Valve takes another step toward making SteamOS a true Windows competitor

I also recently built a gaming PC. First I installed Pop!_OS and it worked really well for games. But as I do some work on it, I wanted something with fresh(er) packages, so I installed CachyOS instead. Games still work (Proton is fantastic) and I have access to AUR. Just try installing Linux, gaming on Linux is not bad at all.

May I ask why you want to wait for Steam OS? Especially if you have Linux experience already.

Last year I was fed up with Windows, and switched to Linux. Since I had a lot of experience with Linux already, I went with Arch. I thought it was going to be really difficult. Sure, the initial setup was a lot of work, but now I'm extremely happy with it. Much happier than I ever was running Ubuntu, Mint, etc.

But anyway, nowadays I don't even think about that I'm running Linux anymore. I have a pretty big Steam library and play a lot of games. I install a game, I run it, and play it. I haven't found any instance where it doesn't work yet. Granted, I don't play multi-player games nor games with DRM (I'm a patient gamer, most games I play are >2 years old).

Nothing is stopping you from switching right away. It's not as hard. You can check whether the games you are interested in are supported on protondb

I would suggest checking out Bazzite, if you haven't already. Fantastic gaming-focused linux distro, based on Fedora Kinoite.

Steam OS ob Desktops is entirely pointless.

Why do you care about having that particular Arch derivative? Any mainstream distro (except Ubuntu derivatives) are perfectly usable for gaming.

There really is no point in waiting for Valve to drop their own Arch derivative. It won't do anything you can not do right now.

EU version of windows doesn't have many of these issues.

I'm having a very similar experience here. I finally got a Windows box, hooked it up to my TV, and assumed that everything would just work since I'm on Windows for once. In fact, lots of games will crash on launch, or glitch the display so bad they're unplayable, or ignore my Windows Night Light settings, or not offer the controller support which was promised. Ironically, the games which work best are the ones that worked on Mac/Linux anyway. Presumably, those are the ones where the devs actually put in the work to ensure broad compatibility.

I think there is an opening for SteamOS to create console-type compatibility guarantees for a machine which also doubles as a general-purpose PC. Honestly if Valve doesn't get their act together somehow, I might just switch to a traditional console. I love Steam's Big Picture Mode, but if half my games don't even work, what's the point? (And don't get me started on how they killed the Steam Controller...)

I think they’re showing us how mature user-facing Linux in 2025 really is. With a little focus and investment on the UX for the end user on top of the open source core OS it has already beat any console OS by a mile.

> I believe that Microsoft does not care about Gaming those days.

I’d be interested in hearing you expand on that!

Disclaimer: I work there :-)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer)

Valve tried “steam machines”, OEM devices intended to provide a console-like experience. It wasn’t a big success (although that might have been a botched implementation rather than something fundamentally wrong about the concept, IDK)

Achem, Ubuntu had ads before, I am not sure if this is still the case, but I would not be surprised.

Why the down-vote? Do I need to flood HN with links? It actually had ads. Go ahead and search for it (or ask me), there were ads in more than one places. It even had ads in its motd (and gnome notifications, and somewhere else I forgot)... I do not care if it is your favorite Linux distribution, it ACTUALLY had ads (and might still do) in more than one places.

So "not getting cluttered with ads" is not so certain. Only if they got rid of all ads, but the future is still not certain with regarding to it, as they have done it before without blinking an eye.

See some links https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44079458 for Amazon ads.

Also https://askubuntu.com/questions/1083504/how-to-disable-the-a... for bit.ly links in motd.

If you need more, I am willing to provide.

Windows have definitely lost me. I grew up on Windows (and DOS...) and while there was always loud criticism pointed at Microsoft, personally I loved everything about Windows from 98 to windows 7. I even liked Windows ME (it's really cool, I swear, and it introduced Movie Maker!) and Vista (best Aero theme to date probably) and obviously XP and 7 as the big winners.

But with 10 and 11 Windows became a massive adware, user experience plummeted, and the OS constantly gets in my way.

The only good thing about Windows in 2025 is wsl. So what does that say?

I tried daily driving Mint and I was instantly filled with nostalgia and appreciation for how the OS really tries to help me do whatever I need, gets out of the way, doesn't ask for anything or makes product "suggestions". It's so smooth and simple compared to Windows right now.

Of course it helps that by now I have more than enough Linux experience, but I would still recommend Mint over Windows to most people.

Chromebooks were there over a decade ago.

One small correction, Bazzite isn't built on Steam OS, it's based on Fedora.

I HIGHLY recommend that you do not install niche distros. Larger distributions give you more stability and more features, they are better maintained and supported.

If Valve was serious about Mac as a platform, they would port their Source games, like they ported Portal 1&2 for the Switch. To some extend I understand this, because Apple isn‘t serious either, no matter how often they show me a Dual Sense loitering near a Mac screen.

I think Valve counts Macs as lost.

Even was Steam had a good client for Mac, most gamers on Mac just relied on Bootcamp to play games, so this is what you get...

SteamOS is an Arch Linux derivative with a games compatibility layer called Proton, which is indeed based on Wine.

It has a proprietary launcher for games, but also comes with Plasma Desktop.

There’s like a million little bits of software valve has created over many years all bundled together that make steamos incredible. It’s hard to properly do justice because it’s all tiny bits of polish that are individually fairly uninteresting but all stack up.

I’ve tried using Fedora as my TV gaming rig but steamos is much better as it out of the box has everything you need. No installing extra drivers for things like Xbox controller support. And it has a fully controller navigable OS that lets you do a lot of advanced system management stuff that you’d otherwise need a mouse and keyboard for.

Also for a while now Valve has been the main contributors towards wine and other gaming on Linux projects.

Only market share will change that. The Proton making linux gaming this good is an incredible trojan horse to a more open OS market. The more people use it, the more incentive companies have to support it entirely, not only by making the game run well on the compatibility layer but making it native.

My pipe dream is that Proton becomes so successful that it kills itself by making linux gaming profitable enough to be first party supported. My long wish of having a decent gaming and development environment will finally come true, just in time for me to not care so much about one or the other.