I was a console gamer for a long, long time just because I refuse to use Microsoft products, and Linux gaming was fraught except for Battle for Wesnoth and Nethack. Many hours just messing with Wine vs I turn on the machine and the game just starts, no fuss.
I've owned a Steam Deck not quite since day 1, I'm beyond delighted now that I can just buy and play Steam games. I think I've thrown maybe one game at Proton that I just couldn't get working. And things like the Heroic launcher have made GoG games (most of which already ran on Linux since they just run via DOSBox) easier than ever.
Anyone on the fence about keeping Windows around just for games: unless you play online multiplayer that uses kernel anti-cheat, just make the jump. I promise you, almost every game in your library will just work, and almost all of the rest will work after you set them to run with a specific Proton version.
> Anyone on the fence about keeping Windows around just for games: unless you play online multiplayer that uses kernel anti-cheat, just make the jump. I promise you, almost every game in your library will just work, and almost all of the rest will work after you set them to run with a specific Proton version.
Same applies to Steam on Linux: Proton has opened to us a gaming library of a size we would not have dreamed of a few years before.
I 100% agree, I bought one to be able to play my library while my wife watches dramas on the TV, and I've been shocked as to how high the compatibility rate is these days.
Also, while the competing handhelds are often more powerful, the Deck's trackpads really are a game changer for some games (like Rimworld)
Can you elaborate more on the benefits of the Heroic launcher? From the website I understand it offers the convenience of bundling multiple launchers into one but having only used Steam, I don't fully understand it's benefits.
Basically it handles downloading & configuration of games from some non-Steam providers (e.g. GOG, Epic), and adds them to Steam, so you can launch them like they are Steam games.
If you don't play games from Epic Games, GOG, Amazon or local installs, then there isn't much point to it. If you only use Steam, there isn't really any benefits.
What if SteamOS included kernel-level anti-cheat? Seems like an elegant solution compared to the current approach of running invasive third-party anti-cheat software.
SteamOS does provide support for common anti cheats (don't know details though), made in collaboration between anti cheat maker and valve, but many games decide to specifically opt out of this support
How would that work? Valve implements a bunch of kernel modules for each of the different KAC libraries an arbitrary game might use?
Both Valve and MS have been making moves to steer game publishers away from KAC. I think the problem will solve itself when the platforms just say, "you can't do that anymore".
I bought an Asus Rog Ally X on a recent trip to NYC (i'm not from the US, and the steam deck isn't sold on regular retailers).
I can't believe how awful the user interface is, they are bascially installing windows 11 in a computer shaped as a portable console, with really small icons and imprecise touch controls, onedrive and microsoft 365 offers, crazy.
If you can install Steam OS on it, all those consolized PCs will end up using native Steam OS, and the next step is the living room (console like desktop pcs).
Microsoft must be really thinking about an Xbox OS, or at least a native and usable gaming interface for windows 11. Valve is trying to remove microsoft as a dependency for their bussines. And i think microsoft sees valve as it's bigger competitor on the gaming space, not Playstation as everyone thinks, that's why they are going with the "everything is an Xbox" ads and rumors about "third party xboxes".
Even the XBOX UI is problematic. I’m stunned that so many games have an additional layer of user onboarding just to get up and running. So many games require that you create an account “typing” your info in an on screen keyboard with an Xbox controller, and verify with email then return to the Xbox and sign in. What should have been a single-sign-on using your gamer tag profile is a clunky fragmented mess.
I'm not even sure it's an 'or' at this point; I've recently gone (multiple times) through the surreal experience of having to install a client and register an account having already bought a game through a storefront for which I had to install a client and register an account and which had already ostensibly installed. In the first case it was for a game I had actually previously played before the publisher decided to slap an account on top of its offering, and I decided I didn't care enough to keep going.
This is a fundamental problem of technology, not just software, not just games games. Too many products unnecessarily tether you back to the manufacturer through an online account. When I buy something, hardware or software, I shouldn't have to check in with the developer forever, just to use it.
Yes. And games are built as multi platform so they don’t want to tie themselves tightly to the XBOX ecosystem. But the UIs for that enrollment are almost always horrible. You can tell they are designed for PCs with keyboards and mice. The scaling is all wrong for a TV based interface.
Yep, probably that will be the future of xbox, it will become like steam so you can use and play your xbox library on every device. There may be some Microsoft branded Xboxes, like they have the "surface" PCs, but will be just another device that runs the xbox client.
Well... they want that, but aren't there from my point of view.
From the xbox library (including 3rd party games you got on xbox, old 360 games and so on) only a handful of titles are actually playable on pc, around 10% in my experience (those labeled as "play anywhere", mostly "newish" first party games... 3rd parties want to sell you another copy to play on pc even using the xbox pc client).
And the look and feel of "the platform" is quite different on pc than the console, i think they will try to make the whole library playable and have the same experience (booting up directly to it or running it as a client on any supported device, similar to steam big picture mode)
Currently if I'm filtering right; 553 games are 'free' under Game Pass Ultimate currently, 223 are available on PC. ~42%. That's not great; but not horrible either.
Full Game Pass is 331,461 titles currently, and 240,596 installable on PC; so a bit better ratio.
Yeah, i'm taking as base my own library of xbox games, built over many years. Most games i bought digitally for xbox.
Probably for gamepass they select games that can be used on pc and console, and the store has xbox and pc versions of many titles, but that doesn't mean that if you bought the xbox version you have rights over the pc version.
That is my guess too, they will still release both a console and a portable but it will be open. Phil Spencer has also talked about allowing third party stores on these future Xbox consoles.
Yep, users try to consolidate their gaming library in a particular platform. If you have 100 games on steam, why you would get the newest fifa-718 on xbox instead of steam, where you have all your games?
They plan game pass to get users to the xbox ecosystem, but i'm not sure if it will be enough.
For gaming, RetroPie is a cool solution (it doesn't require raspberrypi).
I have a setup using HP Pro Mini 400 G9 that boots directly into EmulationStation. It's perfect for playing with my kid, covering everything from NES to more recent consoles, and also Steam and Minecraft (via https://github.com/minecraft-linux/appimage-builder/releases) if needed. The offline aspect of non-steam games is a big plus for easier parental management too.
I've got to say I prefer the raw Retroarch interface over the EmulationStation launcher. EmulationStation is pretty but the seams between it and Retroarch were just too big for me.
I highly recommend SteamFork for now! It's very close to upstream SteamOS unlike other derivatives and is easy to install. The experience is just much much better.
The issue is they would need to get rid of xbox live and allow installing apps outside their store. PC gamers will not accept having to pay for online and many play games that are not in the xbox store: all valve games, indie games, mods etc.
I very rarely play games, and for long time I had dedicated windows installation just for steam and friends.
This was always annoying experience to reboot, hunt for grub, then half year of windows updates until I was able to enjoy my free time.
But thanks to proton, I don't remember anymore when was last time I had to do that, everything just works great on Linux ootb including titles like cyberpunk.
For people wanting dedicated (console like) gaming machine steam os looks really promising.
I think they actually fixed that with Gaming Mode or whatever.
Even worse when a modal dialog used to pop up over your game... the way Windows used to constantly interrupt whatever you were trying to focus on drove me nuts (this never happened on macOS or Linux) but I think they also finally fixed that
Windows updates are slow as fuck, take forever to download, then forever to install, take your CPU, hog your storage and require multiple boots and MUST be finished after started.
On everyLinux distro I've used, updates were single command/click at most, downloaded in the background, cleaned up from storage automatically, never used much CPU and rarely 'required' reboot.
Yes my Linux distro is updated twice a week and Windows was deleted after being out of ~updates~ use for 6 months, why do you ask?
For some people, sure. But to force it upon people without any way of skipping it? Kind of disrespectful to control people's computer usage like that when we're talking about "personal computers".
Or, Microsoft could let people chose when to update, so the ones who have to use Windows (like myself) can continue to do so without having to deal with their continued bullshit.
Sure, but "most people" is a low bar : "most people" probably can't even afford a computer with a dedicated graphics card either : the median per-capita household income is only $2,920 per year.
As for most people with a less than a decade old dedicated graphics card : I actually do believe that WiFi is a limiting factor for Internet speed.
> then half year of windows updates until I was able to enjoy my free time
That sums up my experience with the PlayStation and switch. Don't touch them for awhile and 'we are installing updates for the next 2 hours'. I use my pc often enough that it is not an issue. But I have one computer I do not use very often and then it is update city.
At the risk of defending Nintendo, the software update times on the Switch are notably zippy. I don't think I've ever had it take more than 10 seconds (including the reboot after). That's laudable, and nowhere in the ballpark of, say, Apple, where I once went to lunch and came back to find my laptop still installing updates.
My gripe with proton and linux gaming is GPU drivers — on Windows, I have AMD Adrenaline software where I can undervolt the GPU and adjust performance for every game individually. This drastically cuts power consumption, noise and temperature levels, especially for newer games played in 144hz or 4k. Is there a way to adjust the same things on Linux, preferably without restarting anything and messing about in the terminal?
I spent a couple dozen hours trying to tweak and tune my desktop this spring, get the watts down & see what Linux could do. CoreCtl was the best utility I found for the gpu, even though it left much to be desired & would sometimes work sometimes just not; my memory notably would get locked at max speed sometimes & not be adjustable, taking 20w right away. But it has the obvious knobs; adjusting clocks and mV per each state on each power profile, adjusting fan curves.
(Alas my motherboard appears to lack a ton of controls in Linux. I have been having to go into bios to do cpu undervolting and fan speed controls.)
More recently, I turned on the newer power tuning utility 'tuned' and it's been amazing. I'd fought down from 140 to 110w on my desktop but it still felt absurdly higher than it should be. Turned on tuned and now it idles at 85w. I haven't tried to sit and tweak it and see what it can do, but my impression is it's not as good at letting users tweak stuff endlessly. But it does do a ton of tweaking itself, and it's smart about adapting - switching to gaming profiles when games start.
I could be wrong but it seems like there aren't standards for motherboard management around platform details like fan speed control. And there's many many ways motherboards do things. Where-as gpu's apparently are just much more normative, are tweaked via pretty standard interfaces. Still, a lot is possible. I definitely recommend tuned, as a very all encompassing system tuner.
This is great but we must still be careful. Games have come to Linux but so has a lot of the suckiness associated with them.
The video games industry wants to own your computer. They don't want you to copy their games or cheat. Taking over your machine is the only way they can possibly hope to accomplish that. Therefore they think nothing of shipping literal rootkits directly to you. This is software whose only distinction from malware is a terms of service buried somewhere that you probably clicked through without reading and technically accepted.
There's also the fact they are proprietary software. There's no telling what they are doing. Sometimes there's literal malware in these things. I'm not kidding about this.
I seriously doubt there's any effective way to sandbox them either, they probably need extensive permissions to even work. I wouldn't want to run these things in my personal computer.
For these reasons, you might want to set up a completely separate virtualized Linux system just for this purpose. IOMMU and VFIO technologies allow you to map a discrete graphics card to the virtual machine which enables hardware accelerated graphics at near native performance.
You might want to consider a dedicated gaming machine. To me it feels like a waste since the hardware is great and should also be used for other things.
> Taking over your machine is the only way they can possibly hope to accomplish that.
It's easy. Don't play competitive multiplayer crap. Especially if it's free to play. You get to not waste your time on predatory grindfests, besides not having to install a rootkit.
Also stay away from the companies requiring their own account system, like EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar.
There are plenty of "competitive multiplayer crap" games which I think actually deserve to be botted to oblivion. If you load a game and you see a timer anywhere, it probably deserves it.
The timer exists to delay you rewards and resetting it is probably wired to the credit card button. They do this to create reward schedules in order to get players addicted. They want them logging into the game every single day. Automating those silly "daily tasks" is an absolutely moral thing to do and I will never fault anyone who does it. They are cures for video game addiction and should be prescribed by doctors.
"Just dump the game" is not an easy thing to do when you're addicted. There are people out there who literally wake up at 3 AM to do daily tasks because that's when some idiotic timer resets. It's not something you just "dump". I know because I've been there.
It's my computer. I am the god of this machine. If something happens, it's because I will it. I get to read and write arbitrary memory if I want to. It's offensive to me that they even think I shouldn't have this power. Couldn't care less what their reasons are.
Cheating? I don't care enough about most games to even consider it. I absolutely do consider it to be my prerogative, however. If they don't like it, they better run their "anticheat" nonsense on their computers, where it belongs. If they try to usurp control of my computer, I will do everything in my power to stop it.
This is gonna turn into yet another example of illegitimate customers enjoying a superior product while paying customers get treated like dishonest criminals. Legitimate customers get DRM and anticheat rootkits, pirates and cheaters get none of that. Guess which side I want to be on?
The issue w/ competitive gaming (League of Legends, Deadlock, Overwatch) is if you take advantage of your prerogative and cheat, you make the experience worse for everyone else; and it hurts the game itself.
The sad state of existence is that if you want to run a multiplayer game, you need to do shitty/controlling things or the game will turn unplayable as soon as it starts to become popular.
Games like BG3 however - Who cares if someone is cheating? Just stick to those (great) games if you want more control
It's unfortunate but at the end of the day they're just video games. They aren't worth sacrificing computer freedom over. We shouldn't end up becoming serfs in the digital fiefdoms of corporations just because people want to play online video games. These companies need to give up and let us play these things on our terms.
I'd sooner see multiplayer games disappear than accept this sad state of affairs where our computers come pwned straight off the factory in order to please the so called stakeholders by denying us the freedom to do things that hurt their interests. That's a far more damaging outcome than silly video games becoming unplayable. Cheaters are a small price to pay for freedom and I pay it gladly.
Besides, some games should be hurt. Plenty of "free" games out there employing literal gambling and drug dealer tactics to get people addicted to their product. Cheaters are doing us all a huge favor by speeding up their demise.
I'm not expert but I wonder if using blockchain technology to mathematically make impossible to cheat some information like the position or shooting direction is possible...
that way maybe we don't need to give full control, and the most important things are still are not cheatable.
cheating the skin is not that important but if they think that is important too, then they can just add more information to track somehow on the skins ahah
You tell the server you're on the other side of the map and it just trusts you. Teleport hack. The other guy is on the other side of the map and behind a wall but the server is still sending you his position. Why send the client information it shouldn't have?
They want to pwn your computer so that you can't tamper with the game. They should fix the game so that tampering with it doesn't matter.
I saw your point in your original post of being wary of what games you install since some come with crapware, but you've completely lost me here. For many people, perhaps even most people, the whole point of practicing their digital freedom and even owning a computer is to enjoy a game. The use of games in society and the use of anticheats to games is very obvious by every measure. Yes, don't install crap; no, multiplayer games shouldn't and aren't going anywhere.
Cheating at video games is actually an exercise in computer freedom. The game is running on my computer. As the owner of the machine, I can change its memory. I can change whatever I want. I should be able to do this.
If you don't have the power to cheat at video games, it's because you do not actually control the machine. There's something above you preventing you from doing what you want. It's not your computer, it belongs to the game company. The computer does their bidding, not yours.
So people are not "practicing their digital freedom", they are practicing only what the game company allows them to do. They don't "own a computer" either, the corporations own their computers, they're just letting people use them. In the end it's up to them to decide if games are worth their sacrifices. Personally I think that's an indignity. It means your PC is no different than a game console.
I for one want to play games but don't want to make those sacrifices. I look for ways to make the game run on my terms instead of accepting the corporation's take it or leave it offer. It's pretty sad that people will just give up all their power just to play games but it can't be helped. I can only post these comments and try to convince others.
So... don't play them? Your reasons for not accepting kernel anti-cheat are completely valid, but so are other users' desires to not play games with cheaters.
I already avoid multiplayer games. It's very rare for me to make an exception.
I came here to warn others about these concerns and to cite virtualization with VFIO as a viable solution. I think people should understand what sort of nonsense they're bringing into their computers when they install these games. That's what my original post was about.
I didn't mean to start another one of these discussions. We shouldn't have to justify ourselves. They're the ones barging in and usurping control of our computers because of "cheating" or whatever. You install some video game and next thing you know you've got some malware exfiltrating private information, taking screenshots, scanning your RAM and disks, making an issue of your developer tools. That's unacceptable behavior, the reason for it is irrelevant.
The games themselves? Yeah. But nobody "explicitly invited" in a bunch of invasive anticheat nonsense. That stuff is a nuisance at best, just yet another annoying thing you have to install before you can enjoy the thing you actually paid money for.
Well, no. Anti-cheat exists to keep cheaters from ruining the game. If I paid to enjoy a multiplayer game, and cheaters keep me from enjoying it, then anti-cheat is a requirement to enjoying the game I paid for. It's fine if you don't think it's worth the trade-off, but it does serve a real purpose to make gaming better for players.
They don't prevent cheating, they just make it harder. Cheat developers are still gonna bypass it, after all it is their business. And even if they did prevent cheating, it wouldn't be justifiable because the software is so invasive it can be classified as malware.
It's just like DRM. Like copying, cheating simply cannot be prevented if we are in control of the machine. This technological arms race can only end in one of two ways. Either the corporations manage to own our computers or they lose. Neither result is particularly great but I know which one I'm willing to accept.
> They don't prevent cheating, they just make it harder.
TBF; it's net the same thing. People just need it to be hard enough that it (generally) doesn't ruin your game.
You're making the same logical argument people have made against wearing (and then mandating) seat belts, and in more recent times vaccines. It's a sad slope that's led to me being told over Christmas dinner that murder being illegal is stupid because people still kill. He was serious. Boggles the mind.
Seat belts and vaccines are life saving items. They are approximately a trillion times more important than video games are and ever will be. They do not even belong in the same sentence.
Even those important life saving items have contraindications. They are well studied. We know their benefits. We know their risks. We know how to balance the two. Professionals do it every day. Most people voluntarily choose to use these items after the facts are explained. Forgoing their use doesn't stop your life either.
We know virtually nothing about anticheat systems. Their benefits, if any, are likely exaggerated to increase profits. Their costs and risks are "explained" in some annoying legalese document that pretty much nobody reads. You're forced to accept this nonsense. You can't play the game otherwise, might as well click next.
Their function is to take over your computer in order to control and limit what you can do with it. That's an affront to the user. Accepting this costs users part of their dignity. We can only hope that they will have lots of fun with their game afterwards. Otherwise their sacrifice will have been for nothing.
