Thank you! I know some people don’t really care for it or consider it spam so i’m thankful that i’ve been allowed to do these by the mods. I really enjoying doing these
SteamOS is a nice modified version of Arch, however and for good reasons it has its limits regarding installing new packages/software. I am not sure this is the best for linux newbies.
I would argue that using an image based system with flatpak is one of the best ways for newbies to transition to Linux. Whether that’s SteamOS, Bazzite, Bluefin or Aurora, that doesn’t matter all that much.
Already prepared everything for the jump. Switched MS Office for LibreOffice, and Outlook for Betterbird. Tested install, configuration and access to backups in a VM. Next vacation I take I’ll go for it. Mint is my choice of Distro, because of Steam/Gaming reasons. With the US being antagonistic, if not outright hostile, right now, and Microsoft having their disgusting Copilot AI Analysis Fingers in everything, it’s the rational choice I think.
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Thanks, that was some great insight. Especially the drawbacks regarding cinnamon. Those are 100% things no normal user should ever have to think or worry about.
Just a small update, I made the switch to EndeavourOS /w XFCE4 about two weeks ago and so far everything works perfectly. Even modern games on Steam w/ Nvidia graphics card. Thanks again.
My biggest issue with Discord is that they have become the default hubs for issues and fixes. Over days, weeks, months and years those fixes get buried and harder to find, but the worst offender is that they are unindexable by default.
Quite a good move from them, although the whole support through Discord is a botched concept per-se.
I'll check the bot too for The Gamer's Tavern, we have a few threads about Linux VR gaming and other Linux gaming/audio stuff worth (maybe?) of being set discoverable
I didn’t even know this, but it does work!!! …apparently.
edit - why the downvote? I’m all ears, please please please just comment why you’d feel me replying with this link (which I didn’t even find, a helpful person elsewhere in the comments found this method for RSS) was a bad thing?
Does Factorio count? It’s a good game, you can play multiplayer, the factory can always grow (at least until your hardware, or in the extreme the software, can no longer handle it) and if you’re grinding for something rather than automating it, you’re doing it wrong.
I guess it counts because you are not grinding, the factories are grinding for you. The problem is that it’s a niche game and not many of my friends would play it
It’s the defacto automation game, and can get pretty wildly funny with multiplayer co-op. Players slot into niches and ted to focus on building out X or Y and when these things meet can be hilarious.
It also has a versus mode where you race to build bases on a shared map and kill your opponents first.
I typically do use my Steam Deck as a Steam Deck and not a GOG Deck, but every time I’m on the go, forgot to explicitly put my Steam Deck in offline mode, and get hit with a license that needs to be reauthenticated, I wish I’d stuck to GOG instead…or that GOG offered the game I’m playing at all. Also, BioShock Infinite is fantastic, and whenever you hear about it now, it tends to be from people who really want you to know that they didn’t like it.
Lately I’ve been playing the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance still, and this one is via GOG. I got to a point where I can do some side quests, so the main story is taking a back seat for a little while. I am enjoying the story and characters, but I do wish they’d made different choices in things like the combat and some of the “realism”-related tedium.
I just beat the base game of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel last night, before moving on to its DLC in my attempt to play through this entire series ahead of Borderlands 4. There are some good levels and bosses, and I liked how my class that I selected works, but the writing is just atrocious. It definitely tried to be funny but rarely had anything that could even be classified as a punchline, as though they’d never actually heard a joke before but heard about jokes.
And then my wife and I are still playing through Blue Prince. We’re making good progress, but I do find myself agreeing with the criticism that the RNG is bringing down the experience. I think if you could draft from 5 rooms at a time instead of 3, it would do wonders for the experience.
I found KCD II made huge improvements over the first. I mean, that’s natural and kinda stupid to say…but it felt more ‘complete’ to me. The first actually had me a bit overwhelmed - there were too many options, too much to do and see. The second while actually expanding that aspect…well it just felt a bit more focused. To me, anyway.
I did install a lot of mods also, to remove some of what I find tedious, but others adore.
It’s weird, because even though I support the idea of modding as you the customer doing what you want with the product you bought, I also usually refuse to do it for a first playthrough, because I want to evaluate the thing that the developer actually delivered when I have an opinion on it. So even if some mod out there removes the tedium, I want to see what the game is like, start to finish, with the tedium included.
The thing is, I don’t think valve wants to become a desktop OS provider. Becoming the provider and maintainer of an OS for hundreds of millions of users is so far beyond their scope as a company. They’ve got a third the employees of Canonical and a fiftieth the employees of RedHat, the companies behind Ubuntu and Fedora. Maintaining a limited scope console/handheld OS that runs on a handful of hardware set ups is one thing, but supporting a fully fledged daily driver desktop OS meant to operate on any system is something else entirely.
