Steam Ate Microsoft's Lunch On PC, It's About To Do The Same On Handhelds
As Valve gets ready to bring Steam Deck's OS to more platforms, Microsoft is out of time
Boots up gaming PC
Windows: "YOU IN DANGER ZONE! NEED WINDOWS 11! BUY NEW PC U SCRUB!!!111"
Load up Steam
Steam: "Hey, I see MS are being assholes - click here to install SteamOS instead"
Reboot PC
Millions of people never run windows again
I'm dreaming but that would be amazing. That would make this the year of the Linux desktop. C'mon GabeN, make it happen!
Things which are holding this back
What we know so far, SteamOS won't be a general purpose OS, so it might not support every random piece of h/w.
We might not have the year of the Linux Desktop, but we can expect 2025-2026 to be the year of the Linux handheld.
SRC: Linux fanboy for the last decade
Choice paralysis is a surprisingly big issue.
I'm waiting for the parts for my new gaming PC build to arrive, and the amount of time I've spent choosing a distro has been asinine.
But I did make the choice to leave both the NVIDIA and Windows eco systems on my desktop after seeing most my games run fine on the steam deck ( along with disliking windows 11, and NVIDIA ending gamestream support)
We might not have the year of the Linux Desktop, but we can expect 2025-2026 to be the year of the Linux handheld.
I would argue that year of the Linux handheld has been since the deck dropped. There's been nothing that's anywhere near the solid experience of a Steam Deck. Every competitor is releasing with windows, and all I ever hear from the people I know who bought one of those is that they like it....now that they're running Bazzite. The ones that aren't releasing with windows are doing android, and while I get a whole bunch of gaming from my various android devices, until I can play pc games unported they aren't competing in the same space.
That would be a massive headache because you'd have to make it work on any hardware. And if you bork your users' PCs you're in for a really bad time. It would be much better to come up with a new Steam machine.
Does anybody remember Wubi? It was Linux that was installed on Windows just like a regular program. Gave you an option to choose Linux on boot. It didn't make any partitions, and if you didn't want it anymore? Then you'd go to Windows and uninstall like any other program. It had a few limitations but was an interesting concept.
Of course! It's what got me started!
I love it as a concept, and frankly a dual boot installer (create partitions) that worked from Windows would be pretty useful I think. USB/disk installs add complexity that just hurt the chances.
Are you sure you don't want to create a microsoft ID? Microsoft believes that you should only trust them with all of your data and credentials. They promise they won't hand over your information to the government unless the government serves them a subpoena or has an agreement to access the data that is lawful or they detect something they have been asked to report.
"It erased pictures of my nana, Im going to sue Gabe Newell!" Windows users 🙄🙄
(I am that user)
You forgot the endless pages of trick questions you have to periodically step through to get into Windows. One wrong move and you owe Microsoft money every month.
If Linux had better nvidia support I would swap in a heart beat.
AMD's RT performance is getting quite close to Nvidia. Each generation gets them closer and closer.
CUDA will always be proprietary but there's a ton of resources being put against alternative solutions.
I have been running OpenSUSE with nVidia for 7 years. No issues here.
I am happy going cold turkey to fedora. Windows is the less user friendly and functional experience considering i didn't even need to scour the internet for my weird audio device or graphics tablet drivers. Also steam uses multible times more ram than the os and my phone messages are on the screen and clipboard gets shared.
I hope that SteamOS finds more of its way into desktop computers. Sure, I don't trust Valve; just like I don't trust any other corporation. But it's like fighting a big cancer with a smaller meta-cancer, if they hurt Windows/Microsoft I'm happy.
Plus its current relationship with GNU/Linux is symbiotic.
Valve is the chemotherapy/radiation to Microsoft. Not quite a cure but both are still deadly.
Why is steam/valve bad?
They are a privately owned company with 100% focus on customer service and sustainably.
