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.
What kind of apostrophe use is
its’
?!
That’s how I learned to use the posessive pronoun of “it”.
That I believe is only for plurals, such as:
(one) cat’s paw vs (multiple) cats’ paws
It, however, is not a plural, otherwise it would be “they”. Though I must admit I’ve probably made the same mistake myself.
Unfortunately the biggest issue now is the anticheats that only function on windows. My friends refuse to switch to Linux because you cannot play:
- fortnite
- league of legends
- escape from tarkov
- battlefield
- apex legends
- valorant
- R6 siege
- GTA 5
- Rust
- Destiny 2 Etc
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/
Fuck kernel-level anticheat.
I refuse to buy or play any games with Kernel Anti-cheat.
And I will die on that hill.
They literally care about market share and money watch the magical adoption of server stuff anti chest if Linux takes off
Don’t make me tap the post title.
I’m sure it’s on the roadmap, but not a current priority. First get it to work decently and iron all the kinks out of steamos, then they can look at anti-cheating.
Its not because steam doesnt support it. Some of the games on that list have banned players from connecting online from linux. Apex legends put out a newsletter about how they couldn’t keep up with cheating using linux OSes and so they had to just cut it off entirely.
“Who here wants a bathtub Mint distro?”
Finally a comment that I expect from a simpsons shitpost community. Here’s your reward: A scented candle!
I don’t really understand this buzz about Steam OS displacing Windows.
Windows is a general purpose computer OS; whereas Steam OS is a game-platform OS designed for the Steam Deck and similar devices. It doesn’t seem to be the same use case. Obviously Steam OS could be used as a general purpose OS, if you just switch modes and install this and that software… but then what are you waiting for? There are already heaps of high quality general purpose Linux OSs already designed for that purpose. Linux Mint is a drop-in replacement for Windows, and has no problems whatsoever with games.
I mean, if you want to use Steam OS on your main computer, then that’s fine - but I just don’t really see a reason to use that rather than something that is already available, and already a desktop OS rather than a console OS.
Don’t make me tap the post title.
I mean just saying it’s optimistic is insufficient. “Fever dream fantasy” is closer.
You do understand what the joke is about, do you?
Ok. Yes. I guess this wasn’t quite the right place for me to post my piece.
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.
My whole family largely uses Linux as our daily driver - ages - 40, 38, 18, 9, 7
The only one not running Linux is my 38 year old wife.
HOWEVER - my 9 year old got an occulus for Xmas, and suddenly we are dual booting and that’s a real shame.
you can often get better performance on the same games with the same hardware.
Because there’s a reason why Linux does not randomly use the disk like Windows does
Anti cheats 😭 Only reason why I keep windows around
If SteamOS is ever launched for non-valve hardware, I would probably stop whatever I’m doing at work to get it installed
Copying my own comment from yesterday:
There was a comment thread in one of the Linux communities the other day talking about this mindset. Obviously the comments got a bit rude and unconstructive, but the point is that you can switch to something like bazzite now and most things will work pretty well, but if you’re holding out until it’s perfect then you’ll be waiting forever!
It was already launched for non-Valve hardware. Not for any hardware though, just a Lenovo handheld.
My old desktop has been demoted to console, and some time before Windows 10 goes EOL, I’m planning to try Bazzite on it. Seems like the closest we’ll get to SteamOS on any hardware in the near future.
Recall is the final straw for me. If there really is no way to permanently disable it then I’m going to have to get used to Linux/SteamOS. Which sucks because I really do seriously value things just working and not have to dig for hours to fix random issues with every little program I want to use. :/
You will like Linux then because on Linux, unlike Windows, you can figure out why stuff goes wrong and then fix it for good instead of randomly having reappearances of the same problem (barring hardware issues like overheating of course but that affects all systems equally).
Honestly, as someone comfortable with Linux already, but running Windows because of games, it was the last straw for me in a bigger way. A bunch of people up and down the chain at Microsoft thought recall was a good idea, and didn’t need really basic safety features at launch. Not only is that very poor judgement, but what they think I want and need is so far disconnected from reality that following their upgrade path is a huge risk.
Maybe they’ll put switches in to disable Recall, but maybe they’ll want to take them away for my own good at some point in the future. Maybe they’ll do so silently. I know there’ll be an adjustment curve, but I’d rather be in control of it rather than let the people who thought Recall was a good idea updating my OS internals. I’ll never install Windows 11 on a device I own, and I’m not holding my breath on future versions at this rate.