I don't see how public servers and matchmaking are an issue. The public servers that are known to tolerate cheaters are themselves just going to get a bad reputation.
The issue is the kind of game that doesn't allow you to host public servers, and which instead has an automatching system with an undisclosed algorithm.
And since this also tends to be the kind of game that has DRM, doesn't even allow offline/private servers (is online only), and worse, engages into microtransactions and gambling, the sooner these games are made illegal, the better off the society will be.
I wonder what changed in the last couple of decades. Why did this become acceptable? Why did people start defending corporations that do stuff like this? On Hacker News of all places?
Why are you talking about "personal preferences"? These corporations are shipping literal rootkits to people.
> These corporations are shipping literal rootkits to people.
Same applies to products such as CrowdStrike and similar stuff which in my opinion might be even worse (Anticheat rootkits at least provide some real value.. I’m not really an expert in corporate IT so I might be wrong).
In both cases their users perceive that this software provides some direct or indirect value to them.
Is it so hard to believe that some people might value the opportunity to play online games with less cheaters than retaining the control of their PCs?
Would it be better if same software was running on strictly controlled devices like game consoles? If so what if some people treat their PCs effectively as mainly specialized gaming devices?
> start defending corporations
Let’s not get silly.. what makes you think I’m doing that? I’m merely pointing out that the world is not necessarily black and white and there is some space for nuance.
You're elevating games to the level of security software. Isn't it an issue that a game is literally policing your entire system? If you had any passwords, or literally anything else, they can take it. This is about as far as a "trade off" can go.
> Is it so hard to believe that some people might value the opportunity to play online games with less cheaters than retaining the control of their PCs?
Hard to believe? Absolutely.
This issue is just like privacy. It's one of those important issues where people not only refuse to care but actually look down on you as a loony if you do. They will suddenly start caring a lot when the corporations are fully entrenched and start exploiting them for profit.
The problem is by that point there will be nothing they can do about it. They gave up control of the machines to play games. They will not be able to do a thing when the machines start extracting profit out of them. They are no longer in control.
> Would it be better if same software was running on strictly controlled devices like game consoles?
For some interpretations of "better". Consoles are a huge waste. They are all perfectly good computers which could do so much more. At least dedicated gaming machines at least keep the damage contained. I said this in my original comment.
> If so what if some people treat their PCs effectively as mainly specialized gaming devices?
I have no trouble believing Windows users think that way. If you use Windows, it's because you do not care.
I seriously doubt someone who cared enough about computers to install and learn Linux will enjoy watching his omnipotent general purpose system get turned into a glorified gaming appliance just because corporations aren't happy about the fact he could theoretically use the system's immense power against them.
> Let’s not get silly.. what makes you think I’m doing that?
The words "moral right" gave me that impression.
What gives these corporations the moral right to tell me what I can or can't do on my computer? The whole idea is comical. If I want to cheat, I will cheat. They can only hope that I choose not to. That's a truth they just need to accept. If they won't we'll make them accept it.
> Because we can't allow corporations to install rootkits and malware into people's machines?
TBF - this is You dictating what tradeoffs others are able/willing to make in their off time. I grew up playing competitive FPS; and still have a 'gaming rig' for downtime. I would looove a better state-of-the-world; and am picky about what I will play (I won't run Rivals as an example as it requires Administrator; simply won't trust the developer that much)
> These corporations are shipping literal rootkits to people
i agree most/all kernel level anti-cheats are garbage - but I also dislike strict "We can't allow..." overarching statements also. A world I dread is one where Consoles are our only legitimate home gaming option.
> A world I dread is one where Consoles are our only legitimate home gaming option.
Then you should agree with me.
A computer you don't fully own and control is nothing but a glorified game console appliance.
Don't you see? That's what they are trying to turn our computers into with their rootkit nonsense. They want to own our computers. Turn them into consoles, appliances fully controlled by them.
It's 2025. The only difference between a console and a PC is the console refuses to run software not signed by the manufacturer. It only runs software they approve of. They literally have the keys to the machine, they're just letting us get some limited use out of it, on their terms of course.
That's what they would reduce our PCs to. Glorified appliances that refuse to do what we want. What if you want to cheat at video games? Computer says no. Because the corporation said so.
Averting that world is my objective. It's the reason why I wrote all these comments. The computer must say yes at all times.
> I don't care enough about most games to even consider it
Well yes, but millions of people feel otherwise.
Why do you think that game developers have some nefarious reasons for this and want to usurp your computer? To what ends?
I mean sure the current approach is flawed in many ways however without it many multiplayer games couldn’t really exist in their current form i.e. public servers, matchmaking etc. would become near impossible since the experience for most users would become extremely unenjoyable.
> pirates and cheaters get none of that
True in regards to single player games but I’m not sure how do you think this would work for multiplayer games? How can cheaters bypass the anticheat root kits and still play onlie?
> Why do you think that game developers have some nefarious reasons for this and want to usurp your computer?
Because that is what they do. They think we are all potential cheaters who need to be preemptively stopped and controlled lest we crack their games open. They feel absolutely justified in doing whatever it takes to "ensure" their precious games aren't "tampered with". There are no limits they wouldn't cross.
It's just what I've come to expect from the copyright industry as a whole. Our computers already come pwned straight off the factory just to appease "content creators". We really don't need game companies making the situation even worse.
> To what ends?
It doesn't matter. The result is we have to install their rootkits to play games we paid for. There are no excuses for that.
> many multiplayer games couldn’t really exist in their current form
Not a big deal. Maintaining control over our machines is more important. If that's the price I'll pay it gladly.
> How can cheaters bypass the anticheat root kits and still play onlie?
You'd have to ask them. I'm far from an expert on the subject. I just know that whatever it is that they do no doubt leads to their customers having to put up with a lot less game company malware than they would have needed to otherwise.
Unfortunately, you're not going to change any minds here. I've tried and failed to take this principled stand here, too. People (especially gamers) are willing to excuse anything game companies do as long as they at least say it's in service of "preventing cheating."
These rootkits are now considered the cost of admission to playing games, because gamers won't fight the practice, and they hate cheaters so much they are willing to accept anything.
Also consider: HN is full of software developers. If it's a choice between "What Software Developers Want To Do To Your Computer" and "What Users Want To Stop Them From Doing," HN commenters tend to be strongly on the side of the developers.
As a Mac user, I've only been able to watch the Proton improvements from the sidelines. I'm happy to see them but can't make use of them.
On the other hand, GeForce Now is what let me get rid of Windows and my gaming desktop altogether. For the supported games, it's a truly superb experience, launching into max graphics with a single click. I don't have to install or upgrade anything (patches or drivers) or worry about hardware obsolescence. It's insanely powerful (RTX 4080 equivalent), has no local heat or noise, and barely sips battery life (compute is all in the cloud).
Completely changed the way I game. And this is as someone who grew up on BBS door games and configuring sound blaster and vmem in config.sys. GFN is so so nice and much better than dealing the nightmare that is modern Windows. And a lot easier than managing Proton and WINE too. Nothing beats it for sheer ease of use when I just want to game for a few hours without headaches.
> As a Mac user, I've only been able to watch the Proton improvements from the sidelines. I'm happy to see them but can't make use of them.
We experimented with macOS support prior to launching Proton, but Apple had spent the previous decade repeatedly kicking Valve and game developers in the nuts[1], which meant no one on the team had any particular passion for it. Between Apple's hostility & unreliability, and the small market share, we decided it wasn't a good use of time, so dropped the idea before launch.
You may know this, but CodeWeavers integrates most improvements to Proton into upstream Wine and also into their CrossOver product. So if you use CrossOver, you actually are getting many of the same improvements that are going into Proton.
[1] Garbage OpenGL support; killing 32-bit support, which killed a huge chunk of users' Steam libraries; no Vulkan support.
100% this is Apple's fault. They never took gaming seriously. I'd hoped that would change with the M series integrated GPUs, but that hasn't been the case lately, with only a tiny number of titles launching with Apple Silicon support. That's on Apple, not anybody else.
For what it's worth, I did buy and occasionally use Crossover (thank you!), but only when the game isn't supported on GeForce Now.
My M2 Max, even at its best (as in Baldur's Gate 3 running native Apple Silicon code), is still no match for a 4080... not even close. Crossover works well for simple indie games, but AAA games often have more demanding requirements. The extraordinary performance of DLSS (Nvidia's AI upsampling and frame interpolation algorithm) alone makes non-Nvidia GPUs less viable these days. And that's just the performance side.
Then, Crossover's UX is a whole other issue. Crossover's Steam takes forever to launch every time (I'm not really sure why this is; never bothered to really look into it). It's never clear to me which proper combination of D3DMetal/DXVK/Esync/Msync to use (I still don't even know what the "sync modes" mean). Some games only work with a certain version of Apple's GPT (for others: Game Porting Toolkit, not AI) manually installed, or requiring the bleeding-edge preview version of Crossover, etc. The idea of user-managed "bottles" and disks is a lot more complicated than GFN's model of individually vendor-managed sandboxed/containerized games, preconfigured to work right the first time and every time. That's the kind of arcade/console like experience I want these days since it's zero fuss. (But it often does preclude mod and trainer support, as a tradeoff.)
Overall... I'm grateful Crossover exists. It's easier to use than Whisky, and Codeweavers contributes a lot of code back upstream. Again, thank you. There are some games I wouldn't be able to play at all otherwise.
But most of the time these days, as a working man and not a teenager anymore, I have limited time to spend on gaming. GFN lets me just click a button and play without fuss, vs all the tinkering required of virtualized & emulated games. It's the difference between "wait a few seconds and I can play at max graphics" and "if I tinker with this for a couple hours, it might eventually launch and maybe I can squeeze 30 fps out of it on low-medium".
Steve Jobs reportedly[1] never really liked computer games, and didn't really care about them being on Macintosh. It wouldn't be surprising if this streak still exists in Apple culture, even though iOS became quite the gaming powerhouse despite Apple's lack of interest in the genre.
Maybe it's because I'm in a shitty location (Spain), but these gaming streaming services never felt good enough for me. I've tried a bunch of them (including GeForce Now and more recently, the PlayStation streaming thingy) and they all introduce too much latency + now the quality of the screen suffer from the same type of quality degradation as YouTube, which just looks fucking horrible. I'd rather play on lowest quality settings and lowest resolution than having to view that sort of compromise on image quality.
> And a lot easier than managing Proton and WINE too
I can understand wanting to avoid having to manage Wine, prefixes and all that jazz. But Steam + Proton is literally zero management. You install Steam, start it, install the game and hit "Play", the only Proton thing you notice is that it download and installs it before the actual game runs. Otherwise there is nothing you have to do as a user.
Amazon has started pushing their version, which I think is called Luna. I haven't tried it, but if they run an instance out of EU-South-2 in Spain, you might get better results.
Yeah, it's unfortunately only viable if you're near one of their data centers – and even then, some of their international third-party partners have crappy graphics cards and networks. In the US, though, it is an amazing experience, more like streaming in 4K (which it can do) with minimal lag. Even first-person shooters are perfectly playable, as long as you're not trying to go pro. No compression artifacts or visible degradation at all for me.
> But Steam + Proton is literally zero management.
Absolutely. I had a Steam Deck for a few weeks* and that experience was amazing. Valve did a really really good job there. Unfortunately that's just not how it is in the Mac world :( We have Whisky and Crossover, which are much much harder to use.
(* The Steam Deck is a great piece of kit. I eventually sold it only because I already had a Logitech GCloud, https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/cloud-gaming/cloud-..., which does the same thing except streamed from GFN and with a bigger/better display than the Deck.)
Stadia worked really well for me (midwest US), but the other services haven't been as reliable. Back on hardware for me. SteamDeck is really nice at least.
Exactly! I've had symmetric fiber in countless of apartments in Barcelona, with latency to mainstream sites down to something like 2ms at the lowest. But the game companies who do streaming don't seem to cater to Spain (or Barcelona) at all since the latency always been horrible regardless.
Have you tried any of them and seen if the latency is shit or not?
Obviously it’s not initially remotely a plug and play solution but if you install Steam under Game Porting Toolkit you actually can take advantage of Proton and its improvements much of the time, and after the initial setup there’s very little further tinkering needed.
There is a lot of inter-game variability, unfortunately. (I'm a regular tester and contributor to the Crossover compatibility database: https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility)
Some games, especially simple indie titles, run flawlessly. Others won't launch at all. Most mainstream AAA titles launch but with severe lag and/or graphical anomalies. It's a far cry from native, Proton on Linux, or GeForce Now. I wouldn't recommend it except as a last resort.
The problem with cloud gaming is that isn't available in all countries and it depends a lot on your ISP, so the experience may vary for different people.
This is amazing news. I wonder if this means we’re going to see a TV/home console with Steam OS soon.
I am currently borrowing a friend’s Steam Deck to try it out. It’s absolutely amazing, particularly around starting and stopping gaming sessions.
The only thing holding be back from buying it is that the processing power is a couple of years outdated at this point. It still works fine for older AAA games (or newer lighter games), but it can’t keep up with new AAA.
Having the option of newer hardware with the Steam OS experience is amazing!
Notably the Steam Machines didn't have any equivalent to Proton, they could only run native Linux games out of the box. Needless to say that didn't work out.
Proton is a wrapped/enhanced version of Wine, which has been a thing forever. A large chunk of the Steam library worked perfectly fine on Linux before Proton.
>A large chunk of the Steam library worked perfectly fine on Linux before Proton.
Source? My recollection was that it didn't. Wine had awful direct x translation, I'm not sure if it could do dx11 at all when the steam machine came out. DXVK is a proton project and without it few games could actually run at all.
That's not fair. Vulkan didn't exist when the original Steam Machines launched. Wine's Direct3D implementation also had different goals than the DXVK project, such as supporting macOS, older hardware, and non-gaming DirectX uses.
... for modest values of "fine". Compatibility, stability and performance have improved immensely the last couple of years, for a large part thanks to Valve!
Yeah, WINE may have been around forever but its development was massively accelerated by Valve dumping truckloads of money on CodeWeavers to have them work on fixing games full-time. Plus neither of the two most popular anti-cheat solutions worked in WINE at all until Valve lobbied them to support it.
I think the performance thing isn't that big of a deal with the deck yet.. gaming at 720p 30 or 40 fps still works quite well on the device even for recent AAA titles ... You can always install Steam OS clones on Lenovo Legion Go/Asus rog ally etc.. and get a decent experience.
Where it is slightly annoying is the anti cheat/the recent Sony shenanigans about their overlay not running in Linux/such issues.
But with such huge PC gaming library...i don't think I'll run out of new games to try on the deck any time soon...
> Seems like the hardware upgrade for the Steamdeck will be very soon
I doubt it, the Lenovo Steam-OS option is utilizing Ryzen R2 Go, which has the same RNDA architecture as Valve's handheld and pretty similar (though slightly better) specs.
There's newer architectures but they chose the same as OG Steam deck for... compatibility? Ease of OS support? Something else? I doubt Vavle would help Lenovo with support on a device they'd shortly eclipse with better specs.
Not really the same plug and play experience as a Steam Deck offers though.
I personally wish that Framework works with Valve to release a version of Steam OS for their motherboards, so one can retrofit an old Framework laptop motherboard as a TV console.
Well, yes, you need to know how to boot up an installer and go through a typical Linux distribution installation process. After it first boots though, it can be handled solely via the Steam UI.
I just discovered Bazzite and am excited to try it. Just built a PC for my kid and Windows hates it. Can’t run for 10 minutes without a blue screen. I’d wanted to try an Atomic Desktop originally but thought the gaming support was too weak. Hoping Bazzite gives me stability and the gaming ecosystem…
I have a steam deck. Its incredibly easy to switch from game mode to “desktop mode” and get a full blown, portable linux device! Its fucking incredible.
Gaming has been mostly good. You can trust the steam verification badge. Some games just won’t work but most do.
Let me expand on that - plug your deck in a laptop docking station connected to your lan, monitor setup, keyboard and mouse and you have a the smooth desktop experience of a not at all shabby laptop! It's amazing!
Lately I've taken to using an Arch btw install on an SD card for testing GPU compute stuff on it. It's so smooth...
Not enough vram for blender rendering it seems at least for now...
> plug your deck in a laptop docking station connected to your lan, monitor setup, keyboard and mouse and you have a the smooth desktop experience of a not at all shabby laptop! It's amazing
Just to be clear, this is not even needed, you can use the desktop mode straight up on the Steam Deck without any added accessories, terminal and everything included. Dope for quick maintenance without having to hook it up to anything. Or, if you happen to have a USB-based WiFi antenna with the right chipset, a portable aircrack-ng device :)
> Not enough vram for blender rendering it seems at least for now...
Doesn't Steam Deck have unified memory and 16GB available? I think it's more of a implementation issue than the amount of VRAM it could theoretically use.
I think it's pretty hard to find a laptop with similar performance characteristics, build quality, repairability and firmware support at the steam deck price point. For one.
On the other hand portability is also great, and so is the additional software customization on top. Having an easy slider for custom TDP is a great feature.
Not to mention that by purchasing a Steam Deck, you are helping Valve financially support many opensource projects. Valve invests in the Linux kernel, Proton (and by extension Wine), various KDE software, the Fex emulator for gaming on ARM systems, and more.
> I think it's pretty hard to find a laptop with similar performance characteristics, build quality, repairability and firmware support at the steam deck price point.
On the other hand, it's much easier to find any laptop at all than the Steam Deck... because the Steam Deck is not yet available in my country, while there are plenty of laptops from many different brands (Dell, Lenovo, Positivo, even Apple) at all price points.
True, but I prefer to optimize my laptop choice for work, not gaming. My point was that the deck does not limit you by its form-factor in any way should you plug it to a display, mouse and keyboard.
Have you tried Samsung DeX? I find it pretty amazing, you connect your Android smartphone to a docking station, and you have a usable Desktop OS. The only thing holding it back from becoming a full workhorse for eg document editing imho is that most apps will only give you the - substantially nerfed - mobile version.
You don't need to wait for Valve to get this experience today. The HTPC build of Bazzite [1] brings an experience identical to SteamOS to all computers with an AMD or Intel GPU from the past 8 years or so.
