I like SteamOS a great deal, though it's not my daily driver (yet). I'm curious if people will begin to use it as a daily driver and thus expect Valve to be an OS developer on top of creating software for their gaming hardware. That's a different set of expectations and I wonder how they'll navigate it.

▲

embedding-shape 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> thus expect Valve to be an OS developer on top of creating software for their gaming hardware. That's a different set of expectations and I wonder how they'll navigate it.

They've been doing it since Steam Deck launched, or even since they started to contribute to Proton/Wine (depending on exactly what you see "OS" to be). They seem to have grips on it more or less already, Deck upgrades are a breeze and the machine and software itself is open enough for a Linux hacker like me to be very comfortable on it, and also closed down enough for my nieces to not be able to brick theirs by just tapping around.

▲

keyringlight 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They seem to have worked it out well by limiting SteamOS to their hardware, so they don't have to handle all the varieties a regular distro has to. There's a significant number of people who want an 'official' release as a regular installable distro but I doubt it'll happen and Valve are happy to delegate that to others

▲

oersted 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Indeed, even much earlier. With Steam Deck they achieved wider adoption but the first generation of Steam Machines came out in 2015 and they have been committed to the SteamOS linux distro since then.

	▲	embedding-shape 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I'm sure you're right overall, they've been at it for a long time. I think it's worth keeping in mind that all of the SteamOS'es before Steam Deck were pretty much nothing like the current (3.0) iteration. If I recall correctly, I think they were based on Ubuntu or Debian, compared to the current Arch Linux distribution.

▲

mhitza 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've used SteamOS as a daily driver for half a year. Immutable distros have limitations and my distrobox images failed to work after a SteamOS update.

If you're ok with running work stuff in a separate VM within SteamOS, that works great. Using Geekbench I saw only a 5% cpu performance penalty. Io takes a bigger hit, but that wasn't a blocker for me as I was intending to run VMs with encrypted storage anyway (which adds even more latency) but still a good experience for my work.

▲

jvanderbot 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Linux is my daily driver, and I run steam to play games (though, not on a work linux partition for reasons).

It can run just about everything I want to play, but yes, there are plenty of things that don't work yet. Doom Dark Ages, for example.

▲

TiredOfLife 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I have been using Steam Deck oled as my main computing device for 2 years. It has been amazing. It's fast and silent.