[mort96]

I've had a lot of bad experiences installing Steam from a package manager and having problems with either the Steam client itself or games crashing because they can't find 32-bit OpenGL libraries. I haven't had such issues that I can remember the last few times I've installed steam, but "use your package manager" isn't (or hasn't always been) the complete answer.

[morganvachon]

It's gotten better recently on Ubuntu and derivatives. "Use your package manager" actually works and installs all the correct 32 bit compatibility libraries. "sudo apt install steam" really is all you need now.

That, combined with improved Wine compatibility, means that a lot of Windows games already run great on Linux, though with the obligatory performance hit due to driver differences and such. Hopefully once Vulkan support matures on both platforms we'll start seeing parity, especially with games that have a native Linux port or were Linux-first.

[chupasaurus]

"apt install steam" is not enough on amd64 Debian installations[1] which are much more common.

[1]https://wiki.debian.org/Steam#A64-bit_systems_.28amd64.29

[morganvachon]

Correct, which is why I said "Ubuntu and derivatives". Debian is upstream of Ubuntu, not downstream.

[chupasaurus]

The "fun" part is that SteamOS is (was?) a derivative of Debian.