Comment on Shower thought: Valve could do the ultimate boss-move this year
BmeBenji@lemm.ee 1 day agoAs someone who uses my desktop for gaming (and maybe web browsing) exclusively, and as someone mildly but not very familiar with OSes, I read this as “SteamOS is bad because of reason I personally don’t like that many people don’t understand, so do more research about Linux”
The barrier to Linux as an OS is not how good it is but how understandable it is. After Pewdiepie’s video went up I’m confident the search phrase “Linux OS download” skyrocketed in popularity because people don’t know let alone understand what a distribution is.
SteamOS is a great intro to Linux for the majority of PC gamers because it’s not only basically ready to use as soon as you boot it up, but also because it is being maintained by a team of people intent on making it the optimal PC gaming platform.
Once Windows users are introduced to a basic Linux experience why not let them take their time learning more about the variables in distros?
Maybe SteamOS is not the perfect distribution because <list your gripes here> but is there a perfect distribution?
I read this as “SteamOS is bad because of reason I personally don’t like that many people don’t understand, so do more research about Linux”
It’s easy to dismiss this as something that won’t ever matter to you, but this is something that can cause problems in all sorts of ways even for gamers. The first thing that came to mind is not being able to install custom drivers to support weird hardware, like a racing wheel or something.
I’m not vouching for SteamOS as a permanent OS. I’m just defending the strengths of a corporation-maintained distribution of Linux as an introduction to Linux, of which I think SteamOS has many. After being introduced, I think more people will get curious about other things they can do with Linux. It’s really just that starting hump that people need to get over
Btw I appreciate the brief explanation. I was actually having trouble with that sort of thing myself on Bazzite the other day and I was curious why SteamOS differed from Fedora on some specific things.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Maybe you don’t understand it, but that doesn’t mean you don’t rely on it. If I said an OS was unusable by 99% of people because it didn’t support multithreading, it doesn’t matter if 99% of people know what multithreading is, that’s clearly a true statement. Similarly, if you’ve ever expected your PC to have the same files on it tomorrow that you put on it today, then you might find it annoying when that’s not the case.