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Plenty of the Linux YouTubers have been rolling their eyes when people treat SteamOS as an option, so it'll be interesting to watch their opinions 180 (or not).
I roll my eyes when I see people saying they'll leave Windows when they can run SteamOS, considering there are other distros that are just as good or better. But the brand name recognition will definitely bring some people.
Honestly, the arguing about distros is a big reason I don't move to Linux. I want something well supported and going to stick around, but all I ever hear are new names come up every 5 minutes and I can't help but assume contributors are just dropping off left and right for other distros.
Steam being an actual company behind a distro gives at least an impression of support stability because they have a economical incentive to kind of keep it going.
Is any of this actually true? No, and I know in my heart of the cards it isn't, but choice paralysis is getting real, and 30k distros to choose from don't help.
Canonical (Kubuntu) and Red Hat (Fedora, I suggest the KDE variant) are very big and old companies if that's what you want.
I run both of those (Kubuntu on the desktop, Fedora KDE in a laptop) and either one is a good option.
If you pick one of the core distros like (Fedora/Centos/RHEL/SuSE) or (Debian/Ubuntu) they have been around for decades and will be around for decades more. You don't have to pay attention to whatever trendy new Linux distro of the week has just come up.
Yeah I was the same way. When you express that there’s too many options, and you don’t feel confident in selecting between them, a Linux enthusiast will always answer with a couple of options as if it is the final answer. Then someone always responds to that comment saying why the options are wrong and suggests others. Then someone else comments saying “Just use one of the ones that…” and doesn’t even stick to a specific distro but rather assumes you have the background knowledge to interpret and move forward based on a few key features.
Eventually I just went with Mint and it went pretty well. Maybe I’ll switch, but the first try is the hardest and now I’m over that hurdle. Took years longer than it should have to start because people can’t help but argue in every comment chain.
It’s definitely more attractive to use SteamOS because we know it’s an OS being designed for our general use case by a company that will support it meaningfully (as it already has been with Proton), and will continue to support it for a while. I’m sure a lot of users will switch OSes after a while, and existing Linux users should support the “first step” move to SteamOS knowing this.
It’s probably not the best possible OS choice, but considering no one can agree that any option is the best choice, that doesn’t really factor into the decision.
Yeah... I have to sheepishly raise my hand as one of those people, previously. I finally converted last year because Valve was taking too long.
My justification in waiting was that Valve (being behind Proton) would have a vested interest in making sure that support was top-notch, and not just best effort like you find in some of those niche gaming distros.
I get it, though. The ease of updates is really enticing despite distros like bazzite being better in about every other way.
What are you talking about, if ease of updates is a concern then it literally does not get better than bazzite. You don't even notice that updates are happening, that's how easy they are
I had assumed that Steam wouldn't do this, partly because they wouldn't want to deal with supporting Linux beginners, but they certainly have the resources to do so if they are willing to.
I don’t know if them releasing it for a bigger audience necessarily means they’ll support it. Might very well be that they’ll rely on the community for that.
Well previously it was the fact that it was very AMD centric. Linux can easily support anything of course. But for something that you just want to install and work. Steam OS was made with AMD in mind. You could get Nvidia to work with enough faphing about. But it was discouraged and not default. Enabling it by default could theoretically be less work for Valve. And a value add for the software as a whole.
Before this, said YouTubers were right. It wasn't designed for General use and would cause a lot of problems for people just trying to get into it. Valve changing their support absolutely will change all of this. But it was never guaranteed.
I don't know about youtubers, but as far as I know SteamOS wasn't meant to be installed on non-deck devices, being distributed only as updates (not sure how those work) and recovery images for reinstalling on your deck, with no support or even instructions for installing it elsewhere.
It's not about SteamOS being stupid, it's about it not even being meant to be an option - it had less support than those "random" other distros.
Oh. Neat
paywall, so no idea what changed, but the official install instruction don't list nvidia anywhere, just beta support for AMD discrete GPUs
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/65B4-2AA3-5F37-4227
From my perspective, SteamOS is more marketing than anything else. There are several very good distros for gaming, that aren't bundled with Steam. What does anyone need SteamIS for? Am I wrong to think it's just for Windows users who think it's the only usable Linux distro?
It's absolutely marketed as a safe Linux alternative to SteamOS. Let them at it. Accessibility and ease of use are long-held concerns for Windows users migrating to Linux.
I'm only familiar with gaming on Linux through the Steam Deck. Do these other distros include the same Proton as SteamOS? Because that's been a boon to getting my Windows games running on it.
proton comes with steam, no matter what distro!
Ah, nice!
It also comes without Steam.
Yeah. It feels like Sony advertising Playstation OS for PC hardware.
Like what is the actualndifference between Steam OS.and Big Picture Mode, really.
I'm already running SteamOS on my 7800x3d and 7900XTX PC.
I assume this is in response to the backlash to Steam hardware pricing?
You basically already could either through hoop jumping, or just bazzite as the easy route for feature parity plus extras.
I was running steamos some 12 years ago. i was dual booting with debian then, but now I just run debian fulltime. how is this news?
But will they also release half-life 3?
Doubt. SteamOS has been freely available for many years.
Only through third party hackery not officially supported by valve.
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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