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.
This is the main problem right now.
People want to return to a lighter simple Windows OS, but Microsoft is making that increasingly hard to access. The LTSC version of Windows 10 is close(No AI, No Ads, and minimal telemetry that can be disabled), but they dont sell it to the public unless you buy 5 copies, and
there is no LTSC version of Windows 11 yet.looks like they finally released it a couple months back, but people are unhappy with it.Linux offers an alternative, but compatibility is still a huge issue despite the impressive gains Wine and Proton have made in the last few years.
The reality is that if you have a Windows PC you can basically guarantee that you can install anything you might want(barring hardware limitations). You can often make that software work on Linux too, but there is always some tinkering involved and the general public doesn’t want to deal with that, nor do they want to change to a FOSS alternative.
And if you like playing certain games with kernel anti-cheat, the only way you’re getting away from Windows is on console. Unless gamers jumping from Windows to Max/Linux increase by improbable orders of magnitude, that’s not changing anytime soon.
Always had windows. Never wanted Linux because I didn’t want to dick around with every game install. You give me an OS that lets me browse and game WITHOUT having to dick around with every application, and I’d switch in a heartbeat.
Steam on Linux already does exactly that. You hit play and that’s it, exactly like on Windows. The rest is done for you automatically.
Tinkering might be required with a few non-Steam games and programs, but for the most part, they just work as well.
For the most part that’s true, but when something goes wrong, it really goes wrong.
For example, I wanted to play Path of Exile 2, and it would get stuck at a black screen on startup. The fix is “easy” on Windows, you just edit an ini file in “My Documents”. To fix it on Linux, that same file is stored in
/home/[YOUR USERNAME]/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/2694490/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/My Games/Path of Exile 2/poe2_production_Config.ini
Which is insane by any standard.
And lets be honest, it is not as if tinkering isn’t required for a lot of things on Windows too, it is just that the tinkering is a lot more random “hope & pray” stuff like uninstalling and reinstalling things, rebooting,… and hoping the problem goes away.
I can’t even remember the last time I had to fuck around with a Steam game, all the ones I want to play just work
Lucky you, not my experience at all, even ended up repurchasing a game on Steam while it was on sale because at some point, time is money and I had spent a whole lot of money trying to make it work.
It’s a pretty seamless experience nowadays. I installed CachyOS on my handheld and installing games outside of Steam is pretty seamless with Lutris and Heroic Launcher
Needing another launcher to launch a launcher isn’t seamless and sometimes it works like crap and requires a reboot to get things working.
thats not how that works though. Lutris and Heroic are not the same as steam. They are seperate launchers. Also why do you have to reboot anything? Generally I have not had a single piece of software that required a reboot to work on Linux. Even the updates don’t require reboots.
Funny how Steam having to launch EA app to start a game = people complaining about Steam launching a launcher, but Lutris launching EA app to launch a game =/= a launcher launching a launcher for some reason…
After installing the game on Lutris or Heroic I can just add it to Steam and then launch the game directly from steam. In terms of UX I just need to press the play button, wait a little bit and then see the game main menu. Sometimes you see other launchers but there’s a lot of games that have their own launcher before launching the game, Fallout 4? Nixxes ported games?
I don’t know what anything else that you want. Even on Windows same shit still happens.
You want to play the wrong games.
A Linux user doesn’t touch “AAA”.
No true Sgotsman fallacy.
I only use Windows at work and played RE games and Control without issue.
I can eat from whichever dumpster I choose, thank you very much.
Bruh I play Baldur’s Gate 3 on Linux. Shitty AAA I agree with you.
Then Linux shouldn’t be suggested as a replacement for Windows for gamers.
AAA games work on Linux, sometimes even sooner and better than on Windows.
It should and will continue to be.
Not if it can’t run games that people want to play.
They shouldn’t want to play them.
The first time you try Linux will have an initial learning curve. Just like the first time you tried Windows. But once you have everything set up the way you like and get used to it, you really won’t find yourself having to troubleshoot very often. You certainly don’t have to “dick around with every game install” either.
It’s actually gotten a lot better over the last few years; Valve has been putting in a lot of work into making gaming “just work” through Steam. It’s still a bit jank, but honestly all OSes are a bit jank.
If anyone in this thread is interested, I’d recommend giving Linux Mint a go. There’s nothing really to lose.
