SteamOS is Valve’s Linux-based operating system. It features a seamless user experience optimized for gaming, while retaining access to the power and flexibility of a PC, and plays tens of thousands of games on Steam. SteamOS officially ships on Steam Deck, and will soon ship with certain Legion Go S models. We’re currently working on adding support for more devices.
Will it though? I love what Valve has done for the linux community. But didn’t they abandon Steam OS 2 too? Why will it be better this time? I feel like they would only give official support for handhelds/systems that are officially released with it.
It’s normal for old versions of an OS to stop receiving support after a new version replaces it. That’s not unique to steam OS. if I install an old version of bazzite, or any deprecated Linux kernel, modern apps will not necessarily be made backwards compatible with it.
But steam OS will have more installs than any other Linux variant just because of Valve’s brand recognition alone and the FOSS community will target it as their primary platform for software compatibility as a result.
This is the big reason why I want to hop aboard an Arch SteamOS desktop train. If I ever have to wrangle with technical issues, or goddess forbid, the terminal, I want the documentation to be there to walk me through it. My first attempt at transitioning over to Linux Mint didn’t work out, since there were technical issues that got in the way of fully replacing Windows 11.
Having reliable compatibility reduces the need for documentation, and a standardized platform for the documentation helps even more.
What’s important right now is converting people away from windows. I expect Steam OS 3 to be much more beginner friendly than any other distro. If an average PC gamers first impression of linux is constant troubleshooting, they’re not going to try another kernel; they’re just going to go back to windows.
Even if valve stops support later, they will have still introduced many people to linux in a beginner friendly way and wrestled the gaming ecosystem out of microsoft’s grip that much more.
Other distros have been competing forever. SteamOS is built on top of Arch, which updates multiple times per day. Valve pushes a lot of updates tied to the Steam experience, some of them are also shared with normal Linux desktops, so that makes it somewhat of a moot argument. I run normal Linux (Fedora Workstation) and play games with Steam, and they run the same as my Deck, even day 1 releases.
Like, I get the appeal of a Valve-blessed Linux flavor, but as far as their stack goes, the Linux side of SteamOS is somewhat conservative (not many updates) and limited (due to read-only OS images) compared to normal Linux distros and the gaming side also gets pushed to all Linux distros. As a Steam Deck owner, I personally think Bazzite is more interesting for a real world gaming desktop usage than SteamOS, where you can’t even print documents because it lacks the required stack!
To show how conservative it is, I call recall a few examples:
The desktop side, which runs the KDE Plasma desktop, was stuck on version 5.27 for ages and just got recently updated to 6.2. Meanwhile, Arch and Fedora/Bazzite are rocking Plasma 6.3 and should receive Plasma 6.4 in a month or so, pretty much day one.
The Linux kernel (although patched and tweaked) in SteamOS was still on 6.5 until a few days ago. It was bumped to 6.11 with SteamOS 3.7. Meanwhile, Arch and Fedora have been on 6.14 for weeks now, with new hardware support, performance fixes for existing hardware and some new features.
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Why wait for steam os? Bazzite and others already do everything steam os does and probably better and more.
I agree but steam OS is going to be a hell of a lot more popular and have more support as a result.
Just don’t tell people is Linux, they’ll switch for steam and get out of windows’ grasp
Sure, but it’s not available yet. Someone interested in Steam OS would probably be happy with Bazzite today.
Steam constantly updates their ID. I agree with you.
Will it though? I love what Valve has done for the linux community. But didn’t they abandon Steam OS 2 too? Why will it be better this time? I feel like they would only give official support for handhelds/systems that are officially released with it.
It’s normal for old versions of an OS to stop receiving support after a new version replaces it. That’s not unique to steam OS. if I install an old version of bazzite, or any deprecated Linux kernel, modern apps will not necessarily be made backwards compatible with it.
But steam OS will have more installs than any other Linux variant just because of Valve’s brand recognition alone and the FOSS community will target it as their primary platform for software compatibility as a result.
This is the big reason why I want to hop aboard an Arch SteamOS desktop train. If I ever have to wrangle with technical issues, or goddess forbid, the terminal, I want the documentation to be there to walk me through it. My first attempt at transitioning over to Linux Mint didn’t work out, since there were technical issues that got in the way of fully replacing Windows 11.
Having reliable compatibility reduces the need for documentation, and a standardized platform for the documentation helps even more.
Its normal when there is a new release. But steam OS 2 was abandoned long before version 3 came around.
What’s important right now is converting people away from windows. I expect Steam OS 3 to be much more beginner friendly than any other distro. If an average PC gamers first impression of linux is constant troubleshooting, they’re not going to try another kernel; they’re just going to go back to windows.
Even if valve stops support later, they will have still introduced many people to linux in a beginner friendly way and wrestled the gaming ecosystem out of microsoft’s grip that much more.
Other Linux distro can’t compete with valve. Valve constantly updates their OS and drivers. There is no way other distro can compete.
I have a steam deck. Valve releases updates almost once a month.
Other distros have been competing forever. SteamOS is built on top of Arch, which updates multiple times per day. Valve pushes a lot of updates tied to the Steam experience, some of them are also shared with normal Linux desktops, so that makes it somewhat of a moot argument. I run normal Linux (Fedora Workstation) and play games with Steam, and they run the same as my Deck, even day 1 releases.
Like, I get the appeal of a Valve-blessed Linux flavor, but as far as their stack goes, the Linux side of SteamOS is somewhat conservative (not many updates) and limited (due to read-only OS images) compared to normal Linux distros and the gaming side also gets pushed to all Linux distros. As a Steam Deck owner, I personally think Bazzite is more interesting for a real world gaming desktop usage than SteamOS, where you can’t even print documents because it lacks the required stack!
To show how conservative it is, I call recall a few examples:
Arch releases updates every day (sometimes multiple times per day). Idk about Bazzite’s cadence, but I’m guessing it’s at least weekly, if not daily.