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Valve confirms that its going to be adding steam OS support to Ally and other Windows handhelds


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It's always been the plan.  Valve doesn't give a single damn about whether they sell more Decks than other PC handhelds.  They sell them, make profit off them, but the goal is always just to get more people buying games on Steam.  Valve knows that SteamOS is a better handheld operating system than Windows, so it just makes it that much more enticing for handheld players to buy their games on Steam instead of EGS or other places.

 

As Valve continue to make SteamOS better and open to all devices, it really has a chance to gain a serious foothold.  That's why MS either has to make Windows better for all types of form-factors or they'll find people preferring SteamOS.

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It’s only a matter of time before these handheld manufacturers go straight to just throwing SteamOS on them and dismantle their teams that build their own flavors of handheld OSes. Valve is ready to steamroll the handheld OS market. 

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With NVIDIA finally releasing native drivers in Linux kernel as well is just a step forward for the death of Winblows gaming monopoly as well. It’s nice to see that NVIDIA GPU Linux drives are equivalent or superior then their Windows counterpart. It took a few years, but it’s finally here and here to stay.

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4 hours ago, lynux3 said:

With NVIDIA finally releasing native drivers in Linux kernel as well is just a step forward for the death of Winblows gaming monopoly as well. It’s nice to see that NVIDIA GPU Linux drives are equivalent or superior then their Windows counterpart. It took a few years, but it’s finally here and here to stay.

This won't affect Windows gaming in any meaningful capacity or at all actually. Also basically all of these games running on SteamOS are Windows coded to start, and secondly few want a gimped desktop PC experience as they're used for much more than just gaming.

 

Windows is at no threat of marketshare loss in gaming. You nerds need to give up the Linux delusion, same dumbass hopeless daydream fantasies for the last 25+ years.

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1 hour ago, DynamiteCop said:

This won't affect Windows gaming in any meaningful capacity or at all actually. Also basically all of these games running on SteamOS are Windows coded to start, and secondly few want a gimped desktop PC experience as they're used for much more than just gaming.

 

Windows is at no threat of marketshare loss in gaming. You nerds need to give up the Linux delusion, same dumbass hopeless daydream fantasies for the last 25+ years.

It's the beginning of the end. Sorry, bud.

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15 hours ago, DynamiteCop said:

This won't affect Windows gaming in any meaningful capacity or at all actually. Also basically all of these games running on SteamOS are Windows coded to start, and secondly few want a gimped desktop PC experience as they're used for much more than just gaming.

 

Windows is at no threat of marketshare loss in gaming. You nerds need to give up the Linux delusion, same dumbass hopeless daydream fantasies for the last 25+ years.

Outside of gaming, and proprietary software people might use for work, Winblows has nothing going for it.

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12 hours ago, sugarhigh said:

Steam is what's important here.

yup. i absolutely love how easy it's been to play games on steam os. it truly feels like a pc switch. the more devices with it, the better. i would consider the next ally if it uses steam os.

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20 hours ago, DynamiteCop said:

This won't affect Windows gaming in any meaningful capacity or at all actually. Also basically all of these games running on SteamOS are Windows coded to start, and secondly few want a gimped desktop PC experience as they're used for much more than just gaming.

 

Windows is at no threat of marketshare loss in gaming. You nerds need to give up the Linux delusion, same dumbass hopeless daydream fantasies for the last 25+ years.

Windows can't do what Valve has pulled off with SteamOS. Windows is a terrible experience as a TV/console/handheld UI. You're looking at it completely wrong if you think the idea is to replace Windows on your desktop.

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Here's the thing.  If SteamOS allows for pre-compiling of shaders for essentially all games on desktop by utilizing Fossilize and Vulkan... then one of 2 things will happen.  Either Microsoft steps up and works with Valve to create a similar system that could work for DirectX in Windows.... or people will begin to change over to SteamOS in droves.  Then once enough people move over, you could see developers begin to target Vulkan directly on Linux and simply make their games SteamOS native at that point.

 

I firmly believe that.  Fossilize (Steam shader pre-caching) allows Valve to collect and distribute GPU agnostic PSO data and have your PC pre-compile them before the game even needs to be downloaded.  This is a MASSIVE one-up over Windows in quality of life and quite frankly, performance.  The translation layer will always have a slight overhead, but no shader compilation stuttering is better than losing 5fps lmao.

 

This is basically what Valve is working towards.  They're making essentially the entire Windows gaming platform compatible with Linux, so that they can create huge repositories of PSO data caches and move forward into the future without Windows if Microsoft doesn't keep up with Windows advancements.

Edited by Remij
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56 minutes ago, Remij said:

Here's the thing.  If SteamOS allows for pre-compiling of shaders for essentially all games on desktop by utilizing Fossilize and Vulkan... then one of 2 things will happen.  Either Microsoft steps up and works with Valve to create a similar system that could work for DirectX in Windows.... or people will begin to change over to SteamOS in droves.  Then once enough people move over, you could see developers begin to target Vulkan directly on Linux and simply make their games SteamOS native at that point.

