Given many new handhelds coming on the scene and general disinterest of Microsoft to support the market, do you think SteamOS will take place of default OS the same way Android did on phones some time ago?
Fuck I hope so
SteamOS has been out on Steam Deck for 18 months, but still no general release in sight. I wouldn’t hold my breath. I think we’ll just have to continue to make do with the likes of ChimeraOS/Nobara.
True. There is an unofficial release - HoloIso - which uses Valves packages but is not quite complete. Also manufacturers may be able to get access as Valve previously has been keen on getting other manufacturers to buy into it’s hardware attempts (e.g. Steam PCs previously, and VR now) but I’d expect the manufacturers to be making a big deal of it if they were launching a SteamOS handheld. It seems Valve want to keep exclusivity on Steam Deck for now (which makes some sense given how successful it’s been)
(which makes some sense given how successful it’s been)
It really doesn’t make sense, considering how small the hardware profit margins probably are, if any.
What would make sense is making the Steam-first OS open to be installed on any device.
It doesn’t matter if there’s no hardware profit margin if the end result is, as it seems to be, more people buying more games from steam. That’s no different than most console manufacturers anyways - so far as I know, none of them are in it to make profit off the hardware itself, just the exclusivity.
Granted, Steam Deck still let’s you run non-steam games and connect other launchers, but even so most people will buy from steam for it regardless.
the end result is, as it seems to be, more people buying more games from steam.
This is the end result of releasing their software, not selling more hardware.
Oh look, you stumbled on to the point. Valve would benefit from making a more console-like pc (a la the steam boxes from yesteryear) because it could get more people into the valve ecosystem. There are people who buy consoles simply because they offer the simplicity of buying a prebuilt thing that you don’t need to fudge around with and comes integrated with everything you need to run the games.
I didn’t “stumble onto” anything. Valve would benefit much more from simply releasing their operating system for universal hardware use than they ever would from hardware sales. That was my point from the beginning.
Is there some specific feature that SteamOS brings to the table that people are looking for? So far as I know, a stripped down installation Debian or Ubuntu (Valve likes to base their packages off of Ubuntu) with an Xserver script that directly launches steam in big picture mode ought to create roundabout the same experience I would think.
For me it’s the fact that it just works. I don’t want to fiddle with Wine or bottles or any if that. I pick the game and launch it, never have i had to do more than that.
Technically speaking, Steam handles that part automatically. You wouldn’t need to futz around with it in any distro so long as steam is up and running. That said my original idea that you could just launch steam from an Xserver login script is, well I’ve since learned that Steam Decks are running a less than simple setup behind the scenes. BUT from an end user experience, booting any old distro straight into steam big picture should be at least a passable Steam OS experience, barring any performance issues that would result from the difference in back end implementation.
SteamOS 2.x was based on debian, but that hasn’t been updated in years. The Steam Deck launched with SteamOS 3, which is actually built on top of arch and is much more akin to Manjaro. As for your question, it’s mostly the “game mode”, which uses IIRC Wayland and wraps games inside gamescope which provides a bit more control in the form of controlling frame rate, resolution, etc externally, but regardless, that can and has been achieved in custom distros. I think the main appeal of SteamOS honestly is the package of an immutable OS optimized for running games on steam. It prevents non-linux users from breaking things and tries to make it feel more like a “console” with a “desktop mode” (KDE Plasma) and “app store” (ala flatpaks). I’ve toyed with the idea of running it or similar on my gaming PC but always run into the difficulty of Nvidia drivers on Linux.
I had no idea they switched distros. Or ran Wayland for that matter! Truly it’s the future. But that’s a good point, being able to say on the “box” that is specifically runs SteamOS certainly brings about a level of consumer and investor assurance.
As far as the nvidia drivers go. Only advice I can offer is that I’ve never had any sort of auto install, package based install, or any sidestepping of the default installation of the driver work for me. It’s always borked. The only reliable method I’ve found is the old school drop into the line terminal, shutdown all GUI, and running the nvidia provided install script (which sucks, I know).
