Linux

This is so great to see, and the timing is perfect.

My son already calls the PC Steam, as in “we played game A on Xbox and game B on Steam,” so maybe by the time he has a PC in his room Steam really will run the whole platform.

I thought this had already happened?

I remember seeing ads on Steam for SteamOS years ago—wasn’t there a point at which you could download and run it on your own computer? What happened?

let's goooo

This is the fifth person I see misinterpreting what Steve said about doing Linux performance testing, they aren't going to start doing this soon, they will only start doing it WHEN SteamOS is released for desktops! It was very clear on the video FFS

I'm also really fucking excited for that tho, I recently switched to mint and helldivers 2 actually feels smoother than on windows, it has been such a good experience!! I cannot imagine how much better things will get with more people jumping to Linux and thus game makers actually pay attention to us

Every game I bought on Steam under Windows runs great on Steam in Linux Mint. The few games I didn't buy on Steam (Deus Ex, Giants: Citizen Kabuto) run great on Wine, using the default settings.

Adopting Proton was the smartest thing Valve ever did. They're going to get about 90% of gamers migrating from Windows to Linux, who don't want to fiddle with configuration settings.

I just build a new gaming/creative pc, decided to make the jump to linux mint while i was setting up something new. And I honestly expected more hickups than i got, nothing which a quick search didn't fix except for one. My xbox controller won't connect over Bluetooth, it works when connected through a cable though. But I also noticed some stick drift, so I'm tossing it and order an 8bitdo which has those magentic sticks (forgot the name) and linux compatibility.

I saw a post on bluesky saying Steamdeck can't be widely adopted because of linux. I asked why is that the case? He says "Linux doesn't run as many games as windows ". I said "only a few and the anti cheat ones". He kept arguing. I asked him about nintendo and he goes "It has the games to back it up" and I blocked him lol.

Millions of games are not enough because its FOMO.

I've been using Linux exclusively for ~14 years now. Heavily gaming on Linux only for the last ~8 years.

It was possible (though sometimes headache inducing) to play most games back then (Wine and soon Proton to thank) the biggest change IMHO came with SteamPlay since it turned the headache into one click on most games (thanks to the amazing work of wine/proton developers and the tinkering of the community).

When the SteamDeck released people seemed surprised at the breadth of games that were running on day one. To me it was not really a surprise since I had been Linux gaming with SteamPlay all the time and was almost expecting games to "just work" (though I still would and still am checking ProtonDB before purchase).

What the SteamDeck changed in my view was

1. Showing "everyone" that Linux Gaming is a thing that's happening and been happening for a while. So maybe check it out?
2. That a Handheld that doesn't have to work around Windows but uses a purpose built OS just makes a lot more sense

I feel that the SteamDeck with SteamOS has really put Linux, especially Linux gaming on the map. Even though I want to be like "Linux Gaming has been a thing forever, I was doing it before it was cool" ;) I have to recognize that fact. In the past years I've seen so many people setting up Linux especially by the way of SteamOS (using HoloISO, Chimera ...) just to play/mess with it which is also why I think an Official SteamOS release will make a huge difference.

Tl;dr: Gaming on Linux was a thing before. But the SteamDeck/SteamOS 3 made a huge impact nonetheless.

To anyone reading this thinking "once SteamOS comes out, I'll switch", you should know:

Gaming on Linux is already here. Pick a distro and game. You can take advantage of Proton right now. You don't need to wait for one specific distro.

I've personally been gaming on Linux exclusively for about 3 years. Windows games, not Linux games.

Edit: based on other commenters' suggestions, I'll give you some.

I have gamed for those three years on PopOS. It is a distro based on Debian, ultimately, which means it's also related to Ubuntu and Mint. Realistically, you can pick any of those 4 and you should have a nice experience.

Arch is popular with the übergeeks, and I do use it on my laptop, BTW, but you shouldn't use it as a first distro.

The concept of "distro" doesn't really exist for Windows, because you pretty much get one monolithic product. But basically, it is a specific mix of software that works together and relies on the Linux kernel. Imagine it as a "version" of Windows with specific goals, some of which are overlapping (e.g. Mint and Ubuntu tend to cater to the same audience).

If you get far enough into it, the freedom that Linux allows means that you can turn any distro into any other distro.

When SteamOS releases on all devices people will say "I'll switch when every peice of Windows software is compatible" or some other unreasonable and impossible accomplishment. Even if every peice of Windows software was compatible people would say "ill switch to Linux when it looks and functions identically to Windows".