 

I firmly believe that.  Fossilize (Steam shader pre-caching) allows Valve to collect and distribute GPU agnostic PSO data and have your PC pre-compile them before the game even needs to be downloaded.  This is a MASSIVE one-up over Windows in quality of life and quite frankly, performance.  The translation layer will always have a slight overhead, but no shader compilation stuttering is better than losing 5fps lmao.

 

This is basically what Valve is working towards.  They're making essentially the entire Windows gaming platform compatible with Linux, so that they can create huge repositories of PSO data caches and move forward into the future without Windows if Microsoft doesn't keep up with Windows advancements.

Steam on Linux desktop already does the pre-compiled shaders.

 

SteamOS probs still wouldn't be anything major without prebuilt PCs offering it by default, but hey maybe some selling gaming PCs will. It would certainly be better for people to avoid the £70 or so Winfows tax which gets added.

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19 minutes ago, TLHBO said:

Steam on Linux desktop already does the pre-compiled shaders.

 

SteamOS probs still wouldn't be anything major without prebuilt PCs offering it by default, but hey maybe some selling gaming PCs will. It would certainly be better for people to avoid the £70 or so Winfows tax which gets added.

Yes, but nobody uses linux desktop atm because Nvidia's drivers have been trash for the longest time.  That's the entire reason Valve hasn't released SteamOS desktop yet.. Nvidia still has issues they need to work out.. but it's getting closer.

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42 minutes ago, Remij said:

Yes, but nobody uses linux desktop atm because Nvidia's drivers have been trash for the longest time.  That's the entire reason Valve hasn't released SteamOS desktop yet.. Nvidia still has issues they need to work out.. but it's getting closer.

The drivers were released this year. They’re on par with Winblows for newer GPUs.

 

Also SteamOS distro released over 10 years.

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37 minutes ago, lynux3 said:

The drivers were released this year. They’re on par with Winblows for newer GPUs.

 

Also SteamOS distro released over 10 years.

I'll be honest, I'm not super well informed of all the Linux happenings  but Mesa/Nouveau/NVK still aren't perfect, but they're much better than they were before.  It's the open source drivers that will be what makes SteamOS, and by extension Linux truly viable with Nvidia GPUs.  Things are improving, but it's not at the level of AMD yet.  As far as I understand it, anyway.

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44 minutes ago, Remij said:

I'll be honest, I'm not super well informed of all the Linux happenings  but Mesa/Nouveau/NVK still aren't perfect, but they're much better than they were before.  It's the open source drivers that will be what makes SteamOS, and by extension Linux truly viable with Nvidia GPUs.  Things are improving, but it's not at the level of AMD yet.  As far as I understand it, anyway.

Yeah, so Nouveau is basically (maybe?) dead at this point now that NVIDIA released their own open source drivers which are now delivered right from their site, repo, or package manager (apt, def, zypper, etc.). They’re pretty much on par with AMD now so there’s no problem there, but the open source drivers NVIDIA released are for Turing and newer, otherwise you can use Nouveau or get the proprietary drivers.

 

Even NVIDIA recommends ditching proprietary and going with their open source after their latest kernel driver modules.

 

Still though, SteamOS has been around since 2013 and is still maintained to this day and I think Valve was a big pusher into NVIDIA, along with others, to get them to open source their drivers… which the day has come. 😎 I suspect SteamOS distribution will continue to only get better, but Proton is still a thing and works well until native Linux support shows up.

Edited by lynux3
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9 hours ago, Remij said:

Yes, but nobody uses linux desktop atm because Nvidia's drivers have been trash for the longest time.  That's the entire reason Valve hasn't released SteamOS desktop yet.. Nvidia still has issues they need to work out.. but it's getting closer.

Nobody uses it because Microsoft has a desktop monopoly :D

 

I love Linux but I'm under no delusions here. Most PC gamers probably buy prebuilts  everyone I know does. Until Linux is on prebuilts it wont change much. Steamdeck counts as a prebuilt and that alone put Linux over Mac.

 

Secondly there's the fact that people are confortable with Windows after decades of use. There is a learning curve to a new OS. It also doesn't help that SteamOS is immutable (a blessing and a curse for newcomers), and the fact that it's based on Arch. I winsed as my brother was trying to modify something on his deck and he ended up following Arch instructions and ended up having problems related to the Arch keyring.

 

Lastly there is the perceived incompatability. Its getting better every day. For me who only plays singpe player games or co-op campaigns it has been fine, but I can understand why people who only play competittive online games with incompatabile anticheats wouldn't want to switch.

 

SteamOS would be much better as console style devices. Like the OG steam machines. Where people can mostly stick to SteamOS rather than the desktop.

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