[scheeseman486]

SteamOS is Arch with atomic updates and some custom patches here and there. The system stack is pretty standard; Mesa drivers, Steam Linux Runtime, Proton, it's all what ships on every other distro. The only significant difference is that games run in gamescope-session by default, but that isn't exclusive to SteamOS either and doesn't meaningfully affect the execution of software, it's just a different window manager.

In all your posts I haven't seen you actually explain what it is that's so different about it.

[forrestthewoods]

Let me take the game developer lens. You love Linux and want to support Linux. What is the cost to you?

SteamDeck is a very specific set of hardware running a very specific OS with a specific runtime. This is very easy. The fact that it is Linux is almost immaterial. If it were not Linux at all it would require a similar amount of effort. Might as well be a Nintendo Switch.

Now let’s imagine you want to support generic Linux desktop with a native Linux exe. May God have mercy on your soul. Deploying pre-compiled binaries that run on an infinite number of hardware variations running an infinite number of local variables env permutations is an unfathomable nightmare.

Once upon a time I shipped a native Linux binary (Planetary Annihilation). Somewhat infamously our Linux users were less than 1% of users but ~50% of bug reports. And no it wasn’t because Linux users simply report more general gameplay bugs.

These days you can support Linux by just giving them a Win32 binary. Which is objectively hilarious.

In any case. It would be profoundly fascinating to know the number of gameplay hours played across OSs. And I would imagine that SteamDeck accounts for over 90% of Linux gaming hours.

The Year of the Linux Desktop is still not here. Not yet. IMHO. YMMV.

[scheeseman486]

Steam Deck is an x64-based PC running Arch Linux with FOSS Mesa drivers, which are shared among all modern AMD GPUs. There's extra wrinkles with Nvidia GPUs, but their proprietary driver is the Windows driver with a bunch of kludges to get it to work on Linux and if you're using Vulkan then it's mostly the same code paths. It's also improved greatly in the past couple years.

You're right about native Linux binaries, but the rub is that you don't need to create generic binaries, there's a bunch of options that use containers to deal with environmental permutations and given the Linux version of Planetary Annihilation uses the Steam Linux Runtime environment, you know this.

It is funny that supporting Linux is as easy as providing a win32 binary, but it's not a joke. This is the case because it works.

I think your experience is a little out of date, or you've somehow been missing what's been happening over the last half decade, because in practice gaming on Linux is now absolutely fantastic. Not just on Steam Deck, as since Valve is using the same general software stack that every other distro uses, all the improvements they've made have permeated out to the rest of the ecosystem. On my CachyOS PC with an RTX 3090, the only games that consistently give me problems anymore are titles that ship with kernel-level anti-cheat. Otherwise when I buy something from Steam I simply assume that it'll work.

Steam Deck sales have actually softened quite a bit over the last couple of years, all this recent explosive growth has been driven by desktop users.

[forrestthewoods]

Thanks for response. Not sure I have much more to add. But wanted you to know I saw and read it. :)

[scheeseman486]

Thanks for reading!

I've been following this all pretty closely, it's been exciting. The year of the linux desktop is kind of a punchline, but it's sort of a misnomer anyway. It was never going to happen in the span of a year. But it has been happening; when online discussion spaces can never seem to shut the hell up about all these new idiot users asking all these stupid questions, that's when you know you're seeing a lot of growth.

[rkomorn]

> Once upon a time I shipped a native Linux binary (Planetary Annihilation).

Pretty sure I kickstarter'd that! But also never actually played it.

[forrestthewoods]

PA Titans is pretty good! Definitely niche. In hindsight the whole spherical planets thing is definitely bad. Vanilla flat rectangular maps would have been better.

One of the interesting consequences of Kickstarter is you get hard locked into “promises” even if those ideas turn out to be bad. Naval was so bad but it was a stretch goal so had to ship it. Lesson learned!