The Rogers PieFed InstanceValve says they want SteamOS to be installable on any PC
Classy Hatterwww.youtube.com/watch?v=DuJi1-Csrds&start=337s
In an IGN interview, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said that “[they] want [SteamOS] to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC”. Below is a transcript of the interview. I tried to clean it up to my best ability.
Just like Steam Deck paved the way for Steam OS on a variety of third-party handhelds, we expect that Steam Machine will pave the way for Steam OS on a bunch of different machines in either similar form factors, different perf envelopes, different segments of the market, and get to a good outcome there. We definitely want to encourage people to try it out on their own hardware. We’ll be working on expanding hardware support for the drivers and the base operating system. Just last week, we fixed something that was preventing us from booting on the very latest AMD CPU platforms. Last month, we added support for the Intel Lunar Lake platforms. We’re constantly adding support and improving performance. We want it to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC, but there’s still a ton of work to do there.
If the embedded video doesn’t take you to the correct part of the video, the correct timestamp is 5:37.
EDIT: Here’s the written article of the video:
https://www.ign.com/articles/valves-next-gen-steam-machine-and-steam-controller-the-big-interview
Nvidia please make a dedicated driver team for Linux. IIRC one of the biggest stumbling block for a general SteamOS release is subpar Nvidia performance on DX12 games that can get around 30% performance degradation. Even Valve assigned a team of engineers to work on this specifically.
There is a fix coming for the Nvidia performance problem. It’s going to take some months for all the pieces to fall in place. See this video for more about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpXINAMaljA
Obvious solution: Build a D3D12 to D3D11 translation layer, kinda like DXVK but in reverse
That’s significantly more difficult than the opposite since many DX12 features are not in DX11
Yeah it was a pretty obvious shitpost. With the complexity of the API anything more sophisticated than solitaire is basically untranslatable.
Nvidia’s shit Linux support is why I’ve been stuck with Windows despite how badly I want to switch to Arch. You get no Nvidia Control Panel, no Nvidia App, no ShadowPlay, no RTX HDR, no 3D Settings panel; basically the only thing you can do with an Nvidia GPU on Linux is render 3D graphics. Which is fine if all you do with your PC is CAD or non-competitive SDR gaming. But I paid for all these extra features and so I’d like to use them.
Can’t even switch to an AMD GPU, either, because I like Ray Tracing too much, so I’m stuck waiting on Nvidia to get their shit together (or AMD to finally release a GPU that can handle RT @ 4K120) before I can finally ditch Microsoft for good.
Cool, me to.
I hate Microsoft shoving AI down our throats. I will not upgrade to AI Windows. I just don’t want to port over to a new OS because: (1) I like 10’s GUI, (2) I don’t trust an OS that I might not be able to run word or excel on because I do so much on them, and (3) my version of Windows doesn’t have ads on it.
There are alternatives to Microsoft Office like LibreOffice and OnlyOffice. Plus you can still use Office 365 in a browser if it “has” to be Microsoft Office.
LibreOffice has been so good. As a non-power user I haven’t even noticed a difference, aside from the lack of bullshit.
I’ve used both Libreoffice and Onlyoffice along with Microsofts offerings. I’ve gone several hours in onlyoffice to only notice when I’m saving that I was using Onlyoffice instead of Microsoft Excel. That’s how similar they look.
Yep, the browser version has been good enough if you’re not working with 500 MB excel files that’s been used since 20 years ago. Even the people at my work has switched to the web version of office.
Windows 7?
My EU Win11 doesn’t show any ads either.
I’d be surprised if that turned out to be the case, but I’ve never used EU Windows 11. Is it a special no-ads version?
Windows 10 definitely has ads - I recall seeing something pushing the Xbox on the lock screen a while back. That counts IMO.
Yeah there’s been loads of threads with surprised Europeans when it comes to Windows ads, because we just don’t get them.
… That is not true. We get app recommendations in the home screen and we get a “news” panel. Those are ads. You can’t disable the recommended apps thing either. Recommended by who? The top payer? Fuck off.