Yeah they charge like 10% of profit for the games on there, and more if you make it big. To be on the only platform where people actually shop for PC games...
Nobody has ever given me a real problem with Steam where some other company isn't already doing significantly worse shit in comparison.
Remember when Google's motto was "don't be evil"? Remember when Facebook was innovative? Remember when [insert any post-IPO platform] was privately owned?
Look at the past and future, not just the present. Corporations eventually go sour, and fight against the very users that they were supposed to serve. Give Steam/Valve enough power and it'll do the same. We don't need corporations serving us software; we need open systems.
That said Valve is situationally useful here because it's eroding Microsoft's power.
The way I see it, they are the lesser of two evils. Just because someone isn't as bad a Microsoft, doesn't mean that they are forgiven for their sins.
Predatory lootboxes, and not cracking down on CSGO Gambling site are the biggest sins which Valve has committed.
Going beyond that, no clear path forward for when the Steam DRM Client goes offline. I personally have games which I bought on legacy hardware, that no longer runs on that hardware since Steam discontinued support for it. I don't expect Valve to support all hardware indefinitely, however I can buy the same game from GOG, and install it on my XP and Win 7 machines without issue.
I am certain that there are other issues, and compared to MS they look like a saint. But for me I diversify my game library and get as much of my games DRM Free or on a platform which has a proven track record for supporting not just their current purchases but also legacy ones.
Beat Sony with a stick all you want. Despite the PSP being 21 years old this year, if I can connect my PSP to the internet, I can still download my digital PSP PSM and PS1 games.
I'm generally a fan of Valve (at least historically), but at least recently some stuff has come out about them propping up a billion dollar gambling industry via CounterStrike skins. It's full of legal loopholes to avoid being classified as actual gambling, thus allowing underage users to get addicted to casino mechanics. This might actually be Valve's current biggest profit center in recent years.
They did help usher in the age of microtransactions and lootboxes with their CS and TF2 stuff. That's about the only major bad thing I can think of that they haven't been particularly apologetic about.
Yeah they charge like 10% of profit for the games on there, and more if you make it big.
Which is the same as the vast majority of every other store (video game or otherwise). It's really only a factor because Epic keeps bringing it up as a reason they're better than Steam, and should be allowed to be the monopoly instead (though they don't explicitly state that part).
(Near) Monopolies are just inherently bad. Steam will enshittify further, like all the others. Let's talk again after Gabe kicks the bucket.
I think they charge 30% but yeah.
100% focus on customer service
Lol
They charge 30%, and less if you make it big
30%
Not the only platform
Glorified downloader with DRM
Yeah, I don't think Microsoft has ever understood or cared how much pc gaming has added value to windows.
Which makes the strategic defeat here of failing to understand they are fucked longterm all the more satisfying.
Microsoft understood in the 90s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2V9TFrmQ_Q
St. John recognized the resistances for game development under Windows would be a limitation, and recruited two additional engineers, Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom, to develop a better solution to get more programmers to develop games for Windows. The project was codenamed the Manhattan Project, like the World War II project of the same name, and the idea was to displace the Japanese-developed video game consoles with personal computers running Microsoft's operating system.
To get more developers on board DirectX, Microsoft approached id Software's John Carmack and offered to port Doom and Doom 2 from MS-DOS to DirectX, free of charge, with id retaining all publishing rights to the game. Carmack agreed, and Microsoft's Gabe Newell led the porting project. The first game was released as Doom 95 in August 1996, the first published DirectX game. Microsoft promoted the game heavily with Bill Gates appearing in ads for the title.
It's kind of wild how much Microsoft failed to capitalize on PC gaming over the last 20 years. Arguably PC Gaming has thrived in spite of them, not because of them.
Valve was smart to understand how Microsoft could threaten their business model but it barely mattered considering how many rakes Microsoft stepped on over the years. Don't even get me started on Games For Windows Live.
