this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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As much as I appreciate Valve's contributions to the Linux gaming world: If I wanted a computer with an Operating System dedicated to / optimized for gaming, I would buy a console instead.
I do believe that an operating system by steam for anything but the SteamDeck is a bad idea. It might leech market share of other linux distros, and trigger less well maintained generic linux compatibility - and at that point, Valve could get procured by one of those parasitic megacorps and the enshittification thumbscrews will be tightened HARD. With the end result throwing Linux gaming back a decade in favor of proprietary hot garbage.
I'm slightly worried that games on Linux will end up targeting Steam os, instead of just running great on any distribution.
And I'm fine running SuSE and Fedora. Also they run my games just fine and I wish it stayed that way.
that is what I was trying to say - in more words and with a couple of typos ;)
Well in that case I agree with you!
Just running great on some Bob's distribution for which Bob made sure no game will ever run on it...
It's built on FOSS software, Valve is a main contributer to a bunch of Linux-specific frameworks like Proton, AMD FOSS drivers, and others. This means that the FOSS world benifits from their contributions, regardless of Valve's future contributions.
That's the beauty and power of FOSS, it can't be restricted or locked away, everybody gets to enjoy everybody else's contributions, big and small.
Even if Valve totally enshitifies and tries to restrict their tech, the community will fork their projects, take the code and continue building cool stuff.
Look what happened with Terraform, the largest infrastructure as code platform in the world. They tried to close down their codebase by changing the license to a more restrictive one, and the community rebelled and forked Open Tofu, which not only has 100% backward compatibility with Terraform, but has newly developed features that terraform doesn't have.
Same thing with Red Hat, a multi-billion dollar corpo owned and controlled by IBM, which tried to lock out devs from their codebase recently unless they were building code specifically for Red Hat Linux. Rocky and Alma Linux not only survived, but still thrive.
I could go on, but the point is that right now Valve is a fantastic force for Linux and FOSS development in the gaming space, and because they started with a largely open platform and ecosystem, that protects the community at large from future enshitification.
If it works on SteamOS, how difficult can it be to make it compatible with other distros?
SteamOS isn't even on the latest kernel. If anything, everything on SteamOS is already compatible with other distros. It's just Linux.
The compatibility bit is actually not a major problem here, because the target environment for software on SteamOS is actually a portable container environment and not the OS itself.
You can make the Steam Linux runtime work on any distro with Kubernetes or equivalent as long as they support the container image format and dependencies like Vulkan
Valve isn't getting acquired any time soon. They're a small-ish group that basically gets 30% of nearly every PC game sold. They're private, so finances aren't published, but I have a hunch they have a healthy amount of cash on hand to do whatever the fuck they want for decades, and they might in fact be closer to the size of those mega corps.
It's got a use case. I mean, I know not everyone has a dedicated gaming PC, but some people (myself included) do. I don't keep any personal info on it, it's just for gaming. I have a separate mini-PC for general use. It's a good option for a "consolized" PC at the TV for gaming, in lieu of the typical gaming console. Many already use Bazzite for the purpose.
Either way, I'm glad to see it as an option. And that's all it is. I doubt I'd use dedicated SteamOS (I like my gaming rig to be fully up-to-date on the latest kernel so I use Endeavor), but it's a simple and straightforward choice. There's Bazzite, Cachy gaming, and plenty of standard and immutable distros, SteamOS is just one more.
I have a pretty beefy gaming PC and a separate middling mini-PC for my linux workstation. I enjoy the separation of concerns and distractions and would love to install a gaming-focused OS on my gaming PC.