Right now, most of their users are on windows, which makes them nervous because Microsoft is a known monopolist and has been slowly creeping deeper in to the PC games space. That’s why Valve has put so much effort in to software to support compatibility on Linux, so there is a viable alternative if Microsoft try’s to push them out. I think the steam deck and steamOS were a means to that end, create a business reason to develop and support those tools, not a first step towards becoming an operating system developer.
A better route forward for them would be to use their reach and public trust to help people make the switch to other extant distros. For example an all in one utility on the steam store that helps people select the right distro for their use case and set it up, have a hardware scan and a little quiz to choose a distro, a hard drive partitioning tool to set up dual boot, a tool to write the ISO to a USB drive (or maybe even just set up a bootable on the disk using the partitioner IDK), and migrate important files over using their cloud system.
If the issue is that people trust stuff with the valve branding on it, but are not willing to try Linux on their own, then Steam acting as a guide is much more practical than Valve taking on all the work needed to maintain a proper distro.
I recognise that for almost any one task, Linux has a solution that works better than Windows. My issue is just getting Linux to run not only one specific thing but all the dozens of programs with each having their own dependencies and possible quirks without losing my mind, weeks of my life, data or all three.
If Valve (or really any other large entity capable of handling this for tens of thousands of users) stepped in to act as the guide for setting it all up in a safe manner and such that it just works without constant need for tweaking (unless you want to stray from the “installation wizard”), I could see Linux gain a big surge in users.
OP clearly overestimates how many people would use SteamOS or any other Linux distro for that matter. Most users are casual gamers these days, they are not changing OS just because there is a forced Windows update.
I don’t know, I think you’re clearly underestimating how many people would install Valve’s OS. The number of people with a Steam Deck that don’t know that what it’s running is a Linux distro is pretty high. The other piece to this is that it’s not just a forced Windows update for a huge chunk of users, it’s a forced device upgrade. Valve offering a free upgrade that negates the need to buy new hardware would absolutely capture people’s attention.
Yes and no, people can still use win10, it just won’t receive patches anymore. And in this particular case, my best guess is, that most people would rather use and outdated OS for a long time, rather than changing the OS altogether. Not every game is on steam, also not every non game programm is easily available for Linux. Humans are lazy.
I think that was them drawing a line on eol windows. They cut both 7 and 8.1 at the same time. Could just be the policy now.
Part of me wants them to take the opportunity to push people to switch to Linux, the other part of me thinks that will be perceived no differently from msft’s badgering about win11.
That would be quite the power move, but unfortunately Steam doesn’t hold that much power alone, I think. There are still enough games that are not on Steam. As of today , Microsoft is the biggest games publisher (with Bethesda, Blizzard, Obsidian, ID, Mojang etc. belonging to them) and there are also giants like LoL or Fortnite.
It’s hard to say. I agree, it seems like the MAU data for each of League and Fortnite is roughly the same as MAU for all of Steam (which is nuts). Of course there’s no way to know how much overlap is there. Still, both of these titles would be a hard stop for people deciding whether to switch to Linux.
As for msft themselves though, ironically I don’t know what titles they have that keep players on windows. Battle.net works on Linux, Minecraft Java ed works on Linux (not sure about bedrock ed compatibility or player count, but afaik most of those players are on non-PC platforms), all their zenimax titles are sold through steam and work great on Linux. CoD might be their biggest hold.
I disagree on number of games, but I agree on player count. The number of PC games that are not on steam (or don’t work on linux) is tiny these days. But the number of PC gamers who don’t need steam, or need something that doesn’t run on linux is probably still quite high. Still, even if valve was able to push a few % of PC gamers to Linux, that would be huge. We’re currently at 2% on Linux in steam surveys. I could see a power move by valve around win10 eol bringing that closer to 10%.
Yeah that’s true, I think the biggest hurdle are games that use anticheat that don’t work on Linux, which are afaik usually multiplayer games. So they might be able to pull gamers, that only play Singleplayer games.
No one is trying to play games on those vista machines, though. Valve pulled steam support for win 7 and 8.1 over a year ago because they were EOL. If they also pull support from win 10 once it’s EOL, then people will need to make a change to keep playing their games. If msft refuse to support existing hardware with win11, then many people will be forced to choose between buying a new laptop/PC, or trying Linux.
I always make a point to at least look at a few of them. Sometimes it’s ragebait, but there have been a few times where the review has actually mentioned something that was a deal breaker for me.
However, I do not believe SteamOS is going to be the silver bullet people think it is. I’m somewhat of a fanboy of Valve but SteamOS is really only good for a console-like PC experience.
People who want to ditch Windows need to look at Linux as a whole, not just SteamOS.
If people want to ditch Windows then the gaming industry needs to stop gating the community. Either get rid of the shitty anti Linux anticheat or tell them to turn on Linux support naturally. For fucks sake I can’t believe I find out most anticheat just needs a simple email to turn it on for Linux.
I agree entirely. An argument could be made about native Linux releases being too much but most games run with Proton if the devs don’t intentionally cripple it through kernel anticheat or other arbitrary limitations.
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Aktywne