it does not support proprietary which made life horrible difficult for a noob. What are your thoghts on that?

It still feels like magic at times. The SteamDeck is my backlog steamrolling machine (pun intended). Almost every game in my library that I either forgot about or feels wasteful to play on my high-end desktop, runs amazing. I'm replaying Brutal Legend just because it runs so smoothly on my deck.

When they came out with SteamOS the first time, it felt so good to have a games run on Linux without fiddling with Wine. Those were dark times. The few people making an effort to run their games with the tools they had available where really putting in work to make it happen.

God, I remember searching the ends of the internet to get Starcraft running at some point. I managed to kinda get it going but it might have taken a few days of troubleshooting silly things.

If you've been at it for 8 years, I appreciate your efforts.

I haven't run across a game that hasn't run on The Deck yet. I know it's capable of running quite a lot, but I got it to play indie games. It's been great and does what I want it to do phenomenally. Additionallh if I ever wanted to do something more demanding on it, I could.

Every so often they’ll release an update that breaks everything, or they’ll patch something and the processor improvements will be bigger than intel or amd get out of a generation, showing how gimped it was to begin with.

Linux doesn't run as many games as Windows

I'd argue it runs more due to compatibility breaks. Wine just-werks with a lot of old installers.

any game that needs to install a rootkit on my computer to play it was never going on my computer anyway. Proton can more or less handle every else on linux at this point. Hardware driver support is getting quite mature too. 2025 is legitimately the year of the linux gaming desktop imo.

I have both. As a pure console I still prefer the Switch, and there is a huge overlap in the games. But the Deck is much more than just a gaming handheld, it is now my only PC as well.

You should give Bazzite a go on your desktop, it's very similar to SteamOS and the desktop experience has been great for me. I didn't have a Steam Deck and transitioned to it, and the smoothness convinced me to get a Lenovo Legion Go and install Bazzite straight OOTB.

Anti-cheat systems already have to make changes, since Microsoft have plans to significantly restrict kernel mode access after the major Crowdstrike issues earlier in the year. Kernel mode code is very invasive, difficult to get correct, and can result in major security holes or stability issues if not written correctly.

A bug in userland code may crash that one app. A bug in kernel mode code can (and often does) cause bluescreens, that people blame Microsoft for. I'm sure they're tired of being blamed for buggy code written by other companies.

Running the anti cheat code in userland will (in theory) make it easier to run on other OSes too.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-paves-the-way-for-Linux-gaming-success-with-plan-that-would-kill-kernel-level-anti-cheat.888345.0.html

...and VR. VR is already finicky on its own, gaming on Linux can be finicky in different ways, and the issues multiply if you have two things like that.

Don't hold your breath, the plan is (or was) to initially just release it for other handhelds rather than an iso you can install anywhere

My apologies. Fixed it in the main post with an edit

I've been daily driving Linux since 2017, I started with Ubuntu and it's been great. I recently got a Lenovo T14 Gen 1 and put Linux Mint 22 on it, and I've been playing some games on it and it's been pretty nice for such a portable laptop.

I'm excited, but I wish gpu manufacturers would jump on board with physically compatible cards with ffs or smaller form factor business machines. HP, Dell, et al like to limit space for traditional GPUs in those machines. If there was a half height mid/low grade gpu with components on the reverse side that would be a great couch gaming machine.

these people need permission from a massive corporation calling it something other than Linux so they can dodge the cognitive dissonance of hating Linux

I think it's mostly a matter of having it preinstalled.

The perception is that if it's pre installed, then it is designed for the device.

A few things:

1. It gives manufacturers a blueprint for their devices. You will see a lot of handhelds running SteamOS from different manufacturers. You will also see a lot of small "gaming boxes" with SteamOS to plug in your TV. That's great!
2. Game Developers will have one distribution to test their games on. One of the bigger problems linux had before SteamOS was the big clusterfuck of different distros. Great for users, but a big headache if you're developing for it. Now you can say "it runs on SteamOS", test on SteamOS and you don't have to deal with bug reports from people running RedStarOS
3. It's Valve. It's a company. They are the biggest store selling games and they are building their moat to protect themselves against Microsoft, Apple, Epic & Co. That not exactly great for users, but also explains why Valve is doing this linux push. To prevent Microsoft from abusing their Windows monopoly to crush them

Well here you go: https://bazzite.gg/

No we don't. Who needs that? That's what consoles are for. Every time I want to play on my computer I would need to dual boot and change to the OS? That's nonsense

Game Devs and device driver Devs need to get their shit together and fix things.

Do you mean a dedicated gaming flavor of Linux? Because otherwise, isn't that just a console?

Or even better, a dedicated gaming runtime environment. And that env can then be made multiplatform.

SteamOS is better than, for example, macOS and Windows because of licenses.

Since you're new (welcome!), I should let you in on a little secret: pretty much the entire free software movement is built around licensing. I know, it's boring and seems insignificant. But the outcomes are profound.

Because SteamOS is built to function within the free software ecosystem, it means users are never beholden to the decisions of one centralized entity (usually the company that owns the software patents.)

If Valve ever decides to, say, include candy crush ads in SteamOS' start menu (they'd have to make their own start menu, since right now SteamOS uses one that's already made by the free software community), then users can choose to remove that part of the menu or replace the menu altogether without having to start from scratch.