? I quite literally don’t have this. So either I disabled it or it wasn’t there. I don’t remember it anyway and I can’t see it now either.
As others have mentioned - and to add my own opinion: In terms of Writer (Word) and Calc (Excel), LibreOffice is by far better than M$ for everyone who isn’t for some reason an absolute fan of searching for buttons that have the function they need by looking at tiny icons.
Do it goddammit!
As much as I appreciate Valve’s contributions to the Linux gaming world: If I wanted a computer with an Operating System dedicated to / optimized for gaming, I would buy a console instead.
I do believe that an operating system by steam for anything but the SteamDeck is a bad idea. It might leech market share of other linux distros, and trigger less well maintained generic linux compatibility - and at that point, Valve could get procured by one of those parasitic megacorps and the enshittification thumbscrews will be tightened HARD. With the end result throwing Linux gaming back a decade in favor of proprietary hot garbage.
If it works on SteamOS, how difficult can it be to make it compatible with other distros?
SteamOS isn’t even on the latest kernel. If anything, everything on SteamOS is already compatible with other distros. It’s just Linux.
It’s built on FOSS software, Valve is a main contributer to a bunch of Linux-specific frameworks like Proton, AMD FOSS drivers, and others. This means that the FOSS world benifits from their contributions, regardless of Valve’s future contributions.
That’s the beauty and power of FOSS, it can’t be restricted or locked away, everybody gets to enjoy everybody else’s contributions, big and small.
Even if Valve totally enshitifies and tries to restrict their tech, the community will fork their projects, take the code and continue building cool stuff.
Look what happened with Terraform, the largest infrastructure as code platform in the world. They tried to close down their codebase by changing the license to a more restrictive one, and the community rebelled and forked Open Tofu, which not only has 100% backward compatibility with Terraform, but has newly developed features that terraform doesn’t have.
Same thing with Red Hat, a multi-billion dollar corpo owned and controlled by IBM, which tried to lock out devs from their codebase recently unless they were building code specifically for Red Hat Linux. Rocky and Alma Linux not only survived, but still thrive.
I could go on, but the point is that right now Valve is a fantastic force for Linux and FOSS development in the gaming space, and because they started with a largely open platform and ecosystem, that protects the community at large from future enshitification.
I’m slightly worried that games on Linux will end up targeting Steam os, instead of just running great on any distribution.
And I’m fine running SuSE and Fedora. Also they run my games just fine and I wish it stayed that way.
that is what I was trying to say - in more words and with a couple of typos ;)
Well in that case I agree with you!
Just running great on some Bob’s distribution for which Bob made sure no game will ever run on it…
I have a pretty beefy gaming PC and a separate middling mini-PC for my linux workstation. I enjoy the separation of concerns and distractions and would love to install a gaming-focused OS on my gaming PC.
Valve isn’t getting acquired any time soon. They’re a small-ish group that basically gets 30% of nearly every PC game sold. They’re private, so finances aren’t published, but I have a hunch they have a healthy amount of cash on hand to do whatever the fuck they want for decades, and they might in fact be closer to the size of those mega corps.
It’s got a use case. I mean, I know not everyone has a dedicated gaming PC, but some people (myself included) do. I don’t keep any personal info on it, it’s just for gaming. I have a separate mini-PC for general use. It’s a good option for a “consolized” PC at the TV for gaming, in lieu of the typical gaming console. Many already use Bazzite for the purpose.
Either way, I’m glad to see it as an option. And that’s all it is. I doubt I’d use dedicated SteamOS (I like my gaming rig to be fully up-to-date on the latest kernel so I use Endeavor), but it’s a simple and straightforward choice. There’s Bazzite, Cachy gaming, and plenty of standard and immutable distros, SteamOS is just one more.
The compatibility bit is actually not a major problem here, because the target environment for software on SteamOS is actually a portable container environment and not the OS itself.
You can make the Steam Linux runtime work on any distro with Kubernetes or equivalent as long as they support the container image format and dependencies like Vulkan