Yeah, I’ve gotten Nvidia drivers working, but always with issues in performance or things like Wayland not working and I eventually decide “that was fun to play around with, back to Windows”. Specifically the whole immutable OS thing for me is nice too. Linux is my OS of choice for development work, but it’s so easy to screw things up when trying to make games work nicely and my ideal “it just works” gaming machine can ignore the OS entirely (looking at you, Windows random forced reboots or virus scans), so having big single updates rather than individual packages and no risk of trying to get WINE etc up and running breaking something with the OS is nice. Not to mention, it’s much harder for a small child to brick it than a normal Linux distro or even Windows for that matter. Fedora Kinonite is on my radar for a future distro because of this, I just haven’t decided if I prefer the Fedora ecosystem over Ubuntu or Manjaro.
Fwiw, you can disable those Windows forced reboots in the group policy editor of Windows, at least in the Pro version. I don’t even let mine give me the update notifications any more - I just see the option to install when I go to manually shutdown or reboot.
Edit: granted, Windows updates sometimes unexpectedly make problems anyway, albeit much less often for me than Linux ones.
I hope NVK makes Nouveau a viable daily driver for NVIDIA users, they’re already running games, and Zink is making large improvements.
Then we can finally get the hell off of Xorg and leave it almost entirely to Xwayland.
I honestly think it’s just because most people have nvidia and steam on linux and nvidia don’t work well together and linux and nvidia and just nvidia in general. It works enough but is not a smooth experience. Maybe once the open source drivers are fleshed out more it’ll be better
What are these many new handhelds you speak of
Ayaneo 2 is one apparently. ROG Ally is one. And there are at least 8 more: https://retrododo.com/best-handheld-gaming-pcs/
They are way more powerful but makes less use of the power. Also way more expensive most of the time. Valve actually sells the Deck at a loss and hope to get it back on games. It’s currently the best value for money.
Valve actually sells the Deck at a loss and hope to get it back on games.
this was probably true for the first months but the hardware parts of the steam deck got cheaper over time in particular any flash chips (RAM/SSD) aswell as the older AMD APU
probably the reason why Valve discounts it up to 20% in sales sometimes
Doesn’t the ROG Ally just use Windows?
It does come with Windows but these handhelds are just PC hardware in handheld form factor, you can install whatever OS you’d like.
SteamOS’s UI is incredible. It’s not always easy for a UI to be feature rich while also being intuitive and easy to use, but Valve did a wonderful job. I love pulling up the Quick Menu to check the battery and time or tweak a setting without needing to pause the game or go back to the Home Menu.
I hope its form factor gets closer to the switch so its more mixed mode handheld/console.
IMO Steam OS is the “Windows” for handhelds. Sure there will be lots of variants of Linux with custom skins (hell even Windows itself). However, I think Steam OS has already established itself as a comfortable default for most people due to how optimized the UI is for handhelds and the fact it works out of the box for most PC games without any tinkering 🙂
I’d be OK with that, it’s been excellent so far!
Looking at how many celebrated ROG Ally shipping with windows I doubt it will catch on. Only possibility I see is if valve would do profit sharing with the handheld maker for purchases made in the steam store.
For a third party to ship with steam os now would essentially mean they are also supporting the largest player in the market with no gain for themselves.
No. Steamos is only really great on deck because of the whole making the hardware and software thing. If other people use it it loses that and you end up with a computer with a less compatible OS.
you know that manufacturer can hire staff to optimize steamOS for their hardware kinda like samsung did with android?
Sure. They could do that. That doesn’t really address my point though. And it’s really unlikely to happen on any meaningful scale, imo:
- The market for a dedicated phone OS from one of the larger consumer electronics makers is ORDERS of magnitude larger than any kind of handheld PC gaming console. Just because Samsung did it for phones does not mean anyone will do it for handheld PCs.
- Even if they do, there’s a lot of negative sentiment about Samsung’s version of Android, to the point multiple Android users I know will never buy a Samsung phone. It’s not necessarily a goal to emulate.