It works amazingly well and I can't imagine going back to Windows for a PC that is built only for video games. I use it on my "Gaming HTPC" (Ryzen 3600, Radeon RX6600, Fractal Design Node 202) and it brings a great console experience to my TV, with access to my PC game library, without being locked into a console ecoystem, and without the enormous cruft and user hostility that Windows has you manage these days.
I'm a pretty casual and patient gamer, and for that use case this Steam machine experience is unmatched - despite being built on desktop Linux, it works out of the box and requires zero manual maintenance. For dedicated gaming boxes this Linux user experience is significantly better and easier to use than Windows - we're truly living in the future.
[2]: It's built on top of Fedora and Universal Blue, so under the hood it's different from SteamOS which is built on a custom immutable version of Arch Linux. However, that implementation detail is actually almost totally irrelevant if you want to play games since all software is managed by Steam and Flatpak on both systems.
I have both a Steam Deck and a (Windows) gaming PC.
While the "happy path" in SteamOS is truly amazing, there are dark corners where it falls down. Third party launchers (like EA's garbage) are extremely janky. Hardware support in Linux/SteamOS is questionable for exotic peripherals (I have a TrackIR which never worked right, a MS XBox USB controller dongle that requires third party kernel modules, and a HP Reverb G2 which has only preliminary support through third party software). And some types of multiplayer anti-cheat are completely unavailable.
Some of this is solvable, some probably isn't. But there's a reason I still keep Windows on the gaming PC - sadly.
I've been wondering what the limiting factors are for migrating gamers and I think the larger software ecosystem and cumulative effect of paper-cut issues will cause people to bounce off.
Linux and running games under steam/wine/proton is great in the broad strokes, but users will have built up their own collection of tools or ways of doing things they will seek out equivalents for and judge the linux experience as a whole on whether they can do that. Many of the windows applications are very mature compared to linux because that's the ecosystem and audience its had for decades, there's nothing touching Foobar2000 for example (and the UI glitches in wine). Now add in all the other things gamers regularly expect to do, what's needed to accomplish them and how well they do it, overlays, screen recording, using modding tools, etc.
It also strikes me with the win10 end of life there's going to be a huge variety of hardware configurations people want to 'just work', in terms of age and which model someone chose in a particular generation. For example support for fan control on my Z270 board doesn't exist, presumably because of the way ASUS made that model.
I can appreciate Valve and their direct partners picking their battles on what to support as it's a huge gauntlet to pick up, but I really doubt the needle is going to move large distances and saying "bye bye windows gaming"
If you are demanding or particular about your gaming experience, then Linux isn't there yet. Compatibility with the very latest AAA titles can sometimes trail behind Windows, anticheat for competitive multiplayer often blocks out Linux compatibility, and you need to adapt to different tools for customizing and surrounding your gaming experience if you're so inclined.
What I'm highlighting if you just want to sit down to play some damn games already in your library, especially on a dedicated "console" like a handheld or HTPC, then the Linux experience is superior to Windows. And I expect that there's a sizable audience for that.
> cumulative effect of paper-cut issues will cause people to bounce off
I disagree, PC gaming has always been rife with papercuts, especially relative to console gaming.
The real moat that Windows has is that anonymous-matchmade competitive multiplayer games are decreasingly going to want to run on hardware that supports user freedom. Which for me personally is fine, because I find anonymous-matchmade competitive multiplayer games to be dogwater that I ain't missing, but for a lot of people that's a non-starter.
(Disclaimer: proud owner of a Steam Deck which has also served double duty as my desktop machine while I wait for a replacement power supply for my laptop.)
I tried this a while back, when going 6700 XT HDMI 2.1 to LG Oled C2 HDMI 2.1 with proper cable i could not get RGB 444 with 'correct' colordepth in Bazzite (or any distro)
Windows 10 or 11 does not have this problem. Apparently it's an issue with the HDMI board and proprietary drivers for linux.
They mean "cloud native" in the sense that it adopts atomic system updates and containerized application installs, which has been common in "the cloud" for years but is much less commonplace in personal Linux installations. Working in this way is a large part of why Bazzite "just works". It is also actually exactly how SteamOS works (with some implementation differences under the hood), so SteamOS is "cloud native" in the same sense.
I do think this marketing is unnecessarily confusing. The dayjob of the original master mind behind Bazzite and Universal Blue is working with cloud systems IIUC, so they find it an important thing to highlight.
The full SteamOS experience is pretty tied up in Linux' open source graphics stack, moreso than regular Linux desktop environments because Valve built it for high performance on the Steam Deck's AMD GPU. Nvidia's proprietary driver has traditionally done its own thing and has been quite incompatible with things targeting the open source stack. So it's hard to replicate the Steam Deck experience on Nvidia, no matter the distro.
That said, over recent years Nvidia has made some efforts to improve compatibility. Just a few days ago Bazzite announced a Steam Deck beta image for Turing and later Nvidia cards [1]. It's too early to run though if you want the seamless experience you get on Intel and AMD, and progress mostly depends on Nvidia and Valve, but I hope they get there.
There is no bye to Windows gaming, because the casual PC gamer will still use Windows and won’t bother with SteamOS, and rightfully so, because why bother? If you can’t handle Windows, then certainly you won’t be able to live with Linux as your main system.
Windows just works for gaming and all connected devices. SteamOS maybe works well for dedicated handhelds, but I can’t imagine a casual user bothering with Linux and wondering why the newly bought xyz Bluetooth device doesn’t work on it.
This whole “Windows just works” mantra gets less and less true with every passing day. The number of times I have to fight tooth and nail to stop updates, uninstall edge, nuke bloatware shit installs from orbit, or hell just get my audio to go out the correct output device is astronomical.
Windows is no walk in the park. And Linux is easy to use these days.
So… sure maybe this is still sorta true. But we’re long past the days of needing to be a hacker to use a Linux OS and it’s only getting better, while Windows is only getting worse.
I agree with you partially, but a casual user just doesn’t care or bother. They don’t uninstall bloatware; in fact, I’m pretty sure most don’t even know what it means. Casual users don’t even bother to switch to dark mode or check if their monitor supports more than 60Hz—things like that. That’s also why Apple doesn’t focus on such details.
I’m not against Linux; for developers and servers, it’s awesome. But for casual users, I don’t see the appeal. There’s no reason to bother as long as it works—and it does. Do you genuinely think, that a user who complains that Windows is bad and doesn’t work, will be able to install Linux and be happy? First thing someone like that will do, is probably try to execute an exe file and the complain under some YouTube video about it.
I think the definition of a “casual user” has changed drastically over the last 10 years.
This very much used to be true. But most gamers (i.e. the group we’re talking about here) are more than technically savvy enough to run Linux. Most gamers have seen a terminal once or twice and know how to google the solution to common fixes.
And yes, I do believe most motivated users (those unhappy with windows) can install Linux. It’s SO easy these days requiring nothing more than a USB and an hour or two of time.
Why would anyone want to bother with a terminal just for gaming, a little bit of browsing, casually installing mods, using Photoshop, etc.? I mean, just watch the video, and this is coming from a guy who at least knows one or two things about computers.
Plus, don’t forget, Linux also has its quirks, just like Windows, only in different areas. Like not so awesome Nvidia drivers :P
... nah. I usually remove all unwanted software once and only after a fresh install, and a Windows installation lasts years without maintenance nowadays.
What exactly is such a big hassle with Windows? Sure, it’s bloated with trash, but again, it’s good and simple enough for everyone to use. Try explaining to a casual user that they can’t execute an exe file or use Photoshop or whatever on Linux without specific workarounds.
Neither of those scenarios are typical for 'casual users' of the 2020s: at work, most have Windows laptops issued to them that they can't install things onto anyway, and elsewhere they are liable to do most of their computing on a tablet or a phone. There's almost nothing an exe file could do for a casual user that couldn't be done in a browser or mobile app, and most of them understand what an operating system is and that, on some level, there are cross-compatibility issues between them that they may be able to resolve with a tool.
That’s not true—these scenarios absolutely apply to casual users, like students or hobbyists who do things like video editing or photo editing. Students, for example, often need Windows-specific software for schoolwork.
Even if we ignore Windows-specific software entirely, there are still other pain points: DRM support, HDR support, certain drivers, and even the variety of package managers and ways to install things. You know what I mean—these things are nothing special for us, but for someone who’s just casually gaming or doing some creative hobbies, being forced to use the terminal to, for example, update Nvidia drivers or find a workaround to get an unsupported game launcher to work, can be a total dealbreaker
Even something as basic as swapping out PC hardware as a gamer isn’t as seamless on Linux as it is on Windows. That’s a lot of friction for someone who just wants things to “work”. And you know I’m right because if I would be wrong with all these points, we already would have a year of Linux desktops … as it’s being said every year.
You underestimate how most people just value ease of use, familiarity and don’t care about freedom and control over a system. Most don’t want to spend their time tweaking or figuring out why something doesn’t work and that’s totally fine.
I get the impression that a load of people are preparing to jump ship once Win10's sundowned and they're faced with having to get rid of a perfectly usable computer to install Win11. I know I am, loathe as I am to move over to Linux, but Microsoft's making its own bed and continuing on its quest to alienate long-term users with 'peculiar' interface and OS changes.
That, Mac and Mobile ownership and I do have to wonder what MS's long-term strategy to avoid pissing away Windows Desktop users is, because I can't see it.
> I get the impression that a load of people are preparing to jump ship once Win10's sundowned and they're faced with having to get rid of a perfectly usable computer to install Win11.
In my opinion, what will most likely happen is the same thing that happened when Windows XP was retired: nothing at all, people just kept running the same Windows XP they had already installed. That is, people will just keep Windows 10, not caring that Microsoft does not care about it anymore. And, for them, it will work even better, since without constant updates, Windows 10 will become more stable (as in: not changing all the time, not having random automated reboots due to updates, etc).
(We might be concerned that, without software updates, the security bogeyman will catch and eat us, but most normal people don't worry about that.)
> I do have to wonder what MS's long-term strategy to avoid pissing away Windows Desktop users is, because I can't see it.
Give private users up because you can't extract money from them, but keep milking Office 365, governments and enterprises that Just Can't move away from Windows due to decades of legacy garbage.
Neat. The printer bit made me roll my eyes, though. They could not get a printer work with the desktop OS that is Windows, and after also unsuccessfully attempting to get it to work on the OS of a _hand-held_ _gaming_ device, which they just showcased as a PC-based alternative to a living room console, their conclusion is "needs some work"? I, mean what? Would anybody expect to be able to print from a PlayStation or a Switch? What would you even want to print?
Maybe it’s due to peripheral driver support? Not every device works without issues on Linux. Also maybe because of specific mods or tools which only work on Windows. Besides that, currently all the “awesome anti-cheat root kits”, are not supported by Linux.
There are a few reasons, but I agree with you that if you use only a handheld, SteamOS probably will work fine.
SteamOS is a much more streamlined console-like experience for gaming. Even things as simple as system updates is far less annoying on Linux/SteamOS than it is on Windows. This is especially important in, for example, a set-top box media PC you might want to have for your TV and you don't run every day.
And, over time, as SteamOS in its various forms becomes more and more popular, game publishers will be motivated to support it. Many already are, from Steam Deck alone. And, in a few years, it's possible that a "casual PC gamer" will actually prefer the far more plug-and-play SteamOS experience versus the Windows one (which, I, for one, highly dislike, but I understand that's a preferences thing).
I wonder if Microsoft will start offering discount Windows licenses for gaming handhelds to push back against this, like how they used to offer dirt cheap licenses for netbooks when they were popular.
Even if it's free, the experience of using windows 11 as a portable gaming device is awful. Microsoft must create a gaming focused version of windows for this kind of devices. There are rumors of an "xbox OS", but who knows.
This makes me hopeful that more online games will be pushed to supporting Linux. Most recently it has been very surprising to find out that Marvel Rivals is making sure they support Linux gamers. Unfortunately there's still a lot of high profile games that won't run on Linux, the most notable examples for me being League of Legends and Fortnite. These games have huge communities, and their games are already available on other platforms, so it's not like they're designed with platform exclusivity in mind. Honestly, Linux gaming has been an outstandingly positive experience for me.
Just for those who don't game on Linux: Proton allows a bunch of games to run perfectly on Linux already. The main blocker for games like League of Legends or competitive shooters is the anti-cheat. Most anti-cheats (like Vanguard) run in the Windows kernel so you can't just plop it onto Linux easily.
I remember a number of years back when Steam started Proton thing, it didn't look very promising. Since then it evolved into an actual OS, it would be amazing if Valve could pull this off and expand Linux gaming into mainstream devices and maybe even PCs.
SteamOS is a Linux distro that originally came out in 2013. Proton is a custom version of Wine that came out later -- Proton has some added features for integration with Steam, but Wine has been around and has been working well for Windows gaming on Linux for decades.
SteamOS today bears no resemblance to the version put out in 2013. It's literally based on a different distribution, and lots of things have been customized since then.
Funnily enough Valve tried to make Steam OS happen before Proton was a thing, for some reason they just expected game developers to port their games to Linux on their own dime. Thankfully they realized that was never going to happen at scale, so Proton was born instead.
> Funnily enough Valve tried to make Steam OS happen before Proton was a thing, for some reason they just expected games developers to port their games to Linux on their own dime.
Proton is just a fork of Wine. Wine had already been around for decades, and there were other commercially-supported versions of Wine, like Cedega, long before Proton was around.
On top of that, the increasing dominance of off-the-shelf game engines was already making it trivial to "port" games to Linux -- in Unity, for example, it's often just a few extra mouse clicks to produce a Linux build in parallel to your Windows build. So lots of game developers did start releasing native Linux versions, and continue to do so.
Yes WINE already existed, but SteamOS v1 didn't have it integrated as a core feature like it does today. It was very much intended to only run native Linux titles. WINE also wasn't nearly as seamless for gaming until Valve threw their weight and money behind polishing it, which came after the original SteamOS flopped.
If the SteamOS version of the portable gaming handhelds start to outsell the Windows variants because of the lower price, Microsoft will probably offer to subsidize the cost of the Windows 11 license in the handhelds to bring their cost to parity with the SteamOS devices, in exchange for a promise from the manufacturer that the hardware line will not include a SteamOS offering.
> A promised beta version of SteamOS will be released publicly before May, Valve said, "which should improve the experience on other devices, and users can download and test this themselves. And of course we'll continue adding support and improving the experience with future releases."
so if you want this to build a custom SteamOS machine, presumably May it is!
People have successfully installed SteamOS on their own hardware using the Steam deck rescue/reinstall image that you can download from Valve. So if you're up for a bit of hacking you can build it today.
Wasn't SteamOS around long before the Steam Deck? I remember Valve releasing their custom Linux distro back when they were promoting the "Steam Machine" concept.
Indeed, and as a person who always wanted to game on my Linux boxes, it wasn't (still isn't) nearly as good of an experience as Proton, even though Proton is just Wine+patches+other goodies.
> you had to run a separate win32 Steam instance under wine.
If I remember my trying days during that period, all the Steam games you ran that way (unless hacked around) also shared the same Wine prefix, with all the fun stuff that comes with...
What's funny is that in Linus' mind "saving Linux desktop" meant that Valve would release a single statically linked binary of a game for Linux and distro maintainers would have no choice but to support that binary, thus ending fragmentation in the ecosystem. Steam was trying exactly that when Linus made the comment, but failed to get any traction (see the first iteration of SteamOS/Steam Machines).
Today gaming on Linux is feasible because of Proton, a compatibility layer for Windows binaries. Meanwhile the app distribution and fragmentation problem on Linux is as bad or worse than it was a decade ago. If you asked Linus whether Linux was "saved" by Proton, I bet he would have a very different opinion than everyone here.
I've always loved gaming and one thing that never sat well with me was that gaming's home was unofficially on a proprietary OS. It always made more sense to me (particularly from a software preservation standpoint) that the home of gaming should be on an open-source OS. And truth be told, I have in fact encountered a few games now that will no longer run on Windows but will still work great on Wine/Proton. I'm sure there will be more of those over time.
"way WAY bigger" is a major overstatement. But even if that were true, SteamOS can handle lots of other non-steam storefronts.
For example, I recently went and played some World of Warcraft for old times sake with some friends on Linux. All I had to do was open Lutris which is available through a Flatpak on the SteamOS discovery tool, and then from Lutris you install the Blizzard Launcher. Opening the Blizzard launcher lets one install and play any of their games.
Steam can install and run the blizzard launcher. Add the blizzard-setup.exe using "add a non-steam game to my library". Set the compatibility mode to Proton. On first run, it will launch the blizzard client installation. The next runs will just open the launcher.
I was able to play Overwatch on an AMD ubuntu laptop flawlessly.
I doubt that. Looking at a random list of most popular PC games, a lot of the top ones aren't on Steam (Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, League of Legends, Valorant, Genshin Impact, Rocket League).
Older games are usually easier to run on newer versions of linux than windows, in my anecdotal experience. Not sure about cracked AAA titles, I guess that's a bigger part of the "illegal" stuff.
Yeah, that's true. The other week I tried to get Svea Rike II (1998) to run on my desktop. Tried everything with Windows 11 since I thought it would be easier but nope, nothing worked, couldn't even get past the installation. Switching to trying it on Arch with Wine and boom, five minutes later I was up and running.
SteamOS is an immutable Linux distro that is designed designed to be usable without a keyboard / mouse. By default, it boots you into something that's like an optimized version of Steam's Big Picture mode (but with less compositor / desktop environment overhead).
From this interface you can launch games, modify all your settings, pull up performance metrics, change refresh rate, change your CPU / GPU TDP, enable FSR or other scaling methods, etc. all using just a controller with no assumptions about you having a keyboard / mouse handy.
You *can* launch into a regular desktop environment optimized for keyboard and mouse whenever you need to do certain things on it, but the main focus and value add of SteamOS is the controller friendly interface, and lightweight, resource optimized environment.
By default it uses a different UI and dedicated "window manager" (gamescope), it is not just Big Picture. But you can always switch to a traditional desktop.
By far the biggest difference is that SteamOS is an immutable OS. As far as I understand, any additional package (outside of flatpacks) you install will wiped out on an OS update. So everything is fine if what you need is packaged as a flatpack, otherwise you have to hack around.
Mainly packaging and bundling everything together in one drop-in package for every day users to get access to. I've run Linux for 20+ years now, and gotten steam games working a few times over that period of time. Not hard, not impossible, but is probably more than the average Windows user wants to figure out.
