this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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SteamOS is making huge strides for adoption, i look forward to more people being freed from corporate lock in.
*freed from Microsoft's monopoly. Valve is still a corporation.
They have a lot of work to do before they can publicly release it. They really messed up basing it on Arch, IMO. Whereas Fedora has their Silverblue and SUSE has their CoreOS, Valve is really treading new ground with an immutable Arch distro. As it is now, the immutability is a major barrier to doing even very simple things. If I want to install an external driver on Silverblue, I just navigate to it's folder and run
rpm-ostree install -driver-. SteamOS has no rpm-ostree equivalent, so you have to disable read-only which is more complicated and defeats the purpose of immutability anyway.Valve will have to develop a bunch of brand new tools or (more likely) contract the work out, which as far as I know hasn't happened yet even 1.5 years after official release.
I guess my point is they made an easily accessible experience that is not frustrating to use for the average user which will help dispell the belief that linux is hard to use or that gaming is only for windows. They provided a console like experience and made it hard for normies to break it. You're free to install silverblue on the thing. Personally i'll probably re-image with arch later but for my use so far I haven't really have to change anything. I haven't run into an issue that couldn't be solved with a flatpak yet.
As a gaming OS it works great, I'm just talking about what they need to do if they want it to be a successful desktop OS. Their plans are to release it as such so I hope they put in the necessary effort before that, because it's severely lacking right now.
Steam/Proton/Gamescope work outside of steamOS. Valve contributes to open source software, including linux amd drivers, that can easily be used outside of steamOS
Maybe so, but Steam itself is still proprietary, closed source software.
It is, but you are not really locked in it
As long as the game does not depend on Steam APIs for DRM (which is not Valve's fault), you can absolutely copy over the game files and play it outside of Steam, and even use Proton, although it's only officially supported in Steam.
While what you say is true it is also irrelevant to OPs question. SUSE is a corporation, so is canonical, so is mozilla's corporate wing. can you clarify what your point was, pal?
edit: ah, i used the word corporate, fair point then. I meant in the sense of vendor lock to defacto standards rather than 'corporate bad'.
They've made my life more enjoyable for reasonable cost, they bring vast amounts of resources to open source projects, and they deliver a platform that the least technical of people can use an enjoy. You're free to say they are not your friend, but i won't make perfect the enemy of good.
Steam is not a corporation, it's an online video games store lol