Unrelated tidbit gleaned from reading the entry:
the name "DirectX" came from one journalist that had mocked the naming scheme of the various libraries. The team opted to continue to use that naming scheme and call the project DirectX.
[...]codenamed the Manhattan Project, like the World War II project of the same name, and the idea was to displace the Japanese[...]
a bit on the nose huh
Microsoft recently announced a handheld for Xbox. They’re going to half ass this they way they did with windows phone.
Steam needs to drop a whole OS for PC.
https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown
You can install it yourself on PC.
Note that the SteamOS download on that page is NOT the current version of SteamOS used on the Steam Deck, it's the 2-3 year old version that Valve released a while back and doesn't have most any of the actual improvements to SteamOS that make it worthwhile. The only way to get the current SteamOS is to download the recovery image for the Steam Deck at https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2BB3 and install from there.
Linus from LTT did a video about getting it up and running here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdR-bxvQKN8
EDIT: As per usual, Linus didn't do good research and was incorrect about the SteamOS version available at that link, updated to strike the incorrect info.
That's still steamos2, based on debian 8 (current is debian 12). What's on the Steam deck is much more recent, usable and stable.
There's some user made distros that are basically just like steamos3 though, but at that point you may just as well install a mainstream linux distribution and simply install steam on it.
SteamOS 3.0 should get out there for generic PCs pretty soon, in the meantime there's Bazzite.
It's in the works. Valve is working to develop SteamOS for other devices, including PC.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/6/24315098/valve-steam-machines-steamos-steam-deck-vr
Just install Mint or Bazzite, Steam OS is intentionally locked down more than it needs to be.
Huh. I never even considered the possibility of putting SteamOS on a laptop/desktop... I have a spare engineering laptop sitting around, might try it.
I completely advocate for it. It costs you nothing but time and disk space. You can still run games from other sources with only slight tinkering.
Open source is so beneficial for humanity and for gaming there aren't really downsides for tons and tons of games.
You lose all the spyware from microsoft, the incessant mandatory patching and upgrade notifications and loads of other things that provide no value.
Nothing stops you from being able to dual boot windows or run it in a VM either.
SteamOS installs for laptops aren't supported yet. If you want something alike consider Bazzite
I have bazzite on my laptop since I was too lazy to set up arch, fedora, debian, etc for gaming. It's ready to play installed with steam and everything.
Afaik SteamOS still only supports very limited hardware configurations similar to the steam deck, for example only AMD GPU are supported (Nvidia is in beta support as of recently, I think?).
I thought that was still not officially available, only forks or rebuilds of sorts?
They have to publish kernel edits,
As far as I am aware it’s just Arch with gamescope though so you aren’t gaining anything from using SteamOS 3 compared to a typical Linux build
What would be the advantage of installing it on a laptop? Can't you just run steam on Ubuntu or whatever and use Big Picture mode?
You should check out bazzite
I love my Steam Deck, play it all the time and I've discovered new games, that I wouldn't have considered buying before had I been tied to a desk, like Visual Novels, I've played so many in the year I've owned my Deck
Hell yeah Visual novels on Steam Deck!
I finally got into Steins Gate thanks to Steam Deck. I wasn't able to keep my attention going when I played it on PC.
I haven't picked that one up yet, definitely on my list though
I hope they bring SteamOS to ARM eventually.
It’d be great, but they haven’t even ported the Steam desktop client to 64-bit x86 yet, I feel like we’re going to wait a while for that.
and that’s not even true, they were forced to port it for the Mac, so they’re just sitting on the 64 bit builds for the other OSes for some reason
64-bit brings a lot of benefits - can use more RAM directly, more opcodes and lots more registers allow code to run much more efficiently - but for a programme that I just want to open, click on a couple of times and then for it to be almost completely out of the way, those aren't the biggest selling points. In fact, definitely supporting 32-bit for older games might be better. They might just not want the maintenance headache of supporting two builds.
Microsoft should go to HR about that lunch.