SteamOS is really about bringing that final experience to the most number of people, and I am really supportive of their efforts!
Mostly there isn't any difference. I run steam just fine in Mint, it works about as well as my Steam deck, which is to say very well. I guess there is some optimisation and default settings more aligned to the purpose on Steam OS.
That's basically it, just easier. SteamOS is like Ubuntu, comes with bunch of stuff integrated and tested together for a easier end-user experience, but you could build your own Ubuntu, starting with a base Debian install. Same with SteamOS with Arch (or Manjaro which I think is what they actually use?)
Pretty much just the UI. SteamOS is better suited for handhelds and TV screens and wherever you don't want a full desktop experience, just a game launcher.
The other day I flipped a switch somewhere in Steam on Linux and games previously marked as "Available for Windows" suddenly started installing and, more importantly, working.
I would love for Linux gaming to take off and displace Windows. The current direction is very promising, but there has been roadblocks. Notably, Respawn decided to forbid Linux users last year[0].
Linux gaming became pretty good on PC too. Steam and Proton was a significant driver here as well, and we now have completely open-source Steam Proton-like solution too, the Heroic Launcher. Can highly recommend, really easy to set up, and adding a Windows game to it is literally just a few clicks. Same with trying different Proton or Wine packages, you just change the package, and try running it, same as Steam.
I have a living room PC I use for couch gaming. I'm waiting for SteamOS to be compatible with it! (nvidia gpu) I'll 100% install SteamOS on there ASAP.
Linux gaming is great. Running Bazzite myself, but for proper support you should run full AMD (CPU and GPU). Nvidia drivers seem to be a pain in the arse.
Microsoft lost interest in Windows. It doesn’t care what windows users want, it just wants to wring every dime out of it with crap ware and artificial restrictions on hardware so you can’t run it in your perfectly capable old machines.
It’s time for better options on the Intel platform.
I have been using https://cachyos.org/ with the "Handheld" build with great success for the last 3 months. Best of both worlds, Arch Linux for work and Steam for gaming (as long as the game is Steam Deck compatible).
Well, if someone hasn't left Windows for Linux because of Lightroom even though Darktable exists there, then I doubt they're going to leave Windows for SteamOS because Darktable.
(Darktable is great, but network effects and integrations keep people in Lightroom; stuff like youtube videos, uploader plugins to gallery sites, presets, education and shared knowledge among photographers.)
Does anyone know if titles like FIFA/FC25 work seamlessly on linux devices with proton / whatever the best gaming software is? I remember Wine having a lot of trouble with past FIFA titles.
FIFA22 works well for some values of well: when the EA launcher is not acting up, which happens often, you might still need to set some flags in the config file, which sometimes get reverted.
It is true that if you manage to start it at all, it works completely fine.
I mean, if they add a code editor, terminal, and browser to steam, that should be it (at least for me). I guess I could just use a cloud IDE.
There really is absolutely nothing about Windows I use other than clicking games on Steam.
Gamers keep Windows relevant and fresh. Once we’re gone, it really will be a legacy OS that people still use because their printer won’t work with shit else.
It already has a code editor, terminal and browser. You just boot into the desktop mode and they're all there already (and you can install new ones if you don't like the preinstalled ones). It's a full KDE Plasma desktop environment. Plug in a keyboard, mouse and monitor and stash the SteamDeck under your desk and nobody would even know.
You can even register these as 'non-steam-games' to your Steam install and then you can open them from the regular non-desktop interface. I do this with Discord and Firefox.
Interesting. How does it handle window management because that’s pretty much the main mechanical workflow of the developer. We are simply typing and alt-tabbing to see the output.
I always theorized that what keeps Wondows relevant is mainly games and Office. It's what keep people stuck there.
With gaming quickly moving to Linux, especially with support of Valve, I wonder if there is an opportunity to disrupt Office. While Libre Office suffice for my needs, I understand that it may lack for more professional usage.
There is built-in support for some reshade functionality in SteamOS's gamescope. But by how adamant you are, I'm sure you already knew about it, and it's shortcomings.
For others, the built in support is enough if you'd like to apply some retro shading "filters" to a game or two you play. I really enjoy this VHS effect for games like The Messenger and Slipstream https://github.com/safijari/Reshadeck/blob/main/defaults/sha...
This comes from an old Red Hat Linux advert, likely way back to the late 1990s. At the end of the advert it says "you are here" which shows an old-style plane (before commercial) about to take off. Point is its just a matter of time it leaves the ground and "about to win"
Love or hate GNU/Linux, but it has been extremely successful and while not a winner in the desktop field - it has on servers!
Many people would never believe Linux getting the popularity it deserves. Of course things are changing - though slowly. Here we have Linux getting the love it needs as a serious gaming system anf Microsoft making some poor decision in the last couple of years especially with Windows.
Still a long way to go, especially breaking into the corporate world. Imagine - we could be seeing business laptops/desktops slowing gaining in Linux rather than Windows. That is not going to be easy. Again, it is not about Linux -- but the SOFTWARE. If the Office-space software and tools get more love in the Linux world, Microsoft start to focus away from their Windows platform and be purely about Software/Azure focus.
Just yesterday the news was Nvidia's personal AI supercomputer (on Linux). Today the news is about gaming and SteamOS. The "cloud" is already for decades overwhelmingly Linux. There are remarkable devices (pun) [1] based on Linux. Whether for fun or serious work, if we connect the dots the future is Linux, or at least Linux-like.
Yes, it is a painfully slow journey. People acting as individuals or in organizations have enormous inertia (which is not totally a bad thing- upgrading a Linux desktop is still a dance at the precipice). But the real cause is mostly the extreme centralization and suppression of competition in the broader tech space. This has not helped the adoption of mass-market oriented devices based on Linux. But slowly the wheels of computing history are turning...
To the degree the phrase "a supercomputer in your pocket" stops being an empty marketing term and reflects real empowerment of users I would expect Linux to get ever more exposed to mass markets. But this development is predicated on non-technical users somehow becoming aware and valuing the agency and empowerment that a FOSS personal computing environment affords them.
These days the smartphone is the (very) Personal Computer for a lot of people.
Remember how Android is technically Linux ?
The risk here is for SteamOS to go the Android way...
but I have more faith in today's Valve than in Google of a ~decade ago.
At least for now, while Valve is still a private company and Gabe Newell is still leading it and still seems to be in good health and sound mind.
Sadly, this will probably only last for a couple of decades at best, but hopefully this is all the time that Linux (and libre software in general) needs.
FYI that quote originates neither from Red Hat, nor from Gandhi (the usual misattribution).
Consensus attribution appears to be: Union leader Nicholas Klein in 1914:
> And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
> They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Just because you are somewhere on that sequence, it doesn't mean you have any chance of moving forward. Also, most things don't follow those steps at all.
But yeah, those are the steps that "disruptive innovation" follow. The real kind, that the famous book was written about. Not the bullshit kind that people throw around to confuse others.
(Also, apparently, Carl Sagan wasn't much of a history nerd, just a physics one. I expected that phrase coming from somebody else. But well, at the time people knew very little about things that were not their specialty.)
They were correct to laugh at Columbus. He wanted to sail to India, everyone told him (correctly, because they weren't naive about the basic geography) that the distance was much too far. He lucked into finding an unknown landmass that wasn't India.
Windows is really only around in our household so the kids can occasionally play Minecraft with other kids that use tablets. Without that, Windows is gone, and good riddance. It's always 10X more difficult to deal with than either macOS or Linux.
The article mentions some prices but never presents an apples to apples comparison between the price for a similarly configured device with windows and steamOS.
I’m curious to know how much Microsoft charges for these licenses
The Legion Go S with Windows will cost $599 and the Legion Go S with SteamOS will cost $499. I suppose those will be the same hardware wise. So a $100 difference
People may also be under the impression that Microsoft charges a similar price for Windows as they do to individuals. Which is about $180 for Home edition in my country, Brazil.
I have good news for you, as someone with a 1000+ gaming library spanning 2 decades.
Most older games on steam run seamlessly on Linux these days (I have been gaming on Mint for 3 years at this point).
Also, with some minor tinkering, you can get games you acquired on GoG (or even some you may have lying around that you pillaged when sailing the high seas) running smoothly using Lutris.
If emulation is your thing, Retroarch is a marvel, better than playing on original hardware in many ways, and treat Linux as first-class citizen.
The only thing that should stop you is some modern online competitive games that require nasty anti-cheat software. Those games are cancer anyway, and should be avoided.
If gaming is holding you back on Windows, I am mostly confident you can unshackle yourself brother.
If you want to check if some specific game runs well on Proton (basically the compatibility layer Steam uses to run Windows games on Linux), you can check it out on https://www.protondb.com/
It focus on Steam Deck, but if it runs on Steam Deck, it should run at least on any Debian-based distro.
Legion Go owner here. I bought a "Windows gaming" device specifically because I have a library of games that spans across multiple vendors, not just Steam. Not only does my Legion Go have a decent "unified UI" for launching games, I can easily launch Steam in Big Picture mode. Touch on Windows 11 is surprisingly decent.
The only downside to all of these new portable gaming are the docks, and the living room experience. "HDMI out" usually works (depending on the game), but it's not as seamless as simply hitting power on your PS5/Xbox. I spend way too much time fiddling with graphics settings, and second/mirror/display issues.
You can use games from other vendors on SteamOS no problem. There's tools like Heroic, Junk Store and Lutris that make it really really easy. The only exception is that there isn't AFAIK a way to use purchases from the Microsoft Store, but Epic, GOG, etc. are all fine assuming the game itself doesn't have some underlying issue.
SteamOS docking experience generally works pretty well too IME, although we still need a damn controller with dual trackpads that mimics the Deck's layout.
> There's tools like Heroic, Junk Store and Lutris that make it really really easy. The only exception is that there isn't AFAIK a way to use purchases from the Microsoft Store, but Epic, GOG, etc. are all fine assuming the game itself doesn't have some underlying issue.
But with Windows I don't need to do any of that - and that's my point. I don't need to install additional apps, configure workarounds or hacks.
I turn on my Legion Go, enter my Windows pin and then launch whatever game I want using the built in UI or Steam or Epic etc. Why would I complicate that?
Did you install Steam and Epic? It's really stupidly easy to install something like Heroic. Like the same level of difficulty as installing Epic. And it will even add games automatically to Steam for you.
My Legion Go has a unified launcher, at this point I don't even know what we're arguing about. The goal is the same, play all my games regardless of platform with minimal hassle. I don't have any issues doing this on my Legion Go with Windows. How would a Steam Deck be a net benefit?
I was a console gamer for a long, long time just because I refuse to use Microsoft products, and Linux gaming was fraught except for Battle for Wesnoth and Nethack. Many hours just messing with Wine vs I turn on the machine and the game just starts, no fuss.
I've owned a Steam Deck not quite since day 1, I'm beyond delighted now that I can just buy and play Steam games. I think I've thrown maybe one game at Proton that I just couldn't get working. And things like the Heroic launcher have made GoG games (most of which already ran on Linux since they just run via DOSBox) easier than ever.
Anyone on the fence about keeping Windows around just for games: unless you play online multiplayer that uses kernel anti-cheat, just make the jump. I promise you, almost every game in your library will just work, and almost all of the rest will work after you set them to run with a specific Proton version.
> Anyone on the fence about keeping Windows around just for games: unless you play online multiplayer that uses kernel anti-cheat, just make the jump. I promise you, almost every game in your library will just work, and almost all of the rest will work after you set them to run with a specific Proton version.
Same applies to Steam on Linux: Proton has opened to us a gaming library of a size we would not have dreamed of a few years before.
I 100% agree, I bought one to be able to play my library while my wife watches dramas on the TV, and I've been shocked as to how high the compatibility rate is these days.
Also, while the competing handhelds are often more powerful, the Deck's trackpads really are a game changer for some games (like Rimworld)
Can you elaborate more on the benefits of the Heroic launcher? From the website I understand it offers the convenience of bundling multiple launchers into one but having only used Steam, I don't fully understand it's benefits.
Basically it handles downloading & configuration of games from some non-Steam providers (e.g. GOG, Epic), and adds them to Steam, so you can launch them like they are Steam games.
It's not quite as polished, but it works.
If you don't play games from Epic Games, GOG, Amazon or local installs, then there isn't much point to it. If you only use Steam, there isn't really any benefits.
What if SteamOS included kernel-level anti-cheat? Seems like an elegant solution compared to the current approach of running invasive third-party anti-cheat software.
SteamOS does provide support for common anti cheats (don't know details though), made in collaboration between anti cheat maker and valve, but many games decide to specifically opt out of this support
How would that work? Valve implements a bunch of kernel modules for each of the different KAC libraries an arbitrary game might use?
Both Valve and MS have been making moves to steer game publishers away from KAC. I think the problem will solve itself when the platforms just say, "you can't do that anymore".
> Both Valve and MS have been making moves to steer game publishers away from KAC.
Can you elaborate on this? What sort of moves have they been making?
> I think the problem will solve itself when the platforms just say, "you can't do that anymore".
I hope you're right!
I bought an Asus Rog Ally X on a recent trip to NYC (i'm not from the US, and the steam deck isn't sold on regular retailers).
I can't believe how awful the user interface is, they are bascially installing windows 11 in a computer shaped as a portable console, with really small icons and imprecise touch controls, onedrive and microsoft 365 offers, crazy.
If you can install Steam OS on it, all those consolized PCs will end up using native Steam OS, and the next step is the living room (console like desktop pcs).
Microsoft must be really thinking about an Xbox OS, or at least a native and usable gaming interface for windows 11. Valve is trying to remove microsoft as a dependency for their bussines. And i think microsoft sees valve as it's bigger competitor on the gaming space, not Playstation as everyone thinks, that's why they are going with the "everything is an Xbox" ads and rumors about "third party xboxes".
Even the XBOX UI is problematic. I’m stunned that so many games have an additional layer of user onboarding just to get up and running. So many games require that you create an account “typing” your info in an on screen keyboard with an Xbox controller, and verify with email then return to the Xbox and sign in. What should have been a single-sign-on using your gamer tag profile is a clunky fragmented mess.
The fundamental problem is that games require an account... be it Microsoft, Sony or a game specific account.
I'm not even sure it's an 'or' at this point; I've recently gone (multiple times) through the surreal experience of having to install a client and register an account having already bought a game through a storefront for which I had to install a client and register an account and which had already ostensibly installed. In the first case it was for a game I had actually previously played before the publisher decided to slap an account on top of its offering, and I decided I didn't care enough to keep going.
Let me guess, Ubisoft ?
This is a fundamental problem of technology, not just software, not just games games. Too many products unnecessarily tether you back to the manufacturer through an online account. When I buy something, hardware or software, I shouldn't have to check in with the developer forever, just to use it.
Yes. And games are built as multi platform so they don’t want to tie themselves tightly to the XBOX ecosystem. But the UIs for that enrollment are almost always horrible. You can tell they are designed for PCs with keyboards and mice. The scaling is all wrong for a TV based interface.
You missed the point. They should not require an account.
Or are you talking about multiplayer IAP fests? I'm not sure we should call those "games".
They are: https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/7/24338778/microsoft-xbox-ha...
Yep, probably that will be the future of xbox, it will become like steam so you can use and play your xbox library on every device. There may be some Microsoft branded Xboxes, like they have the "surface" PCs, but will be just another device that runs the xbox client.
That's kind of what they have now; just with console and (every windows machine). Better dedicated mobile hardware would be appreciated.
It is nice that GamePass can be used on my Desktop, XBox, or Laptop from my moms kitchen.
Well... they want that, but aren't there from my point of view.
From the xbox library (including 3rd party games you got on xbox, old 360 games and so on) only a handful of titles are actually playable on pc, around 10% in my experience (those labeled as "play anywhere", mostly "newish" first party games... 3rd parties want to sell you another copy to play on pc even using the xbox pc client).
And the look and feel of "the platform" is quite different on pc than the console, i think they will try to make the whole library playable and have the same experience (booting up directly to it or running it as a client on any supported device, similar to steam big picture mode)
> only a handful of titles are actually playable on pc, around 10% in my experience
https://gg.deals/games/xbox-game-pass-games-list/
Currently if I'm filtering right; 553 games are 'free' under Game Pass Ultimate currently, 223 are available on PC. ~42%. That's not great; but not horrible either.
Full Game Pass is 331,461 titles currently, and 240,596 installable on PC; so a bit better ratio.
Yeah, i'm taking as base my own library of xbox games, built over many years. Most games i bought digitally for xbox.
Probably for gamepass they select games that can be used on pc and console, and the store has xbox and pc versions of many titles, but that doesn't mean that if you bought the xbox version you have rights over the pc version.
They are improving this tough.
That is my guess too, they will still release both a console and a portable but it will be open. Phil Spencer has also talked about allowing third party stores on these future Xbox consoles.
I have zero faith in Microsoft's ability to pull this off in a way that's even close to cohesive.
they should have done this years ago, it may be too late now
Yep, users try to consolidate their gaming library in a particular platform. If you have 100 games on steam, why you would get the newest fifa-718 on xbox instead of steam, where you have all your games?
They plan game pass to get users to the xbox ecosystem, but i'm not sure if it will be enough.
Agree. The Steam Deck user experience it’s clearly superior compared to full blown windows. It’s going to be an interesting “battle”.
For gaming, RetroPie is a cool solution (it doesn't require raspberrypi).
I have a setup using HP Pro Mini 400 G9 that boots directly into EmulationStation. It's perfect for playing with my kid, covering everything from NES to more recent consoles, and also Steam and Minecraft (via https://github.com/minecraft-linux/appimage-builder/releases) if needed. The offline aspect of non-steam games is a big plus for easier parental management too.
I've got to say I prefer the raw Retroarch interface over the EmulationStation launcher. EmulationStation is pretty but the seams between it and Retroarch were just too big for me.
I highly recommend SteamFork for now! It's very close to upstream SteamOS unlike other derivatives and is easy to install. The experience is just much much better.
The issue is they would need to get rid of xbox live and allow installing apps outside their store. PC gamers will not accept having to pay for online and many play games that are not in the xbox store: all valve games, indie games, mods etc.
I very rarely play games, and for long time I had dedicated windows installation just for steam and friends.
This was always annoying experience to reboot, hunt for grub, then half year of windows updates until I was able to enjoy my free time.