For wealthy people who can always pay the "proprietary tax," this might seem like a non-issue. Practically speaking, these people only want their software to work without hassle. They don't care about the true cost of that software, such as only one entity being able to modify/distribute the software. It's not until, say, photoshop starts charging a subscription (which they can always increase the price of) that people start to see the value in free software and the importance of licensing.

Microsoft is deeply entrenched and has undergone decades of enshittification. SteamOS is at only the beginning of this cycle. And since SteamOS is linux-based, it's likely to have ramifications for the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem. Furthermore, if there are two vastly different OSes that developers and graphics card manufacturers need to seriously target, they're more likely to write more platform-agnostic software that everyone can benefit from.

Because valve is a private company. They don't have to answer to shareholders. That means, they don't go through enshitifaction, they care about their product and their customers. Are they perfect? Absolutely not, are they good? Better than every single company out there that tries to be like them. Period.

Because it's open source and based on the Linux kernel. It's owned by them but you can do what you want with it. You can't with Windows.

So if a game works on the Steam OS, it works on pretty much any distro

I game with Steam on Linux, but I'm not using Steam OS

Also, that means that every effort made by Valve to improve compatibility is beneficial to everyone.

Edit: Also, even if it were closed source, I think it would still be good as it gives us alternatives to Windows. But

Valve dosnt really "own" SteamOS. They maintain and update SteamOS, but SteamOS is free and open source

Plus just about everbody who knows anything about steam would tell you they are probably the most consumer friendly billion dollar company ever, and have been for decades. So yes even if they owned it like microsoft owns windows it would still be better

I am not gonna use SteamOS. But if a bunch of regular folk do, then it might convince peripheral and game makers it'd be worth putting in a modicum of effort to support linux. That's why I'm excited for SteamOS.

The source is always free so you could fork it if you disagree with them. Also it means broader support for Linux gaming

It's way easier to move from one Linux distro to another if Valve starts enshittifying SteamOS (which would really suck) than it is to move from Windows to Linux. Either way this is a good stepping stone that's well supported.

If it's like the steam deck version, it'll be based on Arch with a bunch of steam-specific patches/configs to make games run more easily (with the added bonus of making non-steam games run pretty well too). Steam exists to sell games, and if they want to make it easier for me to play games, that's fine by me.

Not sure what a Microsoft distro would look like, but if they make a distro that'll run Xbox games with gamepass, I'd give it a shot.

Another nice bonus for either/both of those situations is that it wouldn't be too hard to incorporate those changes into other distros. That way people who want more of an "install and go" experience would have their official distros, people who like to tinker could work on importing the official code into their unofficial setup, and people who use arch btw can install it from the AUR.

Not answering your comment directly, and I don't even use Linux, BUT..

One reason a lot of us don't use Linux even if we really want to us because it's biggest strength is also one of its biggest weaknesses, that being it's modularity.

There isn't a single packaging system, window manager, file system, shell, etc etc.

This makes it hard for companies (and devs in general) to target Linux for releases. For example you want to release something for Windows, you build a single exe, apple is a dmg (I think) etc so you just build for one single platform with a consistent API.

When you want to build for Linux there can't be just one build/package. This has actively been cited as reasons why some commercial software doesn't support Linux, as it takes far more effort to support all major permutations of platform and package management.

So back to your question, why is Valve's Steam OS going to help? Because it's going to be a single platform with a single way of doing things. You can always go and replace the bits like any Linux distro but out the box it will be easy enough for vendors to support, it will hopefully also get more adoption because it has commercial support.

Look at Android as an example (I know it's not entirely the same), but that is just a customised version of Linux, but as it's consistent and has a single way to manage packages it's widely adopted.

I am pretty sure Linus himself said how one of the reasons why Linux desktop doesn't have mass adoption is because no one can agree on how things should be done, so we have hundreds of libs all doing the same thing in a different way. Valve will pick what they think is best (even if it isn't technically the best) and through that we all have a singular point of effort and adoption to centralise on.

Like if Microsoft released their own Linux OS, would it be good suddenly?

It's worth noting that steamOS, like any Linux distro has its issues and a bit of a learning curve. Especially if you want to go off the beaten track, it's pretty much just using a stock arch distro.

As for if MS switched to Linux, no it wouldn't be good because the issues with Win11 overwhelmingly aren't a matter of incompetence or anything inherent to the code, but of conscious anti-consumer business decisions. There's nothing about Linux that would actively stop MS from cramming telemetry, bloat, etc. In their distro.

Like IBM and Red Hat!

Consoles have accepted keyboard+mouse for years now! Microsoft started with the Xbox one and Sony started with the PS3; Though there were select games for generations prior that supported k+m through their own implentations

Very nice! I wish I could use an AMD GPU, but sadly machine learning keeps me on the CUDA platform. Gotta make a living. That said, recent NVIDIA drivers got better on Linux. I can finally use Wayland problem free now. Games on proton also work just fine.

However, this only works well on Arch, BTW. Really wish I could just use Debian. I'm a computer scientist, but I also get tired of an avalanche of software updates every couple of days; I don't need all the latest and greatest software. My German internet commection also means I wait up to half an hour sometimes.