- Leaving all of that aside, that is still not the same thing as the maker of the device also being the developer of the OS. You’re at the whims of upstream to fix a lot of major things, or you’re maintaining a massive patch process on top of their releases. It’s a much larger task than just “hire staff to optimize steamOS”.
We already have some makers offering “steamos support” in the form of… basically a single steamos image they release once and don’t steam to maintain? GPD’s “GPD OS” from Dec 2022 and Anbernic’s Win600 Steam OS image from Jan 2022.
And still the best way to run SteamOS on either of these devices is ChimeraOS.
The closest to what you’re describing is AYANEO’s ayaos. I don’t know if it’s a steamos fork or not, but it’s their take on linux gaming OS. It’s been in development for a while and we’ve got nothing but a few clips of it to view. And considering it mostly seems to replicate the Ayaspace windows app interface, I’m not sure it even offers any benefits over Windows+ayaspace.
Fair points but market can change. Steam library is very appealing if you making hardware. Time will tell. Obviosly every is getting hyped for linux ascension and valve has done a lot in last few years to get the ball rolling.
I do not get reference to smartphones. In US iOS is dominated system.
Like how Android OS is developed by Google but published for other phone manufacturers to use and build off of.
Ah! Got it. Like windows, Linux, etc…
Most of the SteamOS features are also available on Windows by launching Steam in big picture mode. I use this on my desktop.
You CAN put HoloISO on these handhelds, but no companies are shipping SteamOS out of the box. The Ally comes with Windows. The Ayaneo 2 come with Windows. The AYN consoles run on Android. ONEXPLAYER ships with Windows.
While SteamOS is great and the remaining compatibility problems are mostly caused by stupid DRM bullshit, you still can’t play COD or Halo on SteamOS. Linux also doesn’t support new technologies like Direct Storage at the moment. Shipping Windows is a competitive advantage right now.
Of course, there are options. For example, a dual boot configuration with Windows on one partition, SteamOS on a second partition, and an NTFS volume for storing games on could work. A small sync tool would be all you need to make it possible to boot into either OS on the fly.
Or, even better, there’s nothing preventing vendors from running SteamOS in a VM and passing through the hardware. You could do it the other way around, but such virtual machines get detected by the same shitty DRM that breaks games on Linux in the first place.
Note: You can actually play Halo on a Steam Deck. I’ve played it with friends over the internet and two of us were on a Steak Deck and Linux desktop. The other two were on Windows. It worked well.
(But, yeah, there still are a few other games that don’t have anti-cheat enabled, such as Fortnite and Destiny 2.)
Last I knew playing Halo MCC in coop still requires manually syncing your ucrtbase.dll files.
I made a guide for it on reddit, I’ll probably repost it here sometime.
That’s good to know, I’m glad they patched Halo. Maybe I’ll give it another go some time.
Every negative review of the Ally emphasized windows (and Asus armory crate) as some of the main negatives of the device. Windows gives a worse UI experience, has much higher passive power usage (which prevents you from getting actually good battery life times on low power games like Stardew), and makes things like the deck’s suspend mid game impossible to implement reliability.
You also mentioned that Big Picture mode having most of the features, but it’s missing the QAM and all the nice tools included with that. Asus Armory Crate is supposed to cover some of those, but has had a lot of negative feedback online for not working correctly or having significant downsides like massive deadzones. There’s also a ton of nice features available through decky plugins that are very convenient to use mid game through steamOS.
Not to mention that having windows at all adds to the cost of the device. Average windows license cost for hardware manufacturers is around $50 if I remember right, and they charge more for more powerful hardware. That would be a huge price increase for something like the $400 Steam Deck.
I think SteamOS has a lot to offer, and the only downside (anticheat compatibility) will become a non-issue if steamOS becomes popular enough and companies start targeting it. I really hope to see it available on other devices.
Windows has terrible sleep issues (on every platform, because of shitty drivers) and has had this problem ever since S3 sleep was getting deprecated.
The Ally has shitty software but the AYANEO has a much better overlay. Asus and software just doesn’t seem to go well together.
