I just think they're neat!
The Duff CEO with a Windows-Logo on his forehead: "Gamers use Windows because of its' user experience not our de facto monopoly."
Next Image: Duff CEO with Windows-Logo in front of a "Out of Business" sign. Subtitle: "30 minutes after SteamOS is released"
Edit: Yo, I'm not saying this is gonna happen. I just want to say that Windew's UX sucks ass.
Unfortunately the biggest issue now is the anticheats that only function on windows. My friends refuse to switch to Linux because you cannot play:
They'll play other games but because they mainline one of these they refuse to leave. As long as SteamOS has no answer to these anti cheats windows will maintain a dominance.
Source: https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Technically, all the major anti cheats have Linux userspace binaries that even support wine/proton passthrough, so there are actually a lot of anti cheat games that run on linux as shown in the list.
The issue is not entirely something SteamOS can solve or is even linux's fault because no sane distro would ever support running a kernel level anticheat module. It would break the defining security features of linux, and I'm not even sure DKMS or Akmod would support it out of box on secure boot.
The games in question refuse to enable anticheat on linux because they know the userspace binaries are limited, but then their windows solution is just a crappy rootkit. It's not a very good or longterm solution either. EAC and Battleye both have demonstrable bypasses with various methods of fooling. Only Vangaurd seems to aggressively keep up with the arms race by literally scanning your PCIe devices for hardware cheats.
What they can do is to convince game OEMs to enable their linux AC support by marketing the potential customers they are losing out on. That's basically what happened with Halo MCC and Infinite. I'm still surprised they actually convinced Microsoft to allow both games to run on Linux with EAC.
Don't make me tap the post title.
Requisite "you don't need to wait for SteamOS" post.
Gamed on Linux for over 2 years. The time is now. Shit just works (mostly).
Edit: and yes, you can often get better performance on the same games with the same hardware.
Shit just works (mostly).
That's the "damning with faint praise" that has been the bane of Linux since slackware came on 500 floppies.
Sometimes that "mostly" is just "oh, you have to do this simple thing that is in a FAQ once and then you're golden". Other times it's "oh, that hardware isn't supported, so I guess you don't have a usable video card".
I think what many of us are hoping with when it comes to SteamOS is that a few of the remaining really sharp edges get sanded off. And, just maybe, there will be a tipping point where the smoother the experience, the more people use it, and the more people use it, the smoother the experience will be.
At least we didn't have to look at goddamn Ads in the menu. Also the AI """integration""" fucked up things pretty badly. Sometime you just need a simple, light, OS to do your thing.
Most people just use what's in front of them. Apple takes on exorbitant costs to make sure marginalized people are the face of iphone. Microsoft takes on exorbitant costs to be the face of our soul crushing tech capitalism. What can linux represent and how can we leverage that to our advantage while taking down apple and Microsoft.
Apple takes on exorbitant costs to make sure marginalized people are the face of iphone.
What the hell are you talking about?