Bye-bye Windows gaming? SteamOS officially expands past the Steam Deck

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.

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".

The fundamental problem is that games require an account... be it Microsoft, Sony or a game specific account.

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.

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

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 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 cannot think about single time it happened, like seriously

Maybe you are using wifi like majority of gamers and blame the wrong thing?

I Pause updates for 7 days and run the updates on a sunday morning

Windows gotta update sometime

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Does steam run on GNU/Hurd?

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".

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.

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.

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.)

> 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!)

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.

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.

> 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 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.

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…

> 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

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.)

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).

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...

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.

... 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.

> 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 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 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.

Interesting, I guess I missed that