Anyway, I’m done shilling Linux so I’ll let you get back to your Simpsoning. :P
There’s nothing really to lose.
Just hours of your time as some random miniscule feature you were reliant upon without realizing it until it was missing, then have to look up a dozen different fixes using some stone aged console commands, none of which actually fix your issue…
This is my current experience with pop os. Took a while searching and digging through age old threads to figure out how to fix Rivals so it actually launches, then more searching to fix an issue I was having with the screen blacking out, and it’s going to be more searching to figure out why audio keeps tearing while I’m full screened. It’s a pain trying to make things compatible, so much so I’m extremely tempted to switch back to Windows 10 despite it hitting EOL this year. I really don’t like having to waste my personal time making something work when there’s an incredibly easy alternative where everything works always (aside from hardware issues)
Edit: especially peeved about trying to fix ffxiv. I want my shaders back >:(
I had tried mint years ago, and gave up when I couldn’t even get my extra mouse buttons to work. I’m not going back to 1995 with a shitty 2-button
Good news, then!
You can do that now if your games are on Steam.
But what about LEAGUE!? And Blitz, I can’t be fucked to pick my own runes.
That’s the problem, IF your games are on Steam.
If they’re not, then it’s usually pretty easy to add them to steam as a non steam game, or sometimes you can use Lutris.
Then you have a launcher launching a launcher to launch a game, when that happens on Windows people are pissed, when that happens on Linux people act like there’s nothing wrong with that experience.
You can run games with Lutris, which allows you to create shortcuts for games so that they would be launched through Lutris without invoking a UI
So from a user’s perspective, the game just opens up as normal without any launchers or interfaces in between, like if you ran an .exe
Besides, plenty of non-Steam games can be run simply through Wine, then you literally double-click a game .exe and there you go.
Meh the Linux conversation has been going on as long as I remember and windows is still king. But Linux can play games now so who knows where the wind will blow.
iOS and Androids are the king now.
People don’t buy computers nowadays.
If Microsoft has a monopoly on gaming it’s not because they’ve made an effort to build one. It’s just that MacOS and Linux have never been actual competition. Linux because the user base was so small that making games for it was a big financial risk. SteamOS devices could change this but I doubt it.
And Apple just wont put the effort in for some reason. I’m sure they could make a huge dent on the market, as every iPhone and iPad with Apple silicon are pretty capable of running modern AAA games with a few tweaks, as are their computers. But they just won’t invest in making porting easier and cheaper and refuse to pay more devs to bring their games to the platform or to build a proper gaming division to support them. I’m convinced that Tim Cook just thinks gaming is for losers and doesn’t want it associated with the brand in any way.
The meme is not about how great Linux is, but how shit Windows is, jeez. 🙄
I mean no because even if all of the gamers in the world instantaneously switched away from windows, everybody else in the world - specifically the masses of idiots out there and businesses, not that there’s that much difference - would still keep on using Windows because they don’t give a fuck.
In what world? The steam deck is almost 3 years old, Windows is still on top and it’s not even close
Proton is a much bigger deal than SteamOS itself. It’s what allows you to play Windows games on Linux – often with better performance than on Windows due to reduced overhead.
That’s all been available for a while. The cat is out of the bag
SteamDeck was also not a replacement for your gaming rig’s OS. SteamOS is.
No SteamOS is not a replacement for your gaming rig. The recent steamOS beta release is specifically for hardware manufactures that aren’t in the powered by steamOS program to test their HANDHELD hardware as well as users with non powered by SteamOS handhelds to test steamOS on their handhelds.
There has been a lot of people taking this as SteamOS releasing a linux distro for desktop gamers but thats not the case. I hope one day that will be the case but today its not and people jumping the gun will leave with a terrible linux experience.
I dont think a desktop flavor is far off at all. Plus, they backed Arch, which is upstream from SteamOS and Bazzite. No matter which way you slice it, this is a massive win for Linux gaming and accessibility for many reasons.
Small correction: Bazzite’s upstream is Fedora.
F, thank you. I read one time that its steam deck like and my brain does wild shit.
Yes a desktop compatible version of SteamOS might be coming in the near future but currently thats speculation and there is no evidence to suggest this is the case. Backed by Arch means nothing here, they are just using packages from the arch repo SteamOS itself is nothing like Archlinux.
