And with that, a shitton of games that weren’t yet, are now also playable on Linux, sometimes on 1:1 parity with Windows performance. (sometimes even better)
I thank Steam for finally kicking the habit of using Windows as my browsing and gaming desktop.
My development and work rigs and laptops have been Linux based for over 2 decades.
But after attempting to go full time on my gaming system with Linux every couple of years, I always ended up going back to Windows because the compatibility issues couldn’t be overcome at all, for some of the games I regularly played.
Now, while there’s already a crapton of games that simply get released on Linux at launch, plenty have Windows targeted versions that simply work on Linux compatibility layers, thanks to Valve.
Biggest issue I have with Linux is the inability to sanely use multiple hard drives. Not to mention a ton of bugs with random hardware configurations. Like Wacom tablets don’t work well with Nvidia drivers.
Steam deck specifically solves both of these by being hardware designed for Linux and for being a handheld.
Biggest issue I have with Linux is the inability to sanely use multiple hard drives
What do you mean with that?
If I want to install an application installed by the official repos to another hard drive, not the one mounted at /. How do I do that? Note: If you tell me a command line command, you’ve failed. The Windows way to handle this is 1) format the drive. 2) Install the app. No excuses, no “What if other apps can’t find it.” no “What if it includes already installed libraries.” Just install
The package managers and official repos for most distros would be better thought of as lego blocks to build an OS from - they have no concept of OS and application separation, and splitting installation of an OS across multiple physical drives doesn’t really make sense.
Application focused distribution methods with a clear separation from the OS like Flatpak or AppImage do support this.
AppImage - drag the .appimage wherever you want it.
Flatpak - supports system and per user installs (under home directory) by default. Additional installation directories can be configured, but I’m not sure if any of the GUIs expose this feature - so likely doesn’t currently pass your bar of not needing to use the command line at all.The package managers and official repos for most distros would be better thought of as lego blocks to build an OS from - they have no concept of OS and application separation, and splitting installation of an OS across multiple physical drives doesn’t really make sense.
The packages for Blender, steam, etc, and typical Userland apps are in these repos. The package managers are not the “Lego blocks” only. They are the utilities, user apps, and libraries you need. They are everything in one place. That’s a large point of Linux. Everything you need is in the repo.
Also, repos are distro related. You can’t use Fedora repos on Ubuntu. Originally you couldn’t use any distro’s repos on any other distro’s repos. With Ubuntu and its offshoots and arch and its offshoots, we’ve started to see repos grow to multi-distro but to say that they have no concept of OS is wrong. The whole reason there are distros is so that specific distros can configure things to their liking. This is why things like Debian and Ubuntu exist. It’s why OpenBSD exists. Again, a large selling point for Linux users is that all your packages are configured to be used with your distro.
Flatpak and Appimage are very specifically not what I am talking about. They aren’t typically supported by distros and don’t include distro-specific fixes/configurations for a lot of things.
Yeah, userland packages for things like Blender and Steam do exist in most distro repositories. But they make no distinction between packages that provide software like that and packages that provide core OS services + userland (systemd, pipewire, coreutils, cups, a desktop environment, and so on).
See distros like SteamOS, Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite + universal-blue, openSUSE MicroOS, and Ubuntu Core as examples of modern distros that make use of traditional packages as the building blocks for the base OS, and lean on application distribution methods like Flatpak or Snap to provide desktop software. Use of the package manager for software like Blender is explicitly discouraged by all of these.
Distro specific fixes and configurations shouldn’t be necessary as long as the OS provides what the application platform needs (desktop portals, pipewire, display server, dbus, print server, and so on). Flatpak doesn’t even prevent distro specific repositories if it’s really necessary either; Fedora ships with their own Flatpak repository in addition to Flathub.
So what you say you want (better control of or isolated and relocatable end-user software installation) already exists, it’s just not being done at the traditional package manager level - and I haven’t heard about any development effort going towards changing that.
Those distros are different than what I am talking about. Those are immutable distros that preserve the preinstalled system base. It’s not at all what we’ve been talking about.
Linux doing something for you? The audacity.
(I hate it too. Some things I don’t need to do for my computer, it’s meant to do them for me.)
And I’ve competed three of them
Got Steam with Proton going on my Devuan laptop a few weeks ago, and very impressed with how many games work. I might just get a Deck, after trying out a friend’s.
I think M$ needs to be very afraid – probably why they bought Activision and are trying to dig their way deeper into the gaming ecosystem.
Yeah they own half of the game developers in the world, I don’t think they’re worried. If anything, they practically negated Valve’s efforts to free themselves from MS’s whims. All these megacorps need to be broken up.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Steam Deck from Valve has now hit over 12,000 games that are rated Playable or Verified.
While it’s still far short of the total number of games and software on Steam, which is now over 96,000, it’s still an impressive number that Valve has been able to get through and give some form of testing.
At time of writing the current numbers are:
You can check out the full list on SteamDB, which includes titles that had their store page hidden although owners can still download the games.
There’s various reasons for games to no longer be sold including expired licensing.
You can download and try anything on Steam Deck these are just what Valve put through testing.
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