But thanks to proton, I don't remember anymore when was last time I had to do that, everything just works great on Linux ootb including titles like cyberpunk.
For people wanting dedicated (console like) gaming machine steam os looks really promising.
Bonus points: Have Windows ruin your current shooter session by downloading system updates in the background.
I think they actually fixed that with Gaming Mode or whatever.
Even worse when a modal dialog used to pop up over your game... the way Windows used to constantly interrupt whatever you were trying to focus on drove me nuts (this never happened on macOS or Linux) but I think they also finally fixed that
I Pause updates for 7 days and run the updates on a sunday morning
Windows gotta update sometime
Windows used to let the user choose when they wanted to update - that they force it to happen now is a situation entirely of their own doing.
Yeah cause people just skipped installs forever.
That's the reason.
And as I said, you can run it once a week and control when it happens.
People skipped updates for a reason.
Windows updates are slow as fuck, take forever to download, then forever to install, take your CPU, hog your storage and require multiple boots and MUST be finished after started.
On everyLinux distro I've used, updates were single command/click at most, downloaded in the background, cleaned up from storage automatically, never used much CPU and rarely 'required' reboot.
Yes my Linux distro is updated twice a week and Windows was deleted after being out of ~updates~ use for 6 months, why do you ask?
> Windows gotta update sometime
For some people, sure. But to force it upon people without any way of skipping it? Kind of disrespectful to control people's computer usage like that when we're talking about "personal computers".
People are idiots.
They will just continue to skip forever and never update then blame Microsoft when their machine gets pwned because it wasn't updated.
You're free of course to install another OS on your "personal computer".
Or, Microsoft could let people chose when to update, so the ones who have to use Windows (like myself) can continue to do so without having to deal with their continued bullshit.
How can i do this?
It's an option in windows update (for me at least, Win 10)
There's a button called "Pause updates for 7 days"
I run windows update on a sunday then hit the button again when it's done. Works pretty well.
I cannot think about single time it happened, like seriously
Maybe you are using wifi like majority of gamers and blame the wrong thing?
I'm not accepting your implied premise: That Windows is allowed to use the scarce resources in a way that interferes with the User activity.
This is independent of where the resource limit is.
No, I suggest that there was no update at all and the lags were caused by wifi
The update gives itself away by the "Update and Reboot" button appearing half an hour later.
If you are sure that it was Windows, then you can also disable it
> Maybe you are using wifi like majority of gamers and blame the wrong thing?
What does that mean? For most people, the wi-fi is not the limiting factor for internet speed.
Sure, but "most people" is a low bar : "most people" probably can't even afford a computer with a dedicated graphics card either : the median per-capita household income is only $2,920 per year.
As for most people with a less than a decade old dedicated graphics card : I actually do believe that WiFi is a limiting factor for Internet speed.
> then half year of windows updates until I was able to enjoy my free time
That sums up my experience with the PlayStation and switch. Don't touch them for awhile and 'we are installing updates for the next 2 hours'. I use my pc often enough that it is not an issue. But I have one computer I do not use very often and then it is update city.
At the risk of defending Nintendo, the software update times on the Switch are notably zippy. I don't think I've ever had it take more than 10 seconds (including the reboot after). That's laudable, and nowhere in the ballpark of, say, Apple, where I once went to lunch and came back to find my laptop still installing updates.
Switch updates take less than a minute for me. And this is even after several months of inactivity.
My gripe with proton and linux gaming is GPU drivers — on Windows, I have AMD Adrenaline software where I can undervolt the GPU and adjust performance for every game individually. This drastically cuts power consumption, noise and temperature levels, especially for newer games played in 144hz or 4k. Is there a way to adjust the same things on Linux, preferably without restarting anything and messing about in the terminal?
I’m using LACT[1] which is essentially Adrenaline software. It allows to undervolt/change clock for core, vram; adjust fan speed and all you need.
[1]: https://github.com/ilya-zlobintsev/LACT
Don't know about amd or a gui tool, but at least for nvidia cards you can just set a power limit from the command line.
you should also be able to use Green With Envy.
I spent a couple dozen hours trying to tweak and tune my desktop this spring, get the watts down & see what Linux could do. CoreCtl was the best utility I found for the gpu, even though it left much to be desired & would sometimes work sometimes just not; my memory notably would get locked at max speed sometimes & not be adjustable, taking 20w right away. But it has the obvious knobs; adjusting clocks and mV per each state on each power profile, adjusting fan curves.
(Alas my motherboard appears to lack a ton of controls in Linux. I have been having to go into bios to do cpu undervolting and fan speed controls.)
More recently, I turned on the newer power tuning utility 'tuned' and it's been amazing. I'd fought down from 140 to 110w on my desktop but it still felt absurdly higher than it should be. Turned on tuned and now it idles at 85w. I haven't tried to sit and tweak it and see what it can do, but my impression is it's not as good at letting users tweak stuff endlessly. But it does do a ton of tweaking itself, and it's smart about adapting - switching to gaming profiles when games start.
I could be wrong but it seems like there aren't standards for motherboard management around platform details like fan speed control. And there's many many ways motherboards do things. Where-as gpu's apparently are just much more normative, are tweaked via pretty standard interfaces. Still, a lot is possible. I definitely recommend tuned, as a very all encompassing system tuner.
This is great but we must still be careful. Games have come to Linux but so has a lot of the suckiness associated with them.
The video games industry wants to own your computer. They don't want you to copy their games or cheat. Taking over your machine is the only way they can possibly hope to accomplish that. Therefore they think nothing of shipping literal rootkits directly to you. This is software whose only distinction from malware is a terms of service buried somewhere that you probably clicked through without reading and technically accepted.
There's also the fact they are proprietary software. There's no telling what they are doing. Sometimes there's literal malware in these things. I'm not kidding about this.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/fs-labs-flight-simulator-pas...
https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...
https://twitter.com/TheWack0lian/status/779397840762245124
https://fuzzysecurity.com/tutorials/28.html
https://github.com/FuzzySecurity/Capcom-Rootkit
I seriously doubt there's any effective way to sandbox them either, they probably need extensive permissions to even work. I wouldn't want to run these things in my personal computer.
For these reasons, you might want to set up a completely separate virtualized Linux system just for this purpose. IOMMU and VFIO technologies allow you to map a discrete graphics card to the virtual machine which enables hardware accelerated graphics at near native performance.
You might want to consider a dedicated gaming machine. To me it feels like a waste since the hardware is great and should also be used for other things.
> Taking over your machine is the only way they can possibly hope to accomplish that.
It's easy. Don't play competitive multiplayer crap. Especially if it's free to play. You get to not waste your time on predatory grindfests, besides not having to install a rootkit.
Also stay away from the companies requiring their own account system, like EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar.
> Don't play competitive multiplayer crap. Especially if it's free to play.
Problem is that most good multiplayer online games have gone F2P.
I bought Team Fortress 2. Then it went F2P and got overrun with bots. Overwatch also went F2P after I bought it.
I like online team shooters, but like many genres it's dominated by the F2P business-model.
Completely agree with you, this is great advice.
There are plenty of "competitive multiplayer crap" games which I think actually deserve to be botted to oblivion. If you load a game and you see a timer anywhere, it probably deserves it.
The timer exists to delay you rewards and resetting it is probably wired to the credit card button. They do this to create reward schedules in order to get players addicted. They want them logging into the game every single day. Automating those silly "daily tasks" is an absolutely moral thing to do and I will never fault anyone who does it. They are cures for video game addiction and should be prescribed by doctors.
> Automating those silly "daily tasks" is an absolutely moral thing to do and I will never fault anyone who does it.
I would. You should just dump the game then.
"Just dump the game" is not an easy thing to do when you're addicted. There are people out there who literally wake up at 3 AM to do daily tasks because that's when some idiotic timer resets. It's not something you just "dump". I know because I've been there.
Hmm I've done my share of wow dailies but even those were boring and i was skipping them.
As for free to play games, they're all too expensive. Since you pay for them with your time.
> They don't want you to cheat
Why do you think that is? I’m sure they wouldn’t bother with it if most gamers were fine playing against cheaters.
It's my computer. I am the god of this machine. If something happens, it's because I will it. I get to read and write arbitrary memory if I want to. It's offensive to me that they even think I shouldn't have this power. Couldn't care less what their reasons are.
Cheating? I don't care enough about most games to even consider it. I absolutely do consider it to be my prerogative, however. If they don't like it, they better run their "anticheat" nonsense on their computers, where it belongs. If they try to usurp control of my computer, I will do everything in my power to stop it.
This is gonna turn into yet another example of illegitimate customers enjoying a superior product while paying customers get treated like dishonest criminals. Legitimate customers get DRM and anticheat rootkits, pirates and cheaters get none of that. Guess which side I want to be on?
The issue w/ competitive gaming (League of Legends, Deadlock, Overwatch) is if you take advantage of your prerogative and cheat, you make the experience worse for everyone else; and it hurts the game itself.
The sad state of existence is that if you want to run a multiplayer game, you need to do shitty/controlling things or the game will turn unplayable as soon as it starts to become popular.
Games like BG3 however - Who cares if someone is cheating? Just stick to those (great) games if you want more control
It's unfortunate but at the end of the day they're just video games. They aren't worth sacrificing computer freedom over. We shouldn't end up becoming serfs in the digital fiefdoms of corporations just because people want to play online video games. These companies need to give up and let us play these things on our terms.
I'd sooner see multiplayer games disappear than accept this sad state of affairs where our computers come pwned straight off the factory in order to please the so called stakeholders by denying us the freedom to do things that hurt their interests. That's a far more damaging outcome than silly video games becoming unplayable. Cheaters are a small price to pay for freedom and I pay it gladly.
Besides, some games should be hurt. Plenty of "free" games out there employing literal gambling and drug dealer tactics to get people addicted to their product. Cheaters are doing us all a huge favor by speeding up their demise.
I'm not expert but I wonder if using blockchain technology to mathematically make impossible to cheat some information like the position or shooting direction is possible... that way maybe we don't need to give full control, and the most important things are still are not cheatable. cheating the skin is not that important but if they think that is important too, then they can just add more information to track somehow on the skins ahah
Blockchain is not needed. A huge class of problems could be solved by simply refusing to trust the game client. Plenty of games do that to this day.
https://youtu.be/AUjuefLqphY
You tell the server you're on the other side of the map and it just trusts you. Teleport hack. The other guy is on the other side of the map and behind a wall but the server is still sending you his position. Why send the client information it shouldn't have?
They want to pwn your computer so that you can't tamper with the game. They should fix the game so that tampering with it doesn't matter.
I saw your point in your original post of being wary of what games you install since some come with crapware, but you've completely lost me here. For many people, perhaps even most people, the whole point of practicing their digital freedom and even owning a computer is to enjoy a game. The use of games in society and the use of anticheats to games is very obvious by every measure. Yes, don't install crap; no, multiplayer games shouldn't and aren't going anywhere.
Cheating at video games is actually an exercise in computer freedom. The game is running on my computer. As the owner of the machine, I can change its memory. I can change whatever I want. I should be able to do this.
If you don't have the power to cheat at video games, it's because you do not actually control the machine. There's something above you preventing you from doing what you want. It's not your computer, it belongs to the game company. The computer does their bidding, not yours.
So people are not "practicing their digital freedom", they are practicing only what the game company allows them to do. They don't "own a computer" either, the corporations own their computers, they're just letting people use them. In the end it's up to them to decide if games are worth their sacrifices. Personally I think that's an indignity. It means your PC is no different than a game console.
I for one want to play games but don't want to make those sacrifices. I look for ways to make the game run on my terms instead of accepting the corporation's take it or leave it offer. It's pretty sad that people will just give up all their power just to play games but it can't be helped. I can only post these comments and try to convince others.
So... don't play them? Your reasons for not accepting kernel anti-cheat are completely valid, but so are other users' desires to not play games with cheaters.
I already avoid multiplayer games. It's very rare for me to make an exception.
I came here to warn others about these concerns and to cite virtualization with VFIO as a viable solution. I think people should understand what sort of nonsense they're bringing into their computers when they install these games. That's what my original post was about.
I didn't mean to start another one of these discussions. We shouldn't have to justify ourselves. They're the ones barging in and usurping control of our computers because of "cheating" or whatever. You install some video game and next thing you know you've got some malware exfiltrating private information, taking screenshots, scanning your RAM and disks, making an issue of your developer tools. That's unacceptable behavior, the reason for it is irrelevant.
> ones barging in
Well.. no. They are for better or for worse explicitly invited.
The games themselves? Yeah. But nobody "explicitly invited" in a bunch of invasive anticheat nonsense. That stuff is a nuisance at best, just yet another annoying thing you have to install before you can enjoy the thing you actually paid money for.
Well, no. Anti-cheat exists to keep cheaters from ruining the game. If I paid to enjoy a multiplayer game, and cheaters keep me from enjoying it, then anti-cheat is a requirement to enjoying the game I paid for. It's fine if you don't think it's worth the trade-off, but it does serve a real purpose to make gaming better for players.
They don't prevent cheating, they just make it harder. Cheat developers are still gonna bypass it, after all it is their business. And even if they did prevent cheating, it wouldn't be justifiable because the software is so invasive it can be classified as malware.
It's just like DRM. Like copying, cheating simply cannot be prevented if we are in control of the machine. This technological arms race can only end in one of two ways. Either the corporations manage to own our computers or they lose. Neither result is particularly great but I know which one I'm willing to accept.
> They don't prevent cheating, they just make it harder.
TBF; it's net the same thing. People just need it to be hard enough that it (generally) doesn't ruin your game.
You're making the same logical argument people have made against wearing (and then mandating) seat belts, and in more recent times vaccines. It's a sad slope that's led to me being told over Christmas dinner that murder being illegal is stupid because people still kill. He was serious. Boggles the mind.
Seat belts and even vaccines are much more restricted in the kinds of side effects they can cause :
https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
Seat belts and vaccines are life saving items. They are approximately a trillion times more important than video games are and ever will be. They do not even belong in the same sentence.
Even those important life saving items have contraindications. They are well studied. We know their benefits. We know their risks. We know how to balance the two. Professionals do it every day. Most people voluntarily choose to use these items after the facts are explained. Forgoing their use doesn't stop your life either.
We know virtually nothing about anticheat systems. Their benefits, if any, are likely exaggerated to increase profits. Their costs and risks are "explained" in some annoying legalese document that pretty much nobody reads. You're forced to accept this nonsense. You can't play the game otherwise, might as well click next.
Their function is to take over your computer in order to control and limit what you can do with it. That's an affront to the user. Accepting this costs users part of their dignity. We can only hope that they will have lots of fun with their game afterwards. Otherwise their sacrifice will have been for nothing.
> play these things on our terms
Due to some reason a lot of people want to use public servers and matchmaking. Likely they wouldn’t do that if anticheat root kits didn’t exist.
I don’t particularly care about games like this either nor do I play them but that’s entirely besides the point.
> for freedom and I pay it gladly.
That’s great. Again a lot of people feel otherwise. Why do you feel that you have a moral right to impose your personal preferences on them?
I don't see how public servers and matchmaking are an issue. The public servers that are known to tolerate cheaters are themselves just going to get a bad reputation.
The issue is the kind of game that doesn't allow you to host public servers, and which instead has an automatching system with an undisclosed algorithm.
And since this also tends to be the kind of game that has DRM, doesn't even allow offline/private servers (is online only), and worse, engages into microtransactions and gambling, the sooner these games are made illegal, the better off the society will be.
> Why do you feel that you have a moral right to impose your personal preferences on them?
Because we can't allow corporations to install rootkits and malware into people's machines?
I find it weird that I even have to justify this. These ridiculous stunts were actual scandals not too long ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
I wonder what changed in the last couple of decades. Why did this become acceptable? Why did people start defending corporations that do stuff like this? On Hacker News of all places?
Why are you talking about "personal preferences"? These corporations are shipping literal rootkits to people.
> These corporations are shipping literal rootkits to people.
Same applies to products such as CrowdStrike and similar stuff which in my opinion might be even worse (Anticheat rootkits at least provide some real value.. I’m not really an expert in corporate IT so I might be wrong).
In both cases their users perceive that this software provides some direct or indirect value to them.
Is it so hard to believe that some people might value the opportunity to play online games with less cheaters than retaining the control of their PCs?
Would it be better if same software was running on strictly controlled devices like game consoles? If so what if some people treat their PCs effectively as mainly specialized gaming devices?
> start defending corporations
Let’s not get silly.. what makes you think I’m doing that? I’m merely pointing out that the world is not necessarily black and white and there is some space for nuance.
You're elevating games to the level of security software. Isn't it an issue that a game is literally policing your entire system? If you had any passwords, or literally anything else, they can take it. This is about as far as a "trade off" can go.
> If you had any passwords, or literally anything else, they can take it.
They have done it before.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/fs-labs-flight-simulator-pas...
Shipped a browser stealer to users and exfiltrated data on an unencrypted channel.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1cibw9r/valorant...
https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/634974-...
Screenshots your computer screen and exfiltrates the picture to their servers.
Trusting these game companies is a huge mistake.
> Is it so hard to believe that some people might value the opportunity to play online games with less cheaters than retaining the control of their PCs?
Hard to believe? Absolutely.
This issue is just like privacy. It's one of those important issues where people not only refuse to care but actually look down on you as a loony if you do. They will suddenly start caring a lot when the corporations are fully entrenched and start exploiting them for profit.
The problem is by that point there will be nothing they can do about it. They gave up control of the machines to play games. They will not be able to do a thing when the machines start extracting profit out of them. They are no longer in control.
> Would it be better if same software was running on strictly controlled devices like game consoles?
For some interpretations of "better". Consoles are a huge waste. They are all perfectly good computers which could do so much more. At least dedicated gaming machines at least keep the damage contained. I said this in my original comment.
> If so what if some people treat their PCs effectively as mainly specialized gaming devices?
I have no trouble believing Windows users think that way. If you use Windows, it's because you do not care.
I seriously doubt someone who cared enough about computers to install and learn Linux will enjoy watching his omnipotent general purpose system get turned into a glorified gaming appliance just because corporations aren't happy about the fact he could theoretically use the system's immense power against them.
> Let’s not get silly.. what makes you think I’m doing that?
The words "moral right" gave me that impression.
