Mhmmm 2077
Member
We need to wait for official release of SteamOS, ideally released togetther with next Microsoft's fumble.
Can Steam finally force developers to make Linux versions?
- Thread starter Bernkastel
- Start date
- Opinion
crackajack
Member
yeah, that would be nice... might have changed since I last checked, flatpacks or whatever are a relatively new thing, I suppose, and replace deb and rpm... but probably just another "standard" because Linux people love to fork everything instead of actually nailing the first thing ... but some apps just require /configure /make /make install, and won't uninstall clean or even at all when you click on uninstall or just want to upgrade to the current version some months later.
Linux is nice, for a free thing, with a pointless number of desktop environment choices, but it's so easy to run into weird problems, just because no obvious reason, just because a bigger upgrade failed... whatever. Valve would be wise to not do anything stupid. Some gamers might switch, being fed up with forced Win11, and it is finally a time were gaming is working on much stuff, but it needs to evolve a lot more to be actually noob proof and then with bigger market share trigger more native support.
IFireflyl
Gold Member
Until your average PC user can navigate Linux without issue, Linux will always drag behind Windows. I have said this time and time again. Linux is too fragmented to reliably handle most PC users. The reason MacOS does well is because a user can navigate it with relative ease.
Arch Linux, Bazzite, CachyOS, and all of the other Linux distributions suffer because Linux isn't universal. Want to get an app? Time to figure out how exactly to do that because there are different apps and "app stores" for different versions of Linux. Different desktops, different conventions, different settings panels, different theming that breaks in different ways. A user learns muscle memory in one place and it does not transfer. Right click here does one thing, right click there does another. Settings live under three different menus depending on the OS.
Package managers are another wall. You've got apt, dnf, pacman, zypper, then Flatpak, Snap, AppImage. Then distro repos versus third-party repos versus vendor scripts. This is too much for a new user to try to navigate without making it a serious time commitment. If the path to install an app depends on a flowchart, the OS is not ready for the average person. Software availability is also a major factor. Missing Adobe is not a small thing. Not being able to easily use Microsoft apps, especially for people like myself who HAVE to use them for work, makes it a no-go. You can argue alternatives, but the industry standards are the industry standards.
The Steam Deck works because Valve hid the fragmentation. One store. One runtime. One set of defaults. One recovery path. That is the model that helps non-technical users. Sure, people can go to the desktop and do more than that. But the Steam Deck, much like traditional game consoles, benefits from the simplicity of "install the game and go". That's what the average user wants. The more the experience looks like that, the less Linux feels like a chore.
This is why I want Valve to seriously work on SteamOS to make it an actual OS that can be reliably used by the masses, not just by people who are fine with learning command-line and all the different ways that Linux operates. I hate to say, "Be like Apple," since I think Apple is a sucky company, but I want Valve to be like Apple was with the start of MacOS. Understand what people need from the OS, and work towards making it something that can accommodate the end-user rather than telling the end-user to change in order to accommodate the OS.
Arch Linux, Bazzite, CachyOS, and all of the other Linux distributions suffer because Linux isn't universal. Want to get an app? Time to figure out how exactly to do that because there are different apps and "app stores" for different versions of Linux. Different desktops, different conventions, different settings panels, different theming that breaks in different ways. A user learns muscle memory in one place and it does not transfer. Right click here does one thing, right click there does another. Settings live under three different menus depending on the OS.
Package managers are another wall. You've got apt, dnf, pacman, zypper, then Flatpak, Snap, AppImage. Then distro repos versus third-party repos versus vendor scripts. This is too much for a new user to try to navigate without making it a serious time commitment. If the path to install an app depends on a flowchart, the OS is not ready for the average person. Software availability is also a major factor. Missing Adobe is not a small thing. Not being able to easily use Microsoft apps, especially for people like myself who HAVE to use them for work, makes it a no-go. You can argue alternatives, but the industry standards are the industry standards.
The Steam Deck works because Valve hid the fragmentation. One store. One runtime. One set of defaults. One recovery path. That is the model that helps non-technical users. Sure, people can go to the desktop and do more than that. But the Steam Deck, much like traditional game consoles, benefits from the simplicity of "install the game and go". That's what the average user wants. The more the experience looks like that, the less Linux feels like a chore.
This is why I want Valve to seriously work on SteamOS to make it an actual OS that can be reliably used by the masses, not just by people who are fine with learning command-line and all the different ways that Linux operates. I hate to say, "Be like Apple," since I think Apple is a sucky company, but I want Valve to be like Apple was with the start of MacOS. Understand what people need from the OS, and work towards making it something that can accommodate the end-user rather than telling the end-user to change in order to accommodate the OS.
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