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People saying just build your own steam machine don't get its appeal (programming.dev)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 7 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

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.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

    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.

    better scheduler

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Valve’s main goal is for their distribution to run on everything, performance is a low priority.

    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.

    the words you’re looking for are “scheduler optimised for gaming at the cost of performance in other domains like power consumption”

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago*

    So a better scheduler for gaming distros

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    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.

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