What gives these corporations the moral right to tell me what I can or can't do on my computer? The whole idea is comical. If I want to cheat, I will cheat. They can only hope that I choose not to. That's a truth they just need to accept. If they won't we'll make them accept it.
> Because we can't allow corporations to install rootkits and malware into people's machines?
TBF - this is You dictating what tradeoffs others are able/willing to make in their off time. I grew up playing competitive FPS; and still have a 'gaming rig' for downtime. I would looove a better state-of-the-world; and am picky about what I will play (I won't run Rivals as an example as it requires Administrator; simply won't trust the developer that much)
> These corporations are shipping literal rootkits to people
i agree most/all kernel level anti-cheats are garbage - but I also dislike strict "We can't allow..." overarching statements also. A world I dread is one where Consoles are our only legitimate home gaming option.
> A world I dread is one where Consoles are our only legitimate home gaming option.
Then you should agree with me.
A computer you don't fully own and control is nothing but a glorified game console appliance.
Don't you see? That's what they are trying to turn our computers into with their rootkit nonsense. They want to own our computers. Turn them into consoles, appliances fully controlled by them.
It's 2025. The only difference between a console and a PC is the console refuses to run software not signed by the manufacturer. It only runs software they approve of. They literally have the keys to the machine, they're just letting us get some limited use out of it, on their terms of course.
That's what they would reduce our PCs to. Glorified appliances that refuse to do what we want. What if you want to cheat at video games? Computer says no. Because the corporation said so.
Averting that world is my objective. It's the reason why I wrote all these comments. The computer must say yes at all times.
> I don't care enough about most games to even consider it
Well yes, but millions of people feel otherwise.
Why do you think that game developers have some nefarious reasons for this and want to usurp your computer? To what ends?
I mean sure the current approach is flawed in many ways however without it many multiplayer games couldn’t really exist in their current form i.e. public servers, matchmaking etc. would become near impossible since the experience for most users would become extremely unenjoyable.
> pirates and cheaters get none of that
True in regards to single player games but I’m not sure how do you think this would work for multiplayer games? How can cheaters bypass the anticheat root kits and still play onlie?
> Why do you think that game developers have some nefarious reasons for this and want to usurp your computer?
Because that is what they do. They think we are all potential cheaters who need to be preemptively stopped and controlled lest we crack their games open. They feel absolutely justified in doing whatever it takes to "ensure" their precious games aren't "tampered with". There are no limits they wouldn't cross.
It's just what I've come to expect from the copyright industry as a whole. Our computers already come pwned straight off the factory just to appease "content creators". We really don't need game companies making the situation even worse.
> To what ends?
It doesn't matter. The result is we have to install their rootkits to play games we paid for. There are no excuses for that.
> many multiplayer games couldn’t really exist in their current form
Not a big deal. Maintaining control over our machines is more important. If that's the price I'll pay it gladly.
> How can cheaters bypass the anticheat root kits and still play onlie?
You'd have to ask them. I'm far from an expert on the subject. I just know that whatever it is that they do no doubt leads to their customers having to put up with a lot less game company malware than they would have needed to otherwise.
Unfortunately, you're not going to change any minds here. I've tried and failed to take this principled stand here, too. People (especially gamers) are willing to excuse anything game companies do as long as they at least say it's in service of "preventing cheating."
These rootkits are now considered the cost of admission to playing games, because gamers won't fight the practice, and they hate cheaters so much they are willing to accept anything.
Also consider: HN is full of software developers. If it's a choice between "What Software Developers Want To Do To Your Computer" and "What Users Want To Stop Them From Doing," HN commenters tend to be strongly on the side of the developers.
Yeah. It's incredibly depressing.
Thanks for replying. It's good to know that I'm not alone. That's the real reason why I comment these things.
I was so confused reading those as well. I'm concerned how it's even moderately acceptable to anybody.
Does steam run on GNU/Hurd?
As a Mac user, I've only been able to watch the Proton improvements from the sidelines. I'm happy to see them but can't make use of them.
On the other hand, GeForce Now is what let me get rid of Windows and my gaming desktop altogether. For the supported games, it's a truly superb experience, launching into max graphics with a single click. I don't have to install or upgrade anything (patches or drivers) or worry about hardware obsolescence. It's insanely powerful (RTX 4080 equivalent), has no local heat or noise, and barely sips battery life (compute is all in the cloud).
Completely changed the way I game. And this is as someone who grew up on BBS door games and configuring sound blaster and vmem in config.sys. GFN is so so nice and much better than dealing the nightmare that is modern Windows. And a lot easier than managing Proton and WINE too. Nothing beats it for sheer ease of use when I just want to game for a few hours without headaches.
> As a Mac user, I've only been able to watch the Proton improvements from the sidelines. I'm happy to see them but can't make use of them.
We experimented with macOS support prior to launching Proton, but Apple had spent the previous decade repeatedly kicking Valve and game developers in the nuts[1], which meant no one on the team had any particular passion for it. Between Apple's hostility & unreliability, and the small market share, we decided it wasn't a good use of time, so dropped the idea before launch.
You may know this, but CodeWeavers integrates most improvements to Proton into upstream Wine and also into their CrossOver product. So if you use CrossOver, you actually are getting many of the same improvements that are going into Proton.
[1] Garbage OpenGL support; killing 32-bit support, which killed a huge chunk of users' Steam libraries; no Vulkan support.
100% this is Apple's fault. They never took gaming seriously. I'd hoped that would change with the M series integrated GPUs, but that hasn't been the case lately, with only a tiny number of titles launching with Apple Silicon support. That's on Apple, not anybody else.
For what it's worth, I did buy and occasionally use Crossover (thank you!), but only when the game isn't supported on GeForce Now.
My M2 Max, even at its best (as in Baldur's Gate 3 running native Apple Silicon code), is still no match for a 4080... not even close. Crossover works well for simple indie games, but AAA games often have more demanding requirements. The extraordinary performance of DLSS (Nvidia's AI upsampling and frame interpolation algorithm) alone makes non-Nvidia GPUs less viable these days. And that's just the performance side.
Then, Crossover's UX is a whole other issue. Crossover's Steam takes forever to launch every time (I'm not really sure why this is; never bothered to really look into it). It's never clear to me which proper combination of D3DMetal/DXVK/Esync/Msync to use (I still don't even know what the "sync modes" mean). Some games only work with a certain version of Apple's GPT (for others: Game Porting Toolkit, not AI) manually installed, or requiring the bleeding-edge preview version of Crossover, etc. The idea of user-managed "bottles" and disks is a lot more complicated than GFN's model of individually vendor-managed sandboxed/containerized games, preconfigured to work right the first time and every time. That's the kind of arcade/console like experience I want these days since it's zero fuss. (But it often does preclude mod and trainer support, as a tradeoff.)
Overall... I'm grateful Crossover exists. It's easier to use than Whisky, and Codeweavers contributes a lot of code back upstream. Again, thank you. There are some games I wouldn't be able to play at all otherwise.
But most of the time these days, as a working man and not a teenager anymore, I have limited time to spend on gaming. GFN lets me just click a button and play without fuss, vs all the tinkering required of virtualized & emulated games. It's the difference between "wait a few seconds and I can play at max graphics" and "if I tinker with this for a couple hours, it might eventually launch and maybe I can squeeze 30 fps out of it on low-medium".
Steve Jobs reportedly[1] never really liked computer games, and didn't really care about them being on Macintosh. It wouldn't be surprising if this streak still exists in Apple culture, even though iOS became quite the gaming powerhouse despite Apple's lack of interest in the genre.
1: https://bit-tech.net/news/gaming/john-carmack-steve-jobs-hat...
Maybe it's because I'm in a shitty location (Spain), but these gaming streaming services never felt good enough for me. I've tried a bunch of them (including GeForce Now and more recently, the PlayStation streaming thingy) and they all introduce too much latency + now the quality of the screen suffer from the same type of quality degradation as YouTube, which just looks fucking horrible. I'd rather play on lowest quality settings and lowest resolution than having to view that sort of compromise on image quality.
> And a lot easier than managing Proton and WINE too
I can understand wanting to avoid having to manage Wine, prefixes and all that jazz. But Steam + Proton is literally zero management. You install Steam, start it, install the game and hit "Play", the only Proton thing you notice is that it download and installs it before the actual game runs. Otherwise there is nothing you have to do as a user.
Amazon has started pushing their version, which I think is called Luna. I haven't tried it, but if they run an instance out of EU-South-2 in Spain, you might get better results.
Yeah, it's unfortunately only viable if you're near one of their data centers – and even then, some of their international third-party partners have crappy graphics cards and networks. In the US, though, it is an amazing experience, more like streaming in 4K (which it can do) with minimal lag. Even first-person shooters are perfectly playable, as long as you're not trying to go pro. No compression artifacts or visible degradation at all for me.
> But Steam + Proton is literally zero management.
Absolutely. I had a Steam Deck for a few weeks* and that experience was amazing. Valve did a really really good job there. Unfortunately that's just not how it is in the Mac world :( We have Whisky and Crossover, which are much much harder to use.
(* The Steam Deck is a great piece of kit. I eventually sold it only because I already had a Logitech GCloud, https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/cloud-gaming/cloud-..., which does the same thing except streamed from GFN and with a bigger/better display than the Deck.)
Stadia worked really well for me (midwest US), but the other services haven't been as reliable. Back on hardware for me. SteamDeck is really nice at least.
> shitty location (Spain)
Eh? As in, proximity to the streaming server?
Otherwise, fiber is prolific in Spain (in major cities at least, to the best of my knowledge). I get 500Mbps down here in Valencia (for just €15 too!)
> Eh? As in, proximity to the streaming server?
Exactly! I've had symmetric fiber in countless of apartments in Barcelona, with latency to mainstream sites down to something like 2ms at the lowest. But the game companies who do streaming don't seem to cater to Spain (or Barcelona) at all since the latency always been horrible regardless.
Have you tried any of them and seen if the latency is shit or not?
I haven't tried any of them, sorry.
Obviously it’s not initially remotely a plug and play solution but if you install Steam under Game Porting Toolkit you actually can take advantage of Proton and its improvements much of the time, and after the initial setup there’s very little further tinkering needed.
There is a lot of inter-game variability, unfortunately. (I'm a regular tester and contributor to the Crossover compatibility database: https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility)
Some games, especially simple indie titles, run flawlessly. Others won't launch at all. Most mainstream AAA titles launch but with severe lag and/or graphical anomalies. It's a far cry from native, Proton on Linux, or GeForce Now. I wouldn't recommend it except as a last resort.
The problem with cloud gaming is that isn't available in all countries and it depends a lot on your ISP, so the experience may vary for different people.
This is amazing news. I wonder if this means we’re going to see a TV/home console with Steam OS soon.
I am currently borrowing a friend’s Steam Deck to try it out. It’s absolutely amazing, particularly around starting and stopping gaming sessions.
The only thing holding be back from buying it is that the processing power is a couple of years outdated at this point. It still works fine for older AAA games (or newer lighter games), but it can’t keep up with new AAA.
Having the option of newer hardware with the Steam OS experience is amazing!
> I wonder if this means we’re going to see a TV/home console with Steam OS soon.
They existed, and they didn't really take off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer). But it was 10 years ago, things are different today
Notably the Steam Machines didn't have any equivalent to Proton, they could only run native Linux games out of the box. Needless to say that didn't work out.
Proton is a wrapped/enhanced version of Wine, which has been a thing forever. A large chunk of the Steam library worked perfectly fine on Linux before Proton.
It wasn't nearly as streamlined though. Average person wants to just click play on Steam, which is the biggest thing proton brought to the table.
>A large chunk of the Steam library worked perfectly fine on Linux before Proton.
Source? My recollection was that it didn't. Wine had awful direct x translation, I'm not sure if it could do dx11 at all when the steam machine came out. DXVK is a proton project and without it few games could actually run at all.
> Wine had awful direct x translation
That's not fair. Vulkan didn't exist when the original Steam Machines launched. Wine's Direct3D implementation also had different goals than the DXVK project, such as supporting macOS, older hardware, and non-gaming DirectX uses.
It doesn't matter what's fair. It's whether it worked or not that counts. It didn't, now it does. That's an awesome positive step.
I don't think it's good to be rude about other peoples' work without a really good reason :)
Sure, but GP's claim was that the statement "Notably the Steam Machines didn't have any equivalent to Proton" is false.
... for modest values of "fine". Compatibility, stability and performance have improved immensely the last couple of years, for a large part thanks to Valve!
Yeah, WINE may have been around forever but its development was massively accelerated by Valve dumping truckloads of money on CodeWeavers to have them work on fixing games full-time. Plus neither of the two most popular anti-cheat solutions worked in WINE at all until Valve lobbied them to support it.
I think the performance thing isn't that big of a deal with the deck yet.. gaming at 720p 30 or 40 fps still works quite well on the device even for recent AAA titles ... You can always install Steam OS clones on Lenovo Legion Go/Asus rog ally etc.. and get a decent experience.
Where it is slightly annoying is the anti cheat/the recent Sony shenanigans about their overlay not running in Linux/such issues.
But with such huge PC gaming library...i don't think I'll run out of new games to try on the deck any time soon...
Seems like the hardware upgrade for the Steamdeck will be very soon...
https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-introduces-ryzen-z2-series-c...
Edit: although some people say the slide meant that the processor was coming for "devices like the SteamDeck", not literally the SteamDeck
https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/ryzen-z2-extreme-announced
> some people say the slide meant that the processor was coming for "devices like the SteamDeck", not literally the SteamDeck
"Some people" being Pierre-Loup Griffais, who works on the Steam Deck at Valve.
https://bsky.app/profile/plagman.bsky.social/post/3lf36y66gg...
> Seems like the hardware upgrade for the Steamdeck will be very soon
I doubt it, the Lenovo Steam-OS option is utilizing Ryzen R2 Go, which has the same RNDA architecture as Valve's handheld and pretty similar (though slightly better) specs.
There's newer architectures but they chose the same as OG Steam deck for... compatibility? Ease of OS support? Something else? I doubt Vavle would help Lenovo with support on a device they'd shortly eclipse with better specs.
> I doubt Vavle would help Lenovo with support on a device they'd shortly eclipse with better specs.
Why wouldn’t they? It more or less locks the user into the Steam store where Valve gets a cut of every sale. That’s their primary income stream.
This is very achievable today with off-the-shelf hardware paired with ChimeraOS or Bazzite.
I recommend SteamFork which is a bit closer to upstream SteamOS. It's an install and forget kind of experience.
Not really the same plug and play experience as a Steam Deck offers though.
I personally wish that Framework works with Valve to release a version of Steam OS for their motherboards, so one can retrofit an old Framework laptop motherboard as a TV console.
Well, yes, you need to know how to boot up an installer and go through a typical Linux distribution installation process. After it first boots though, it can be handled solely via the Steam UI.
I just discovered Bazzite and am excited to try it. Just built a PC for my kid and Windows hates it. Can’t run for 10 minutes without a blue screen. I’d wanted to try an Atomic Desktop originally but thought the gaming support was too weak. Hoping Bazzite gives me stability and the gaming ecosystem…
If you are running into BSODs right off the bat, that sounds like you could have faulty hardware (bad memory, sketchy PSU, etc).
Agreed, it’s worth cleaning contacts and reseating the memory modules to start with.
> I wonder if this means we’re going to see a TV/home console with Steam OS soon.
You can build one yourself pretty easily and just install Bazzite [1], basically SteamOS for generic PCs on it.
You can select "Do you want Steam Gaming Mode?" "Yes" on the download and it will automatically start into gamescope & Steam Big Picture Mode.
1: https://bazzite.gg/
I have a steam deck. Its incredibly easy to switch from game mode to “desktop mode” and get a full blown, portable linux device! Its fucking incredible.
Gaming has been mostly good. You can trust the steam verification badge. Some games just won’t work but most do.
Let me expand on that - plug your deck in a laptop docking station connected to your lan, monitor setup, keyboard and mouse and you have a the smooth desktop experience of a not at all shabby laptop! It's amazing!
Lately I've taken to using an Arch btw install on an SD card for testing GPU compute stuff on it. It's so smooth...
Not enough vram for blender rendering it seems at least for now...
> plug your deck in a laptop docking station connected to your lan, monitor setup, keyboard and mouse and you have a the smooth desktop experience of a not at all shabby laptop! It's amazing
Just to be clear, this is not even needed, you can use the desktop mode straight up on the Steam Deck without any added accessories, terminal and everything included. Dope for quick maintenance without having to hook it up to anything. Or, if you happen to have a USB-based WiFi antenna with the right chipset, a portable aircrack-ng device :)
> Not enough vram for blender rendering it seems at least for now...
Doesn't Steam Deck have unified memory and 16GB available? I think it's more of a implementation issue than the amount of VRAM it could theoretically use.
Or just buy a laptop, and then you can just play games on it like normal! Amazing :P
I think it's pretty hard to find a laptop with similar performance characteristics, build quality, repairability and firmware support at the steam deck price point. For one.
On the other hand portability is also great, and so is the additional software customization on top. Having an easy slider for custom TDP is a great feature.
Not to mention that by purchasing a Steam Deck, you are helping Valve financially support many opensource projects. Valve invests in the Linux kernel, Proton (and by extension Wine), various KDE software, the Fex emulator for gaming on ARM systems, and more.
> I think it's pretty hard to find a laptop with similar performance characteristics, build quality, repairability and firmware support at the steam deck price point.
On the other hand, it's much easier to find any laptop at all than the Steam Deck... because the Steam Deck is not yet available in my country, while there are plenty of laptops from many different brands (Dell, Lenovo, Positivo, even Apple) at all price points.
Works on my machine...
True, but I prefer to optimize my laptop choice for work, not gaming. My point was that the deck does not limit you by its form-factor in any way should you plug it to a display, mouse and keyboard.
Have you tried Samsung DeX? I find it pretty amazing, you connect your Android smartphone to a docking station, and you have a usable Desktop OS. The only thing holding it back from becoming a full workhorse for eg document editing imho is that most apps will only give you the - substantially nerfed - mobile version.
You don't need to wait for Valve to get this experience today. The HTPC build of Bazzite [1] brings an experience identical to SteamOS to all computers with an AMD or Intel GPU from the past 8 years or so.
