It's just not the same if you don't have to fiddle for hours to get a game to run, is it?

Year of the BSD when?

Haiku or bust!

I just run headless Linux and imagine that I'm playing games.

OS/2

MINIX is the way

I've seen a lot of folks waiting for this to make the switch, it's silly but having a familiar name attached to it gives them a sense of comfort, and SteamOS is solid for what it is.

I'm not a fan of its whole "read only filesystem" shenanigans and wiping things on upgrade, so I switched my Deck to CachyOS Handheld, but I acknowledge it does those for a reason, adding a safety net to the "console-like" experience for most users. Admittedly that feature may be just the thing some inexperienced users would need in order to not break the thing.

While I generally agree with your overall assessment. The thing you have to understand is that Microsoft has largely written off home users. At least written them off as a concern. They are much more focused now on corporate, government, and AI. Whether or not home users remain trapped on their products, matters less to them. Compared to the other groups.

The recent revelations about meddling by Microsoft corporate into their gaming division, closing so many successful studios. Canceling massive projects. Without regard to how much time, energy and resources were poured into them. All to meet some arbitrary 30% margin of profitability. They're betting in the short term on the other groups to keep home users trapped and helpless. And short term it will work to an extent.

But the time is right for valve to push right now regardless.

What makes it even funnier is, that steam is started by former Microsoft employees

If they release Half Life 3 day 1 of Steam Machine launch, Linux gonna get so much attention, probably biggest bang of the decade.

I 100% agree about this being the opportunity for Linux to be brought into the mainstream but for a different reason.

This will divorce Linux from Linux bros. Most people aren't interested in doing any of the stuff Linux is good at like running servers, they just want to run their apps.

Right now the only way normie users hear about Linux is by stumbling into a Linux bro who started ranting at them.

While Linux bros have been great for popularizing Linux on the backend and with technical people you literally could not pick a worse demographic to represent a product to the general public.

Microsoft will dominate corporate, SMBs, government and education. That's what they care about.

I'd say it's even more unique than a valuable competitive mistake/opportunity.

Valve has the chance to grow the brand and make a bunch of money and all the other standard goals for a company, sure. But they also have the opportunity to benefit the world in subtle but significant ways while getting richer.

A normal megacorp might not give a shit about that last part. But a company that is majority owned by one individual who is already a billionaire that looks like santa claus and presumably cares about his legacy and maybe even other people... it might just be possible!

Valve has news for you

I installed cachyOS and love it so far, KDE plasma is nice. Used Linux mint before. Didn't try vr yet because my GPU died and 1060 3GB won't run or well but I hope it will run fine thanks to steam.

I might suggest you take a look at Envision and see if that doesn't get you what you need right now?

There is a fix coming for the Nvidia performance problem. It's going to take some months for all the pieces to fall in place. See this video for more about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpXINAMaljA

Nvidia's shit Linux support is why I've been stuck with Windows despite how badly I want to switch to Arch. You get no Nvidia Control Panel, no Nvidia App, no ShadowPlay, no RTX HDR, no 3D Settings panel; basically the only thing you can do with an Nvidia GPU on Linux is render 3D graphics. Which is fine if all you do with your PC is CAD or non-competitive SDR gaming. But I paid for all these extra features and so I'd like to use them.

Can't even switch to an AMD GPU, either, because I like Ray Tracing too much, so I'm stuck waiting on Nvidia to get their shit together (or AMD to finally release a GPU that can handle RT @ 4K120) before I can finally ditch Microsoft for good.

Obvious solution: Build a D3D12 to D3D11 translation layer, kinda like DXVK but in reverse

I mostly agree with that, but the problem with Bazzite and CachyOS is that they are made by small teams. Distributions made by small teams might die because of some small problem, like a key member of the team being unable to continue with the project. Bazzite team, for example, earlier this year said that they would stop maintaining the OS if a proposed change to Fedora would go through, because their team wouldn’t be able cope with the change.

SteamOS on the other hand, being developed by a company with a lot of money to throw into things, is much more resilient OS, and I think that makes it better for larger masses of users.

I am not waiting for it because I personally want to use it. I'm excited for the industry shaping power a Linux OS released by Valve will have.

For sure, I've been running Linux as my daily driver since... 2005? Fuck... and ran it on the side even before that. And I've been trying bazzite on my gaming PC and it's been pretty cool. But I'm still pumped about SteamOS, not because I'm planning on running it, but because any success SteamOS has will be likely directly applicable to Linux desktop gaming in general.

Every game that adjusts something to test on SteamOS will make it better for me off SteamOS. Every peripheral that is built to work with SteamOS, all the user demographic numbers that set priorities withing the gaming industry, are all great.

I'm excited for the year of the Linux desktop.

Why do you think Bazzite isn't great for full desktop use?

I'd bet a lot that it'll be easy to install. Any Linux distro I've tried is a breath of fresh air after using the Windows installer. I wouldn't even be surprised if they make driver management even more seamless and automagic than the best Linux distros, stuff like that might be why it's taking so long.