Valve's SteamOS Compositor Has Begun Seeing Some Activity Recently

[skeevy420]

Honestly SteamOS is a joke. Who would still run Debian 9? They should do a Debian testing based Distro or do an Ubuntu fork of the latest version.

Long-term, Debian testing is more of a nightmare to manage than Arch. Like in the other thread, my votes are for Manjaro or Fedora -- Actual up-to-date distributions that focus on how well the desktop works.

SyXbiT

Check out their issue trackers. A lot of issues on there are from people using older LTS distributions with comments from people on newer distributions saying "what problems" simply due to using newer software that contains bug fixes. Basically, Steam's own trackers show that neither Debian nor Ubuntu LTS should even be in consideration as a gaming-focused distributions.

[Vistaus]

The Windows Store is a failure, and will continue to be so. They don't have the developers, nobody is putting their stuff on it. You can't even find the most basic apps you'd expect.

Also, they tried Windows with modern apps only before with Windows RT. It was a major failure.

[jonbitzen]

Honestly SteamOS is a joke. Who would still run Debian 9? They should do a Debian testing based Distro or do an Ubuntu fork of the latest version.

I have a SteamOS-like project on GitHub called ConvergenceOS. It is basically the steamos session and compositor bolted onto Ubuntu 18.04 / LinuxMint 19. I use it so I can run a Plex server, scm server, and samba share on the same system as my video game machine, since it has a full package set behind it unlike Steamos which is very stripped down. Going to desktop takes you to Cinnamon on mint. Because it's based on a modern distro you can update your own drivers in the desktop. I use an Nvidia ppa for example. It has a few blemishes but it works for me.

I'd love to see the steamos compositor get some fixes. Currently several proton games such as the Wolfenstein reboot and others have mouse input sticking issues that go away if you use the regular desktop session. Hence I currently boot to desktop which defeats the purpose of booting straight to steamos session.

[Xaero_Vincent]

SteamOS 2.0 is actually still based on Debian 8 Jessie IIRC with a newer graphics stack but that's still outdated compared to upstream. It has an extremely old base now.

Windows 10X appears to still support Win32 apps but they will run in a secured container with reduced performance. If it were just pure WinRT apps, it would be a sure failure.

[sarmad]

Why are they still updating SteamOS? Surely no one is gonna run SteamOS on a desktop or a laptop. Are they still planning to bring more steam machines one day?

[SyXbiT]

Why are they still updating SteamOS? Surely no one is gonna run SteamOS on a desktop or a laptop. Are they still planning to bring more steam machines one day?

They clearly wanted people to buy/build steam machines for a while. That's obviously died down now. I wonder if they're keeping it alive because they want to do another push. Now that Proton is working well, maybe it's time for another attempt?

[alkazar]

A few relevant projects:
https://github.com/gamer-os/steamos-compositor-plus and https://gamer-os.github.io

steamos-compositor-plus is a fork of the SteamOS compositor with some bug fixes (for example, it allows Dead Cells, among other games, to actually work).
GamerOS is a SteamOS alternative that features a minimal Arch Linux base, with zero downtime automatic updates and releases roughly once a month (we just released version 7 yesterday).

GamerOS packages steamos-compositor-plus along with other enhancements like pre-configured proton settings for many games for a great out of the box experience.

[starshipeleven]

Many people will be looking for new operating systems when Windows 7 extended support gets dropped in ~3 months (January 2020). I hope this "new activity" will get the attention of users coming from Windows 7.

Everyone still on Win7 has very little incentive to upgrade, really. Much less than those on XP when it finally went out of support.

[starshipeleven]

Steam's own trackers show that neither Debian nor Ubuntu LTS should even be in consideration as a gaming-focused distributions.

Amen to that.

[starshipeleven]

Why are they still updating SteamOS? Surely no one is gonna run SteamOS on a desktop or a laptop. Are they still planning to bring more steam machines one day?

It's their backup plan, their lifeboat. If they see Windows starting to go downhill (which isn't going to be a fast process) they can easily ramp up their efforts and get a decent "replacement" in years.

Starting from scratch with no experience would require many years and it would be a massive risk (as they won't know if they can make it, and in what timescale)

Same as mothballing equipment instead of selling or scrapping it. It's much faster to press it into service than having to buy or procure or even design and manufacture something new from scratch.

So for now SteamOS is not alive, but it's not dead. It's just sleeping.