If you’re on a PC, SteamOS won’t give you anything that any other major distro already offers. Cachy and Bazzite are probably the most similar to SteamOS, but Fedora, Mint, Pop are all also solid choices. There’s no reason to wait for Steam to switch to Linux.
SteamOS comes with a mighty corporation to fully fund its development, plus likely being the default for the wider gaming community. If the desktop version is flexible enough to let me do mods, locale, and so on, it would be ideal for my usecase. I hate the idea of distro hopping, because I don’t want to spend time and energy figuring out things more than once.
It is my preference to only have one OS for each machine, for its entire lifespan. I would stick to Windows, if it weren’t for Microsoft being invasive and commandeering.
FWIW it doesn’t seem like Valve is really looking to make Steam OS a general-purpose operating system. They are developing it to work on their hardware offerings and may or may not add support to other hardware. This means that they may not work on supporting Nvidia cards well unless they start shipping gabe cubes or decks with Nvidia hardware.
Just because a corporation is backing the OS doesn’t mean that they are doing so for anything beyond their own products.
You need to do more research. Valve has in total about 300 employees, and maybe a dozen work on SteamOS. Their priority will always be to maintain it for Valve-produced hardware. If you’re expecting golden unicorns from SteamOS on a PC, you will be very disappointed.
To make matters somewhat worse it’s based on Arch, which is one of the more difficult distros to work with from a user perspective - Valve uses it because it provides more flexibility to aggressively optimize it for their specific hardware. You will not get the experience you are thinking you will get from it.
Fedora on the other hand is based on and funded by Red Hat, which is one of the largest names in enterprise Linux. It’s been in production for PCs for over 20 years. On top of funding, Red Hat also has employees working on it.
Red Hat was purchased last year by IBM for $34B USD, roughly 3x what Valve as a whole is estimated to be worth. If you want a so-called “mighty corporation” backing your OS… valve ain’t it.
SteamOS Desktop can’t arrive fast enough. Once it has, I will jump ship to either CachyOS or SteamOS, depending on what reviewers say.
If you’re on a PC, SteamOS won’t give you anything that any other major distro already offers. Cachy and Bazzite are probably the most similar to SteamOS, but Fedora, Mint, Pop are all also solid choices. There’s no reason to wait for Steam to switch to Linux.
SteamOS comes with a mighty corporation to fully fund its development, plus likely being the default for the wider gaming community. If the desktop version is flexible enough to let me do mods, locale, and so on, it would be ideal for my usecase. I hate the idea of distro hopping, because I don’t want to spend time and energy figuring out things more than once.
It is my preference to only have one OS for each machine, for its entire lifespan. I would stick to Windows, if it weren’t for Microsoft being invasive and commandeering.
FWIW it doesn’t seem like Valve is really looking to make Steam OS a general-purpose operating system. They are developing it to work on their hardware offerings and may or may not add support to other hardware. This means that they may not work on supporting Nvidia cards well unless they start shipping gabe cubes or decks with Nvidia hardware.
Just because a corporation is backing the OS doesn’t mean that they are doing so for anything beyond their own products.
You need to do more research. Valve has in total about 300 employees, and maybe a dozen work on SteamOS. Their priority will always be to maintain it for Valve-produced hardware. If you’re expecting golden unicorns from SteamOS on a PC, you will be very disappointed.
To make matters somewhat worse it’s based on Arch, which is one of the more difficult distros to work with from a user perspective - Valve uses it because it provides more flexibility to aggressively optimize it for their specific hardware. You will not get the experience you are thinking you will get from it.
Fedora on the other hand is based on and funded by Red Hat, which is one of the largest names in enterprise Linux. It’s been in production for PCs for over 20 years. On top of funding, Red Hat also has employees working on it.
Red Hat was purchased last year by IBM for $34B USD, roughly 3x what Valve as a whole is estimated to be worth. If you want a so-called “mighty corporation” backing your OS… valve ain’t it.
So does bazzite technically. They are based off fedora.
Just jump to something like Bazzite and get rid of windows, don’t wait unless you have to