The win for linux gaming is more hardware manufacturers shipping linux. Its not Desktop users moving from windows to SteamOS like this meme would suggest. I just want to clear this up everytime i see it because I dont think its good for new linux users to try SteamOS on their desktops in its current state.
Valve sponsored arch. Thats a huge deal.
Its good but it doesn’t change anything I said above. Plenty of companies contribute to distros its expected that when you use a distro for commercial purposes that you contribute back upstream. Take a look at the amount of companies donating to RHEL, Ubuntu or OpenSuse.
Does steam deck not run Steam OS…? What the Deck was meant to do is irrelevant, the OS it comes with and the OS mentioned in the OP in no way shut Windows down
Sure, but the real goal is to get gamers off of Windows. We dont give a shit what the corpos use. SteamOS has a massive possibility to do that.
I feel like we’re having two different conversations.
The OP is acting like as soon as people “have the option” to switch to something else, they will, and Windows will be dead. SteamOS, however, has been a thing for a couple years now, and easily configurable Linux distributions for even longer, so saying that Windows is dead 30 minutes after release isn’t really wishful thinking, it just… Didn’t happen.
Your argument is that SteamOS has potential to upset the gaming OS market, which I’m not at all disagreeing with.
My comments had nothing to do with “what corpos use”, I’m talking about Steam’s user statistics. Over 90% of steam users are on Windows, and that’s with the incredibly popular Steam Deck taken into consideration.
Let it be clear that I’m not at all a Windows fanboy, I fucking hate the OS. I use it because I’m too lazy to set up Linux, and a few games I play are known to not work. Something SteamOS can change, but not something it already has.
We are talking sideways a little bit. OP’s joke won’t come true. But SteamOS has the potential to begin shipping on prebuilds if this traction keeps up. Why pay for a Windows license when we wanna game, y’know? In company time, thats a blink of an eye. Microsoft should be doing something, they are, but its not really going to matter. If this game focused OS jumps to desktop and is good. It has the potential to take over the PC gaming market. Especially if it makes everything Just Work. We’re probably on the same page in reality. Its not exactly there yet. But if there is gonna be a year of the Linux desktop. I’d put my money on Valve igniting it.
Linux Mint: Exists
Windows: Still king
Point: Made
I think you’re kind of right. For now anyway.
It won’t make any difference until Valve releases SteamOS for general consumption on more than a handful of handhelds
Mint, Bazzite, Pop… Options exist, users don’t care. If you don’t get the professional world off Windows, you’re not getting the personal world off Windows because people don’t want to figure out two OS when they have a hard time figuring out one.
What exactly do you do on your PC my friend?
I’m not really sure why it’s relevant to this conversation? But mainly game, homework, and 3d modeling stuff.
I assume you grew up having an Xbox?
I grew playing with a computer on the first Pentium generation, the only reason I tried to get Linux to work is one game that runs better on it because of shaders issues, when I’m done playing it I’ll probably delete my Linux partition.
Which distro did you try?
I’m not sure where that assumption comes from, or again it’s relevance to the conversation, but I had a couple platforms growing up. Most of them were hand me downs. My earlier childhood was spent on a PlayStation 2, and my teen years were shared between the 360, Wii, and my shitty laptop.
Market share moves slowly.
Windows enshittification made me look if Linux had become a viable alternative.
Got a Steam Deck to try it out and was very impressed by how far it’s come.
When my Win10 desktop needs replacement in a year or 2, getting a Linux desktop.
When my Win10 desktop needs replacement in a year or 2, getting a Linux desktop.
What’s stopping you from installing Linux now? I don’t think you can just “get” a Linux desktop, though I’d be happy to be wrong.
Several companies sell Linux desktops nowadays. Tuxedo and Slimbook come to mind
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
Here’s the news you missed:
I saw that after my first comment, I’m still not really sure how this is supposed to mean the death of Windows. Another mobile PC device running SteamOS isn’t going to disrupt Window’s position (though it is of course nice to see more handhelds on the market running the OS), and Valve saying they’ll soon release a user-installable beta is nowhere near what some are making it out to be. People are acting like they just released a stable Linux distro meant to replace your main OS; the news is exciting, but it’s not the death of Windows, at least not for a long while.
The idea is that the deck is not a one off and as more devices come to run SteamOS specifically developers will take note.
No one said it’ll be the death of windows altogether, the meme and comments are saying it may be the death of windows for dedicated gaming rigs (meaning handheld pc gaming devices and dedicated desktop gaming pcs)