However, all of the proper features SteamOS provides rely heavily on good drivers. Power consumption and sleep issues have plagued the Deck as well, Valve just fixed them in time before most people ran into them.
Do you expect Asus to put as much effort into patching their AMD drivers if they can’t even get their device to sleep properly on Linux? I’m willing to bet that if they went with SteamOS, they’d release with terrible drivers, an outdated kernel, very few kernel updates if any at all, and of course some minor modifications that will never be upstreamed to the Linux kernel.
Asus sells devices running Linux and they’re not exactly known for running the latest and greatest Linux kernel. The Zenphone 9 runs on Linux 5.10 and will probably never get an update to 5.15, let alone 6.1. I can’t find much about their routers, but from what I can tell they’re running a version of Linux 4. They also make liberal use of proprietary modules and kernel forks, of course, making life much harder for themselves if they care about upgrading the kernel in the long time.
The Steam Deck is great mostly because Valve is working hard at making the kernel and underlying OS work right. If a vendor can’t do that on Windows, they’re definitely not going to pull it off on Linux.
Rog Ally is a good portable space heater.
direct storage is from directx lol, obviously it isn’t gonna work, and vulkan has an alternative tho
Most of the SteamOS features are also available on Windows by launching Steam in big picture mode.
No they aren’t. They’re vertically integrated. I don’t think you understand what the SteamOS features actually are. It’s more than just a GUI.
I mean the features end users care about. You get the console interface, the button remapping, the save game sync, and even the FPS overlay. You’ve got a usable desktop environment through Windows (that’ll also work better for most people despite Microsoft’s attempts to make Windows worse) with things like eGPU support.
You probably don’t get the performance sliders, but every handheld has their own little overlay bound to a special button that’ll offer the same options anyway.
If you install Steam on your Linux distribution of choice because you dislike Windows, you get all the Proton tricks for free as well. You may even get the performance sliders if you’re on an AMD handheld and the kernel packs the right drivers.
Of course SteamOS has a lot of features hidden from the user (A/B boot setup for seamless updates, a custom Wayland server dedicated to playing games) but those only matter to diehard Linux users.
People buying a Steam Deck just want to play video games.
I mean the features end users care about.
Yes that’s what I was also talking about.
I hope so, but only if the option to install other OS’s remains an easy option. I love android but installing a different operating system on my phone is so much of a pain in the dick that it’s not even worth it.
I feel like I’d probably avoid a handheld if the option to install windows wasn’t there, even if I don’t end up using it much.
If my choice was a default windows install with the option to install steamOS myself, or a default steamOS install with no other options, I’m choosing the windows install every time.
It would be a good thing. Gaming on windows has been a shit experience since everything after windows 7. I don’t want to have to manually(or scriptedly) remove candy crush installer icons among other bloat shit every time I install the os just for a basic clean experience that still spies in me.
Strong agree. Have you by chance checked out O&O Shut Up 10? I run it after every install and periodically to keep as much of the tracking disabled as I can. Highly recommended.
I used that 3 windows installations ago but switched to a PowerShell script that is backed up on my friends computer that I set up.
ETA Prime always referring to “Steam Deck OS” and claiming that’s the name it’s widely known by is so cringe.
Only possible if all handheld machines have transparent hardware designs, i.e., all electronic components inside are known, have open source drivers and do not rely on third-party proprietary drivers or reverse engineering. This is due to Linux itself rely heavily on open source software and doesn’t play well with proprietary parts (take Nvidia GPU for example, every person who has it in their Linux machine knows it causes headache once in a while). Unfortunately, so far only Valve’s Steam Deck has a hardware specs that satisfy this requirement. The other ones more or less suffer from closed source components
Not really true. You don’t necessarily need open source drivers for Linux to play well. There was actually a period where NVidia was the better option on Linux because their proprietary drivers were better than the alternatives. If the company cares to manage those drivers they will work well. That said, it looks like AMD has embraced FOSS and NVidia finally opened their other drivers, so things are looking up at least. Having binary blobs for certain shit is not ideal either, but I’ll take it if it means more people will move to Linux and everything else will still be open.
