It's Been Five Years Since That Interesting Message From Gabe Newell

[emblemparade]

What's been your favorite Steam Linux game?
Talos Principle

What hopes do you have for SteamOS over the next year or five?
Valve has done a poor job in marketing and explaining it. It shines as a single target reference platform for game developers: they can target and test on SteamOS and safely ignore the dozens of other Linux-based operation systems. It would then be the responsibility to conform to what SteamOS provides: I think that is the correct and healthiest balance. Unfortunately, Steam Machines made little sense for consumers: yes, it's a very cool idea to play PC games in the living room with a Steam Controller, but Windows would have offered a much better gaming experience at this point in time. So: my hope is that SteamOS gets re-branded as an OS for devs, not for consumers. It has not benefited from this dual role, and perhaps even has given Linux a bad name -- nothing worse than it had before, but still it didn't help us.

What else do you hope they'll do to improve the Linux gaming ecosystem?
1. The point of pain continues to be GPU drivers. The proprietary-vs.-open-source landscape is confusing. Valve needs to keep pushing GPU vendors for quality open source drivers on Linux. They've had great success in getting the major game engines to support Linux; hope they can work their magic with GPU vendors.
2. I know this is controversial, but I would very much like Steam on Linux (also Steam on Mac) to incorporate WINE and allow a simple UI allows users to install Windows games and run them on WINE. Just like winedb, users can provide a rating and commentary as to how well games run. This would vastly increase the number of games that can run well -- I know this, because I have Steam for Windows installed on Linux, and many games run perfectly. I know some folk think this is a bad idea because it would discourage devs from porting to "native" Linux, but I insist that we always need to think of gamers first.
3. Steam on Linux (with proprietary GPU drivers) offers parity with Windows. That's an amazing achievement. However, I wonder what can be done to give Linux features above and beyond what's available in Windows, as a kind of reward for being kewl and cutting edge. It could be entirely marketing related: special discounts for loyal Linux players, special in-game items, etc. Make gamers want to move to Linux.

[schmidtbag]

Valves has done more to bring retail games to Linux than anybody before has, so they deserve that respect. I hope one day to finally retire the Windows OS partition on my only PC that still runs Windows for gaming. Next hardware buys will be with Linux in mind. No more SLI for me.

Not only that, but as a result to Valve's involvement, we have Intel, AMD, and Nvidia who all put more resources into Linux GPU drivers.

[lindgrenj6]

Favorite Steam Linux Game: As of right now Mad Max, such a great port and a pretty fun game
SteamOS Hopes: As of right now none. I just wish they would distribute steam for more systems "officially." like it runs fine on Arch but technically isn't supported, and it does hiccup sometimes.
Improving Linux Gaming: Mainly encouraging devs to make linux a first class citizen through the use of vulkan. Kind of like how star citizen is dropping DX12 and going vulkan only now! go them!

[treesloth]

What's been your favorite Steam Linux game?

Dying Light and Dirt Rally, yes it's two games but both are great AAA games that look and run great on my Arch Linux install.

What hopes do you have for SteamOS over the next year or five?

That it continues to be targeted by developers and that progress continues. (pretty vague)

What else do you hope they'll do to improve the Linux gaming ecosystem?

Improve/maintain sound quality. Have no current complaints about my sound quality, but would like to know surround sound is working with games under SteamOS. Though that's probably more up to the distro to make sure the sound is setup correctly. Still don't have AC3 digital through spdif support on my Arch install, did get it to work on Ubuntu 16 though.

[Duve]

Manage game developers to test games with Mesa git and rolling release OS. Stop only nvidia games.

Valve doesn't have a whole lot of control in that outside of it's own influence (which has been on the wane for a bit).
That said, it's really systemic of a bigger issue. That is that game developers don't note the many differences in linux (in general) and assume that if they do what they do in Windows it will be fine. It won't be and many have bucked up against that.

[geearf]

What else do you hope they'll do to improve the Linux gaming ecosystem?

Reduce the need for afterthoughts-ports, and, but probably never happening, switch to a model where the engines are FOSS and only the assets are proprietary.

[Sidicas]

Valves has done more to bring retail games to Linux than anybody before has, so they deserve that respect. I hope one day to finally retire the Windows OS partition on my only PC that still runs Windows for gaming. Next hardware buys will be with Linux in mind. No more SLI for me.

[Chewi]

Did you?

[moilami]

I remember, I did not know what Steam is After observing the angered discussion I thought maybe it is something rather important

[d2kx]

The dampfnudeln are a lie! Fake News!