It works amazingly well and I can't imagine going back to Windows for a PC that is built only for video games. I use it on my "Gaming HTPC" (Ryzen 3600, Radeon RX6600, Fractal Design Node 202) and it brings a great console experience to my TV, with access to my PC game library, without being locked into a console ecoystem, and without the enormous cruft and user hostility that Windows has you manage these days.
I'm a pretty casual and patient gamer, and for that use case this Steam machine experience is unmatched - despite being built on desktop Linux, it works out of the box and requires zero manual maintenance. For dedicated gaming boxes this Linux user experience is significantly better and easier to use than Windows - we're truly living in the future.
[1]: https://bazzite.gg
[2]: It's built on top of Fedora and Universal Blue, so under the hood it's different from SteamOS which is built on a custom immutable version of Arch Linux. However, that implementation detail is actually almost totally irrelevant if you want to play games since all software is managed by Steam and Flatpak on both systems.
I have both a Steam Deck and a (Windows) gaming PC.
While the "happy path" in SteamOS is truly amazing, there are dark corners where it falls down. Third party launchers (like EA's garbage) are extremely janky. Hardware support in Linux/SteamOS is questionable for exotic peripherals (I have a TrackIR which never worked right, a MS XBox USB controller dongle that requires third party kernel modules, and a HP Reverb G2 which has only preliminary support through third party software). And some types of multiplayer anti-cheat are completely unavailable.
Some of this is solvable, some probably isn't. But there's a reason I still keep Windows on the gaming PC - sadly.
I've been wondering what the limiting factors are for migrating gamers and I think the larger software ecosystem and cumulative effect of paper-cut issues will cause people to bounce off.
Linux and running games under steam/wine/proton is great in the broad strokes, but users will have built up their own collection of tools or ways of doing things they will seek out equivalents for and judge the linux experience as a whole on whether they can do that. Many of the windows applications are very mature compared to linux because that's the ecosystem and audience its had for decades, there's nothing touching Foobar2000 for example (and the UI glitches in wine). Now add in all the other things gamers regularly expect to do, what's needed to accomplish them and how well they do it, overlays, screen recording, using modding tools, etc.
It also strikes me with the win10 end of life there's going to be a huge variety of hardware configurations people want to 'just work', in terms of age and which model someone chose in a particular generation. For example support for fan control on my Z270 board doesn't exist, presumably because of the way ASUS made that model.
I can appreciate Valve and their direct partners picking their battles on what to support as it's a huge gauntlet to pick up, but I really doubt the needle is going to move large distances and saying "bye bye windows gaming"
If you are demanding or particular about your gaming experience, then Linux isn't there yet. Compatibility with the very latest AAA titles can sometimes trail behind Windows, anticheat for competitive multiplayer often blocks out Linux compatibility, and you need to adapt to different tools for customizing and surrounding your gaming experience if you're so inclined.
What I'm highlighting if you just want to sit down to play some damn games already in your library, especially on a dedicated "console" like a handheld or HTPC, then the Linux experience is superior to Windows. And I expect that there's a sizable audience for that.
> cumulative effect of paper-cut issues will cause people to bounce off
I disagree, PC gaming has always been rife with papercuts, especially relative to console gaming.
The real moat that Windows has is that anonymous-matchmade competitive multiplayer games are decreasingly going to want to run on hardware that supports user freedom. Which for me personally is fine, because I find anonymous-matchmade competitive multiplayer games to be dogwater that I ain't missing, but for a lot of people that's a non-starter.
(Disclaimer: proud owner of a Steam Deck which has also served double duty as my desktop machine while I wait for a replacement power supply for my laptop.)
I tried this a while back, when going 6700 XT HDMI 2.1 to LG Oled C2 HDMI 2.1 with proper cable i could not get RGB 444 with 'correct' colordepth in Bazzite (or any distro) Windows 10 or 11 does not have this problem. Apparently it's an issue with the HDMI board and proprietary drivers for linux.
From the Bazzite homepage
> Bazzite is a cloud native image built upon
Seems to be targeting cloud somehow? Very different from SteamOS where everything works offline, except the game purchases/downloads of course.
They mean "cloud native" in the sense that it adopts atomic system updates and containerized application installs, which has been common in "the cloud" for years but is much less commonplace in personal Linux installations. Working in this way is a large part of why Bazzite "just works". It is also actually exactly how SteamOS works (with some implementation differences under the hood), so SteamOS is "cloud native" in the same sense.
I do think this marketing is unnecessarily confusing. The dayjob of the original master mind behind Bazzite and Universal Blue is working with cloud systems IIUC, so they find it an important thing to highlight.
I think it's referring to that Bazzite uses container technology to build the OS (it's an OCI image).
Is there a distro that brings a console-like experience to systems with Nvidia cards?
I’ve also heard about ChimeraOS. How do all the different gaming focused Linux distro compare?
The full SteamOS experience is pretty tied up in Linux' open source graphics stack, moreso than regular Linux desktop environments because Valve built it for high performance on the Steam Deck's AMD GPU. Nvidia's proprietary driver has traditionally done its own thing and has been quite incompatible with things targeting the open source stack. So it's hard to replicate the Steam Deck experience on Nvidia, no matter the distro.
That said, over recent years Nvidia has made some efforts to improve compatibility. Just a few days ago Bazzite announced a Steam Deck beta image for Turing and later Nvidia cards [1]. It's too early to run though if you want the seamless experience you get on Intel and AMD, and progress mostly depends on Nvidia and Valve, but I hope they get there.
[1]: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/new-bazzite-deck-nv...
There is no bye to Windows gaming, because the casual PC gamer will still use Windows and won’t bother with SteamOS, and rightfully so, because why bother? If you can’t handle Windows, then certainly you won’t be able to live with Linux as your main system.
Windows just works for gaming and all connected devices. SteamOS maybe works well for dedicated handhelds, but I can’t imagine a casual user bothering with Linux and wondering why the newly bought xyz Bluetooth device doesn’t work on it.
This whole “Windows just works” mantra gets less and less true with every passing day. The number of times I have to fight tooth and nail to stop updates, uninstall edge, nuke bloatware shit installs from orbit, or hell just get my audio to go out the correct output device is astronomical.
Windows is no walk in the park. And Linux is easy to use these days.
So… sure maybe this is still sorta true. But we’re long past the days of needing to be a hacker to use a Linux OS and it’s only getting better, while Windows is only getting worse.
I agree with you partially, but a casual user just doesn’t care or bother. They don’t uninstall bloatware; in fact, I’m pretty sure most don’t even know what it means. Casual users don’t even bother to switch to dark mode or check if their monitor supports more than 60Hz—things like that. That’s also why Apple doesn’t focus on such details.
I’m not against Linux; for developers and servers, it’s awesome. But for casual users, I don’t see the appeal. There’s no reason to bother as long as it works—and it does. Do you genuinely think, that a user who complains that Windows is bad and doesn’t work, will be able to install Linux and be happy? First thing someone like that will do, is probably try to execute an exe file and the complain under some YouTube video about it.
I think the definition of a “casual user” has changed drastically over the last 10 years.
This very much used to be true. But most gamers (i.e. the group we’re talking about here) are more than technically savvy enough to run Linux. Most gamers have seen a terminal once or twice and know how to google the solution to common fixes.
And yes, I do believe most motivated users (those unhappy with windows) can install Linux. It’s SO easy these days requiring nothing more than a USB and an hour or two of time.
Then you have more faith in humanity, or casuals, than I do. :D I mean, this was three years ago, but I don’t think much has changed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0506yDSgU7M&t=
Why would anyone want to bother with a terminal just for gaming, a little bit of browsing, casually installing mods, using Photoshop, etc.? I mean, just watch the video, and this is coming from a guy who at least knows one or two things about computers.
Plus, don’t forget, Linux also has its quirks, just like Windows, only in different areas. Like not so awesome Nvidia drivers :P
... nah. I usually remove all unwanted software once and only after a fresh install, and a Windows installation lasts years without maintenance nowadays.
My brother in Christ, we must be using different versions of Windows.
I have to uninstall crap all the time. :’)
I just had a new headset that I cannot pair in Windows without a third party adapter.
Windows has momentum, but it certainly isn't because it is easier or more reliable anymore.
Funny sentiment to me, because I switched my parents and in-laws over to Linux exactly because of what a hassle Windows is to support.
> and wondering why the newly bought xyz Bluetooth device doesn’t work on it
It's not the early 2000s anymore, things just work now.
What exactly is such a big hassle with Windows? Sure, it’s bloated with trash, but again, it’s good and simple enough for everyone to use. Try explaining to a casual user that they can’t execute an exe file or use Photoshop or whatever on Linux without specific workarounds.
Neither of those scenarios are typical for 'casual users' of the 2020s: at work, most have Windows laptops issued to them that they can't install things onto anyway, and elsewhere they are liable to do most of their computing on a tablet or a phone. There's almost nothing an exe file could do for a casual user that couldn't be done in a browser or mobile app, and most of them understand what an operating system is and that, on some level, there are cross-compatibility issues between them that they may be able to resolve with a tool.
>Photoshop or whatever
No one who _needs_ Photoshop is a casual user.
That’s not true—these scenarios absolutely apply to casual users, like students or hobbyists who do things like video editing or photo editing. Students, for example, often need Windows-specific software for schoolwork.
Even if we ignore Windows-specific software entirely, there are still other pain points: DRM support, HDR support, certain drivers, and even the variety of package managers and ways to install things. You know what I mean—these things are nothing special for us, but for someone who’s just casually gaming or doing some creative hobbies, being forced to use the terminal to, for example, update Nvidia drivers or find a workaround to get an unsupported game launcher to work, can be a total dealbreaker
Even something as basic as swapping out PC hardware as a gamer isn’t as seamless on Linux as it is on Windows. That’s a lot of friction for someone who just wants things to “work”. And you know I’m right because if I would be wrong with all these points, we already would have a year of Linux desktops … as it’s being said every year.
You underestimate how most people just value ease of use, familiarity and don’t care about freedom and control over a system. Most don’t want to spend their time tweaking or figuring out why something doesn’t work and that’s totally fine.
I get the impression that a load of people are preparing to jump ship once Win10's sundowned and they're faced with having to get rid of a perfectly usable computer to install Win11. I know I am, loathe as I am to move over to Linux, but Microsoft's making its own bed and continuing on its quest to alienate long-term users with 'peculiar' interface and OS changes.
That, Mac and Mobile ownership and I do have to wonder what MS's long-term strategy to avoid pissing away Windows Desktop users is, because I can't see it.
> I get the impression that a load of people are preparing to jump ship once Win10's sundowned and they're faced with having to get rid of a perfectly usable computer to install Win11.
In my opinion, what will most likely happen is the same thing that happened when Windows XP was retired: nothing at all, people just kept running the same Windows XP they had already installed. That is, people will just keep Windows 10, not caring that Microsoft does not care about it anymore. And, for them, it will work even better, since without constant updates, Windows 10 will become more stable (as in: not changing all the time, not having random automated reboots due to updates, etc).
(We might be concerned that, without software updates, the security bogeyman will catch and eat us, but most normal people don't worry about that.)
> I do have to wonder what MS's long-term strategy to avoid pissing away Windows Desktop users is, because I can't see it.
Give private users up because you can't extract money from them, but keep milking Office 365, governments and enterprises that Just Can't move away from Windows due to decades of legacy garbage.
Counterpoint: LTT recently tried SteamOS on PC[0] and found that even without an official desktop release from Valve, it just works.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdR-bxvQKN8
Neat. The printer bit made me roll my eyes, though. They could not get a printer work with the desktop OS that is Windows, and after also unsuccessfully attempting to get it to work on the OS of a _hand-held_ _gaming_ device, which they just showcased as a PC-based alternative to a living room console, their conclusion is "needs some work"? I, mean what? Would anybody expect to be able to print from a PlayStation or a Switch? What would you even want to print?
> Would anybody expect to be able to print from a PlayStation or a Switch?
Interestingly enough PS2 had printer support[0], and so did PS3[1]. But it seems it didn't work very well.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djHWzLZFm7A
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_efGW89MyL4
> SteamOS maybe works well for dedicated handhelds
If someone just wants to play games, why pay extra for Windows? Especially if all they are going to do is play games on a handheld / console.
Maybe it’s due to peripheral driver support? Not every device works without issues on Linux. Also maybe because of specific mods or tools which only work on Windows. Besides that, currently all the “awesome anti-cheat root kits”, are not supported by Linux.
There are a few reasons, but I agree with you that if you use only a handheld, SteamOS probably will work fine.
SteamOS is a much more streamlined console-like experience for gaming. Even things as simple as system updates is far less annoying on Linux/SteamOS than it is on Windows. This is especially important in, for example, a set-top box media PC you might want to have for your TV and you don't run every day. And, over time, as SteamOS in its various forms becomes more and more popular, game publishers will be motivated to support it. Many already are, from Steam Deck alone. And, in a few years, it's possible that a "casual PC gamer" will actually prefer the far more plug-and-play SteamOS experience versus the Windows one (which, I, for one, highly dislike, but I understand that's a preferences thing).
I wonder if Microsoft will start offering discount Windows licenses for gaming handhelds to push back against this, like how they used to offer dirt cheap licenses for netbooks when they were popular.
Even if it's free, the experience of using windows 11 as a portable gaming device is awful. Microsoft must create a gaming focused version of windows for this kind of devices. There are rumors of an "xbox OS", but who knows.
I wonder if Microsoft will tell Lenovo that the cost of Windows licenses for Lenovo's laptops and desktops will double or more.
I think OEMs get Windows for free if the screen is smaller than 9".
This makes me hopeful that more online games will be pushed to supporting Linux. Most recently it has been very surprising to find out that Marvel Rivals is making sure they support Linux gamers. Unfortunately there's still a lot of high profile games that won't run on Linux, the most notable examples for me being League of Legends and Fortnite. These games have huge communities, and their games are already available on other platforms, so it's not like they're designed with platform exclusivity in mind. Honestly, Linux gaming has been an outstandingly positive experience for me.
Just for those who don't game on Linux: Proton allows a bunch of games to run perfectly on Linux already. The main blocker for games like League of Legends or competitive shooters is the anti-cheat. Most anti-cheats (like Vanguard) run in the Windows kernel so you can't just plop it onto Linux easily.
I remember a number of years back when Steam started Proton thing, it didn't look very promising. Since then it evolved into an actual OS, it would be amazing if Valve could pull this off and expand Linux gaming into mainstream devices and maybe even PCs.
SteamOS is a Linux distro that originally came out in 2013. Proton is a custom version of Wine that came out later -- Proton has some added features for integration with Steam, but Wine has been around and has been working well for Windows gaming on Linux for decades.
SteamOS today bears no resemblance to the version put out in 2013. It's literally based on a different distribution, and lots of things have been customized since then.
> Since then it evolved into an actual OS
Funnily enough Valve tried to make Steam OS happen before Proton was a thing, for some reason they just expected game developers to port their games to Linux on their own dime. Thankfully they realized that was never going to happen at scale, so Proton was born instead.
> Funnily enough Valve tried to make Steam OS happen before Proton was a thing, for some reason they just expected games developers to port their games to Linux on their own dime.
Proton is just a fork of Wine. Wine had already been around for decades, and there were other commercially-supported versions of Wine, like Cedega, long before Proton was around.
On top of that, the increasing dominance of off-the-shelf game engines was already making it trivial to "port" games to Linux -- in Unity, for example, it's often just a few extra mouse clicks to produce a Linux build in parallel to your Windows build. So lots of game developers did start releasing native Linux versions, and continue to do so.
Yes WINE already existed, but SteamOS v1 didn't have it integrated as a core feature like it does today. It was very much intended to only run native Linux titles. WINE also wasn't nearly as seamless for gaming until Valve threw their weight and money behind polishing it, which came after the original SteamOS flopped.
Interesting, I guess I missed that
My prediction:
If the SteamOS version of the portable gaming handhelds start to outsell the Windows variants because of the lower price, Microsoft will probably offer to subsidize the cost of the Windows 11 license in the handhelds to bring their cost to parity with the SteamOS devices, in exchange for a promise from the manufacturer that the hardware line will not include a SteamOS offering.
The important part for me
> A promised beta version of SteamOS will be released publicly before May, Valve said, "which should improve the experience on other devices, and users can download and test this themselves. And of course we'll continue adding support and improving the experience with future releases."
so if you want this to build a custom SteamOS machine, presumably May it is!
People have successfully installed SteamOS on their own hardware using the Steam deck rescue/reinstall image that you can download from Valve. So if you're up for a bit of hacking you can build it today.
Apparently the SteamDeck recovery images already work well enough as long as the hardware is somewhat similar (i.e. an AMD video card).
Wasn't SteamOS around long before the Steam Deck? I remember Valve releasing their custom Linux distro back when they were promoting the "Steam Machine" concept.
Yes, but the original SteamOS was built on Debian 8 and ultimately failed to gain market share.
Its website is still up https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown
Back then it could only run Linux native games... I'm not sure if their old steam OS version even integrated Proton properly back then.
The current version (Steam OS 3) is rebuilt from scratch and there are a lot of under the hood changes...
> if their old steam OS version even integrated Proton properly back then.
"Proton" wasn't even a thing that existed back then :)
Wine was a thing and you could run quite a few games, but it wasn't integrated at all: you had to run a separate win32 Steam instance under wine.
Indeed, and as a person who always wanted to game on my Linux boxes, it wasn't (still isn't) nearly as good of an experience as Proton, even though Proton is just Wine+patches+other goodies.
> you had to run a separate win32 Steam instance under wine.
If I remember my trying days during that period, all the Steam games you ran that way (unless hacked around) also shared the same Wine prefix, with all the fun stuff that comes with...
Indeed. Having to share wine prefixes (or having multiple Steam installs) was a problem. I don't think I bothered running more than a game or two.
Proton also include DXVK and VKD3D which weren't a thing at that time (Wine had ok DX9 support, awful DX10/11 and non-existent DX12).
Here’s the classic clip from 2014 where Linus Torvalds says Valve will save the Linux desktop: https://youtu.be/Pzl1B7nB9Kc?t=309
What's funny is that in Linus' mind "saving Linux desktop" meant that Valve would release a single statically linked binary of a game for Linux and distro maintainers would have no choice but to support that binary, thus ending fragmentation in the ecosystem. Steam was trying exactly that when Linus made the comment, but failed to get any traction (see the first iteration of SteamOS/Steam Machines).
