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SteamOS expands beyond Steam Deck (upcoming SteamOS beta for other devices)
(store.steampowered.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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Hm. It's a start, I suppose. At this point this seems like it'll cover more or less the same handheld devices Bazzite was doing. The big game changer will be when they figure out desktop PCs, and specifically those on Nvidia cards, I think.
As it is, I may give it a go on my one handhled dual booting Windows and Bazzite to see if it's any better, although Bazzite is just fine already.
I did try Bazzite on a desktop PC with an Intel card at one point and it was... fine? It kinda sorta worked, with enough rough edges that I stil ended up switching back to Windows there. I would like to give that a go with a official Valve distro if and when support is there, but it seems there'll be some more waiting still.
To be honest you can get any decent Linux distro working for games; I run OpenSuSE Tumbleweed with an Nvidia 3070 and it works great. Steam works great, and as desktop it runs perfectly.
I also have a miniPC in my living room that I got after loving my SteamDeck being docked but a bit frustrated by switching between Desktop and the gyroscope modes. I have Nobara running on that, with Steam in big picture mode when I use it, but plenty of other things set up on there too and again it works great. I like to game but also watch twitch or browse the net on it, plus run GOG games via Lutris, and SteamOS isn't really meant for all that even with desktop mode (as it's not default)
So while it's great that SteamOS is coming, I think it's redundant in the desktop space and probably not their prime target. Getting it onto as many handheld PCs as possible is a very good idea and will give Windows a run for its money (Windows + custom interfaces from other handheld manufacturers are all a bit shit right now).
I don't see SteamOS as it stands as a good design for a living room PC or gaming rig; but that's not it's target and I think it's not realistic for people for expect it to be good for that. There is a huge range of hardware to support, while Valve targetting it's own hardware + partners + main competitors in the handheld PC space is manageable.
There are two reasons I disagree with you there.
The least important one is booting straight into Game mode, which is good for TV top boxes meant to act as gaming consoles. I'm mostly fine with autobooting to Steam Big Picture on Windows, but people make a big deal of edge cases where you may need a mouse and keyboard, so the demand is there for a native implementation in living room situations.
The more important one, IMO, is SteamOS's handling of displays, and especially of HDR. I recently spent a not insignificant amount of time and effort trying to get a fairly typical high end desktop setup (Nvidia card, couple of HDR monitors with high refresh rates and different resolutions) on an existing Linux distro and... yeah, it's not good. Not only did I have to try multiple distros and do some manual configuration until I found the right mix to get everything going under Wayland/KDE Plasma, but the end result is kinda flaky still and struggles with going in and out of sleep without breaking everything.
If, and it's a significant if, Valve figured out the sort of display reliabilty they have on Deck for desktop that would be a major step forward. Granted, that's several steps down the line. An endgame solution needs to have out of the box support for all GPUs and their drivers (and good driver support in the first place), reliable support for VRR, support for multiple HDR standards and built-in monitor profiles, support for multimonitor with indepenent scaling and on the fly changes and more. Some of that is already in there on SteamOS, some of that is a long way away.
But it's the bar for success here. That's when I consider switching for real. If someone else figures it out before Valve does, even if it involves building on top of Gamescope, then great, but Valve sure seem to be the closest, at least for gaming-focused setups.
For now I can see them adding support for specific closed hardware specs by certifying third party handhelds and consolized MiniPCs (hi, Steam Machines 2.0), but I won't really perk up my ears until that includes at least one device with a high end dedicated Nvidia GPU and external display support.
I think Bazzite will be way better than SteamOS when it comes to hardware enablement. After all, that's uBlue's main priority.
SteamOS is quite a bit behind when it comes to new features, and HDR/ VRR is improving everyday under KDE.
I didn't use Windows personally for 3 years or so, but I don't miss one thing when it comes to gaming.
Sure, HDR and VRR are still a bit on the experimental side compared to Windows, but even if it doesn't work as great, I wouldn't even miss it when disabled tbh.
The ability to not having to use Windows is far outweighting the lack of some features for me personally.
Well, not for me. I didn't pay all that extra money to have my GPU and monitor do worse color reproduction. It took long enough for Windows to get their ass in gear for modern display support, I'm not keen on waiting another five years for it elsewhere.
And for as much as "having some level of support" is an improvement, it still doesn't work properly on my setup, so Linux is just broken for me, even under the right flavor of KDE.
I do agree with you that I see Bazzite getting there sooner in terms of just widespread hardware support. What I see SteamOS doing first is pointing at specific hardware configs, or rather to specific prebuilt boxes and saying "this will just work". And, you know, actually mean it, not like when Linux advocates say something will just work and then it doesn't.
I think that's a bigger deal than most of the Linux community likes to acknowledge, but I also don't think the Linux community would have a big issue with the idea of SteamOS being paired to specific hardware and then slowly trading reliability for flexibility by one step through Bazzite and by multiple steps by adopting Proton and maybe Gamescope in other distros. That seems like a... very Linux state of affairs.