Today gaming on Linux is feasible because of Proton, a compatibility layer for Windows binaries. Meanwhile the app distribution and fragmentation problem on Linux is as bad or worse than it was a decade ago. If you asked Linus whether Linux was "saved" by Proton, I bet he would have a very different opinion than everyone here.
I've always loved gaming and one thing that never sat well with me was that gaming's home was unofficially on a proprietary OS. It always made more sense to me (particularly from a software preservation standpoint) that the home of gaming should be on an open-source OS. And truth be told, I have in fact encountered a few games now that will no longer run on Windows but will still work great on Wine/Proton. I'm sure there will be more of those over time.
Windows gaming is way, WAY bigger than Steam!
"way WAY bigger" is a major overstatement. But even if that were true, SteamOS can handle lots of other non-steam storefronts.
For example, I recently went and played some World of Warcraft for old times sake with some friends on Linux. All I had to do was open Lutris which is available through a Flatpak on the SteamOS discovery tool, and then from Lutris you install the Blizzard Launcher. Opening the Blizzard launcher lets one install and play any of their games.
Steam can install and run the blizzard launcher. Add the blizzard-setup.exe using "add a non-steam game to my library". Set the compatibility mode to Proton. On first run, it will launch the blizzard client installation. The next runs will just open the launcher.
I was able to play Overwatch on an AMD ubuntu laptop flawlessly.
Ah nice, I hadn't tried this but it makes sense!
Is it? A quick search seems to indicate that Steam has 75-80% of the Windows gaming market share.
I doubt that. Looking at a random list of most popular PC games, a lot of the top ones aren't on Steam (Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, League of Legends, Valorant, Genshin Impact, Rocket League).
Minecraft famously runs on anything. Roblox works through Sober. Genshin Impact and Rocket League both run through Proton.
The rest have kernel level anticheat, unfortunately.
Steam is the only place I've ever played Rocket League. Did it move off the platform?
Yes, since 2020 when the developer got bought out.
I'm guessing that's based on official and legal purchases, while I'd wager than "Windows gaming" is a whole lot bigger than just the legal stuff.
Unclear if parent is referring to "Gaming" as a whole or just including boring capitalism numbers like "marketshare" etc.
Older games are usually easier to run on newer versions of linux than windows, in my anecdotal experience. Not sure about cracked AAA titles, I guess that's a bigger part of the "illegal" stuff.
Yeah, that's true. The other week I tried to get Svea Rike II (1998) to run on my desktop. Tried everything with Windows 11 since I thought it would be easier but nope, nothing worked, couldn't even get past the installation. Switching to trying it on Arch with Wine and boom, five minutes later I was up and running.
Hey Gabe, who’s your biggest competitor? Mark Rein? Nah, Peter Sunde.
Proton launches my non-steam games on linux just fine. Flawless experience
Cite?
"What do you mean personal computers will change the world? Time-sharing is way, WAY bigger than personal computers!"
for now...
How is SteamOS install different from just installing Steam on Linux?
SteamOS is an immutable Linux distro that is designed designed to be usable without a keyboard / mouse. By default, it boots you into something that's like an optimized version of Steam's Big Picture mode (but with less compositor / desktop environment overhead).
From this interface you can launch games, modify all your settings, pull up performance metrics, change refresh rate, change your CPU / GPU TDP, enable FSR or other scaling methods, etc. all using just a controller with no assumptions about you having a keyboard / mouse handy.
You *can* launch into a regular desktop environment optimized for keyboard and mouse whenever you need to do certain things on it, but the main focus and value add of SteamOS is the controller friendly interface, and lightweight, resource optimized environment.
By default it uses a different UI and dedicated "window manager" (gamescope), it is not just Big Picture. But you can always switch to a traditional desktop.
By far the biggest difference is that SteamOS is an immutable OS. As far as I understand, any additional package (outside of flatpacks) you install will wiped out on an OS update. So everything is fine if what you need is packaged as a flatpack, otherwise you have to hack around.
Mainly packaging and bundling everything together in one drop-in package for every day users to get access to. I've run Linux for 20+ years now, and gotten steam games working a few times over that period of time. Not hard, not impossible, but is probably more than the average Windows user wants to figure out.
SteamOS is really about bringing that final experience to the most number of people, and I am really supportive of their efforts!
Hmm, At least on Mint there is no trickery to get Windows games running on Steam.
Install Steam, install game, play it. That is mostly it.
Very few games require some fiddling with Proton versions, but I reckon that the fiddling would be the same on SteamOS.
My desktop has dual boot Windows and Linux, but I've never bothered playing games on Linux.
Maybe I'll try to dual boot Linux and SteamOS, just to have a "safe" and working Steam environment.
Mostly there isn't any difference. I run steam just fine in Mint, it works about as well as my Steam deck, which is to say very well. I guess there is some optimisation and default settings more aligned to the purpose on Steam OS.
That's basically it, just easier. SteamOS is like Ubuntu, comes with bunch of stuff integrated and tested together for a easier end-user experience, but you could build your own Ubuntu, starting with a base Debian install. Same with SteamOS with Arch (or Manjaro which I think is what they actually use?)
They use Arch as a base.
Pretty much just the UI. SteamOS is better suited for handhelds and TV screens and wherever you don't want a full desktop experience, just a game launcher.
Not much different, but there is steam exclusive mode, essentially straight to big picture and nothing else.
The other day I flipped a switch somewhere in Steam on Linux and games previously marked as "Available for Windows" suddenly started installing and, more importantly, working.
I dare say this is a game changer.
I would love for Linux gaming to take off and displace Windows. The current direction is very promising, but there has been roadblocks. Notably, Respawn decided to forbid Linux users last year[0].
0: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1gh3aik/apex_legends...
Linux gaming became pretty good on PC too. Steam and Proton was a significant driver here as well, and we now have completely open-source Steam Proton-like solution too, the Heroic Launcher. Can highly recommend, really easy to set up, and adding a Windows game to it is literally just a few clicks. Same with trying different Proton or Wine packages, you just change the package, and try running it, same as Steam.
I have a living room PC I use for couch gaming. I'm waiting for SteamOS to be compatible with it! (nvidia gpu) I'll 100% install SteamOS on there ASAP.
Linux gaming is great. Running Bazzite myself, but for proper support you should run full AMD (CPU and GPU). Nvidia drivers seem to be a pain in the arse.
Microsoft won’t care.
Microsoft lost interest in Windows. It doesn’t care what windows users want, it just wants to wring every dime out of it with crap ware and artificial restrictions on hardware so you can’t run it in your perfectly capable old machines.
It’s time for better options on the Intel platform.
I have been using https://cachyos.org/ with the "Handheld" build with great success for the last 3 months. Best of both worlds, Arch Linux for work and Steam for gaming (as long as the game is Steam Deck compatible).
Does Adobe Lightroom run in proton these days? Would be amazing if one could use SteamOS for photo editing and such.
darktable or Rawtherapee will probably run just fine on the SteamDeck!
Well, if someone hasn't left Windows for Linux because of Lightroom even though Darktable exists there, then I doubt they're going to leave Windows for SteamOS because Darktable.
(Darktable is great, but network effects and integrations keep people in Lightroom; stuff like youtube videos, uploader plugins to gallery sites, presets, education and shared knowledge among photographers.)
Nope
Does anyone know if titles like FIFA/FC25 work seamlessly on linux devices with proton / whatever the best gaming software is? I remember Wine having a lot of trouble with past FIFA titles.
Looks like the last few FIFA/FC games are no-go on the Steam Deck, so I would presume not: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1811260/EA_SPORTS_FIFA_23...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2195250/EA_SPORTS_FC_24/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2669320/EA_SPORTS_FC_25/
There's a little "Steam Deck Compatibility" section that currently says "Unsupported".
EA introduced their own kernel-level EA anti-cheat which makes it impossible to run their games through wine/proton.
ProtonDB is the place for that information. It reports FIFA23 is Borked [0] but FIFA22 works pretty well [1].
[0] https://www.protondb.com/app/1811260
[1] https://www.protondb.com/app/1506830
FIFA22 works well for some values of well: when the EA launcher is not acting up, which happens often, you might still need to set some flags in the config file, which sometimes get reverted.
It is true that if you manage to start it at all, it works completely fine.
I can’t wait for Windows’ monopoly on PC gaming to end after the atrocious windows 11 and them trying to force recall.
If Steam OS can run productivity software like 3ds max, maya, photoshop and etc. I will leave windows and never look back.
I mean, if they add a code editor, terminal, and browser to steam, that should be it (at least for me). I guess I could just use a cloud IDE.
There really is absolutely nothing about Windows I use other than clicking games on Steam.
Gamers keep Windows relevant and fresh. Once we’re gone, it really will be a legacy OS that people still use because their printer won’t work with shit else.
It already has a code editor, terminal and browser. You just boot into the desktop mode and they're all there already (and you can install new ones if you don't like the preinstalled ones). It's a full KDE Plasma desktop environment. Plug in a keyboard, mouse and monitor and stash the SteamDeck under your desk and nobody would even know.
You can even register these as 'non-steam-games' to your Steam install and then you can open them from the regular non-desktop interface. I do this with Discord and Firefox.
As far as I know, you can drop back to desktop mode on SteamOS and be on your way.
It's a real KDE Plasma desktop too, not some joke that is just there to check a box!
Yeap, already a fact with the current deck. Just plug it in your laptop's type-c dock and run Desktop mode.
you can switch to desktop mode once, install all these from its builtin app store, and add them to Steam launcher, then you are good to go.
Interesting. How does it handle window management because that’s pretty much the main mechanical workflow of the developer. We are simply typing and alt-tabbing to see the output.
It's KDE, so it's got very fully-fledged window management.
I always theorized that what keeps Wondows relevant is mainly games and Office. It's what keep people stuck there.
With gaming quickly moving to Linux, especially with support of Valve, I wonder if there is an opportunity to disrupt Office. While Libre Office suffice for my needs, I understand that it may lack for more professional usage.
Hopefully gamers don't adopt the Tim Sweeney "strategy" to try to fix Windows: https://x.com/timsweeneyepic/status/964284402741149698
I won’t switch to Linux for gaming until there’s a Linux version of Reshade. And, no, vkBasalt is not the same.
There is built-in support for some reshade functionality in SteamOS's gamescope. But by how adamant you are, I'm sure you already knew about it, and it's shortcomings.
https://github.com/safijari/Reshadeck
For others, the built in support is enough if you'd like to apply some retro shading "filters" to a game or two you play. I really enjoy this VHS effect for games like The Messenger and Slipstream https://github.com/safijari/Reshadeck/blob/main/defaults/sha...
First they ignore you
.. then they laugh at you
.. then they fight you
.. then you win.
This comes from an old Red Hat Linux advert, likely way back to the late 1990s. At the end of the advert it says "you are here" which shows an old-style plane (before commercial) about to take off. Point is its just a matter of time it leaves the ground and "about to win"
Love or hate GNU/Linux, but it has been extremely successful and while not a winner in the desktop field - it has on servers!
Many people would never believe Linux getting the popularity it deserves. Of course things are changing - though slowly. Here we have Linux getting the love it needs as a serious gaming system anf Microsoft making some poor decision in the last couple of years especially with Windows.
Still a long way to go, especially breaking into the corporate world. Imagine - we could be seeing business laptops/desktops slowing gaining in Linux rather than Windows. That is not going to be easy. Again, it is not about Linux -- but the SOFTWARE. If the Office-space software and tools get more love in the Linux world, Microsoft start to focus away from their Windows platform and be purely about Software/Azure focus.
"You are here" -- getting closer off the ground!
Just yesterday the news was Nvidia's personal AI supercomputer (on Linux). Today the news is about gaming and SteamOS. The "cloud" is already for decades overwhelmingly Linux. There are remarkable devices (pun) [1] based on Linux. Whether for fun or serious work, if we connect the dots the future is Linux, or at least Linux-like.
Yes, it is a painfully slow journey. People acting as individuals or in organizations have enormous inertia (which is not totally a bad thing- upgrading a Linux desktop is still a dance at the precipice). But the real cause is mostly the extreme centralization and suppression of competition in the broader tech space. This has not helped the adoption of mass-market oriented devices based on Linux. But slowly the wheels of computing history are turning...
[1] - https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
Linux dominates supercomputers for a long time: https://itsfoss.com/linux-runs-top-supercomputers/
To the degree the phrase "a supercomputer in your pocket" stops being an empty marketing term and reflects real empowerment of users I would expect Linux to get ever more exposed to mass markets. But this development is predicated on non-technical users somehow becoming aware and valuing the agency and empowerment that a FOSS personal computing environment affords them.
These days the smartphone is the (very) Personal Computer for a lot of people.
Remember how Android is technically Linux ?
The risk here is for SteamOS to go the Android way...
but I have more faith in today's Valve than in Google of a ~decade ago.
At least for now, while Valve is still a private company and Gabe Newell is still leading it and still seems to be in good health and sound mind.
Sadly, this will probably only last for a couple of decades at best, but hopefully this is all the time that Linux (and libre software in general) needs.
FYI that quote originates neither from Red Hat, nor from Gandhi (the usual misattribution).
Consensus attribution appears to be: Union leader Nicholas Klein in 1914:
> And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
Thumbs up!
Yes, I was aware this quote was from elsewhere... and likely inherits from others as well.
Thank you for sharing.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5EkkMfjetEY&pp=ygUNVHJ1dGggaGF...
> They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Just because you are somewhere on that sequence, it doesn't mean you have any chance of moving forward. Also, most things don't follow those steps at all.
But yeah, those are the steps that "disruptive innovation" follow. The real kind, that the famous book was written about. Not the bullshit kind that people throw around to confuse others.
(Also, apparently, Carl Sagan wasn't much of a history nerd, just a physics one. I expected that phrase coming from somebody else. But well, at the time people knew very little about things that were not their specialty.)
They were correct to laugh at Columbus. He wanted to sail to India, everyone told him (correctly, because they weren't naive about the basic geography) that the distance was much too far. He lucked into finding an unknown landmass that wasn't India.
Windows is really only around in our household so the kids can occasionally play Minecraft with other kids that use tablets. Without that, Windows is gone, and good riddance. It's always 10X more difficult to deal with than either macOS or Linux.
Minecraft on iPad is the way to go, then you can be off the Windows train entirely.
I thought a self hosted minetest server with the weirdest mods was the way to go.
Minecraft java version works perfectly on Linux.
Dang, never thought Windows dominance will be upended by gaming.
The article mentions some prices but never presents an apples to apples comparison between the price for a similarly configured device with windows and steamOS.
I’m curious to know how much Microsoft charges for these licenses
The Legion Go S with Windows will cost $599 and the Legion Go S with SteamOS will cost $499. I suppose those will be the same hardware wise. So a $100 difference
https://www.tomsguide.com/gaming/handheld-gaming/lenovo-legi...
Windows version of the handheld will have 500gb more storage than SteamOS.
wow, this is a good promotion for SteamOS models, as pre-install windows license should cost Lenovo $5 or less afaik.
I guess part of it is that users vaguely know how much the windows license costs them and will accept that kinda price increase on top for windows?
very comfortable margin for Lenovo there
People may also be under the impression that Microsoft charges a similar price for Windows as they do to individuals. Which is about $180 for Home edition in my country, Brazil.
It's not really a cost issue. Windows UX sucks on small handhelds. It's just not made for that form factor. SteamOS was.
I have a collection of games on steam going back decades, its the only thing keeping me on windows these days; really excited to see this in action.
I have good news for you, as someone with a 1000+ gaming library spanning 2 decades.
Most older games on steam run seamlessly on Linux these days (I have been gaming on Mint for 3 years at this point).
Also, with some minor tinkering, you can get games you acquired on GoG (or even some you may have lying around that you pillaged when sailing the high seas) running smoothly using Lutris.
If emulation is your thing, Retroarch is a marvel, better than playing on original hardware in many ways, and treat Linux as first-class citizen.
The only thing that should stop you is some modern online competitive games that require nasty anti-cheat software. Those games are cancer anyway, and should be avoided.
If gaming is holding you back on Windows, I am mostly confident you can unshackle yourself brother.
That's really good to hear, thank you for letting me know!
If you want to check if some specific game runs well on Proton (basically the compatibility layer Steam uses to run Windows games on Linux), you can check it out on https://www.protondb.com/
It focus on Steam Deck, but if it runs on Steam Deck, it should run at least on any Debian-based distro.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42625139
Legion Go owner here. I bought a "Windows gaming" device specifically because I have a library of games that spans across multiple vendors, not just Steam. Not only does my Legion Go have a decent "unified UI" for launching games, I can easily launch Steam in Big Picture mode. Touch on Windows 11 is surprisingly decent.
The only downside to all of these new portable gaming are the docks, and the living room experience. "HDMI out" usually works (depending on the game), but it's not as seamless as simply hitting power on your PS5/Xbox. I spend way too much time fiddling with graphics settings, and second/mirror/display issues.
You can use games from other vendors on SteamOS no problem. There's tools like Heroic, Junk Store and Lutris that make it really really easy. The only exception is that there isn't AFAIK a way to use purchases from the Microsoft Store, but Epic, GOG, etc. are all fine assuming the game itself doesn't have some underlying issue.
SteamOS docking experience generally works pretty well too IME, although we still need a damn controller with dual trackpads that mimics the Deck's layout.
> There's tools like Heroic, Junk Store and Lutris that make it really really easy. The only exception is that there isn't AFAIK a way to use purchases from the Microsoft Store, but Epic, GOG, etc. are all fine assuming the game itself doesn't have some underlying issue.
But with Windows I don't need to do any of that - and that's my point. I don't need to install additional apps, configure workarounds or hacks.
I turn on my Legion Go, enter my Windows pin and then launch whatever game I want using the built in UI or Steam or Epic etc. Why would I complicate that?
Did you install Steam and Epic? It's really stupidly easy to install something like Heroic. Like the same level of difficulty as installing Epic. And it will even add games automatically to Steam for you.
My Legion Go has a unified launcher, at this point I don't even know what we're arguing about. The goal is the same, play all my games regardless of platform with minimal hassle. I don't have any issues doing this on my Legion Go with Windows. How would a Steam Deck be a net benefit?
My point is it's not difficult at all to use games from other launchers on a Steam Deck/Steam OS and you still benefit from the controller focused UI.