It's Been Four Years Since SteamOS Began Shipping With Not Much To Show

[anarki2]

As long as they refuse to drop "stable_api_nonsense.txt" this will never change. Ever. You can't build stable software upon unstable interfaces, let alone over dozens of them in an infinite number of possible version combinations, end of story.

You can quote me on that.

Canonical tried to do something similar with a stable common base, it was called the Ubuntu API or something, it would've been something like LSB except more ambitious. Of course they instantly received backlash for that, because "ooooh but what about freedom of choice" and other standard bullcr@ap. Because standardization is restricting to some. Makes sense. So enjoy your unstable random API versions and random breakages but don't expect big companies to develop for the desktop, let alone properly support it for a long time.

Especially when it comes to games. A game's support lifecycle is like a year or two at best. They won't just spend money on all their previous titles to keep making them work on Ubuntu release n+1 and n+2. Traditional software is less problematic because you get a newer version which is of course targeting the current OS releases, but games? Not quite. You get a new episode, but there's never a v2.0 for an older release.

We only need to endure LTS releases for 2 years, but the first half year is about putting out fires because of atrocious bugs, then in the 2nd year things are already obsolete. For things like the lack of TLSv1.2 support in 14.04. So they refuse to support their own platform but they expect others to do it anyway. Well yeah, that's not how it works. That's not how any of this works.

[moilami]

That's FreeBSD gaming...

Yeah, and it is fine

[mike44]

Yea I think they don't have silly stupid things like udev? No wonder very few linux sales when people can't get their joystick working...Creating udev rules is a real pain in the ass and only on Linux.

[NateHubbard]

I know how we can get people to want Linux for gaming. We need to make BTRFS more mature and make it the default file system on popular distributions. And we need systemd to help integrate the desktop environment even better with Linux. Also Wayland as the display server performing typical everyday rendering tasks will definitely impress prospective gaming users... And while not needed for gaming, the philosophical implications of good open source OpenCL support should be appealing too. And we're already down to 5 popular widget toolkits and 4 popular desktop environments to give everyone a sort-of standard look-and-feel desktop experience.

Need I say more? If ordinary non-computer savvy gaming people know about must-have essential features like BTRFS, system management, and boilerplate display technologies, they'd switch in droves for sure.

I honestly thought you were being sarcastic by mentioning things no user will care about ever, like btrfs and systemd, which are invisible to the user, and making fun of wayland for seeming to never be fully usable. You even mentioned "philosophical implications" and toolkits.

I know that the toolkit is definitively why my girlfriend has a Windows PC...

But reading it again, I think maybe you were serious?

People will continue to run Windows as long as that is where all the games (and office applications to a lesser extent) run on day one.

[Michael_S]

Of course, there's a chicken and egg problem here. Game devs wouldn't target SteamOS if nobody is running it. That's why Valve was hoping to get as many SteamOS devices into people's hands as possible. And that's the part of the plan that has not worked so well. Any SteamOS-based living room PC would give you *much* better value if you install Windows + Steam on it instead, even considering the cost of a Windows license (OEM licenses are much cheaper).

I still think SteamOS is an important part of the strategy of convincing game devs to target to Linux. But we still need to figure out how to get people to want a Linux-based device for its own merits.

I think it's an effectively unsolvable problem. The overwhelming majority of serious PC gaming enthusiasts aren't going to give up Windows and the 80% of the Steam games that only run on it. There is no "killer app" to get people to switch.

[caligula]

I've tried Steam OS few times and always wonder what the heck did they do to make it so wrong. It uses too much disk space (tried to build a minimal Steam OS system and came up with 90% smaller one), boots slower than my distro, outdated software. Maybe it's a nice stable platform for developers, but not really the gaming distro you'd want.

[starshipeleven]

As long as they refuse to drop "stable_api_nonsense.txt" this will never change. Ever. You can't build stable software upon unstable interfaces, let alone over dozens of them in an infinite number of possible version combinations, end of story.

As usual, anyone posting the linux kernel API instability as an issue just shows he is clueless.

That document talks about driver-kernel interfaces, while kernel-userspace interfaces are kept stable and have always been kept stable.

The issues applications have on Linux are overall the same issues they also have on Windows, they need to bundle ALL OS-level-libraries they might remotely need as changes in newer versions might break older applications. Windows development is just slower, but the issue is still there. Most applications on Windows ship a fuckton of .dlls in their folders just for the sake of not relying on OS libraries.

The current solution to that is flatpack and Snap, which aim to provide stable OS-level libraries and a way to make self-contained and sanboxed packages so the outdated (and probably vulnerable) applications don't fuck up the rest of the system when they get compromised.

[starshipeleven]

Yea I think they don't have silly stupid things like udev? No wonder very few linux sales when people can't get their joystick working...Creating udev rules is a real pain in the ass and only on Linux.

More like the joystick manufacturer isn't giving a shit about Linux so they don't ship drivers and udev rules for their stuff.

Also, Windows lacks any kind of udev, and this means that it is 100% up to the manufacturer to ship drivers that find and enumerate correctly their device.
With serial ports (where the driver is rather basic) it's always a crapshoot, will your USB-serial dongle get assigned COM1? COM4? COM3?

Also Windows will NOT remember drive letters of removable drives unless you set it to a very high letter (like X, W, Z) as the lower ones can be reassigned to other drives if you connect enough drives to reach their letter.

[sarmad]

I think SteamOS still has a chance if Valve decides to push it again, now that AMD's support is in good shape and Vulkan's support is maturing in the major game engines. They can release a new steam machine with an AMD APU and it will be able to compete with consoles price wise. They just need to convince big studios to start targeting SteamOS, and they will if they see a reasonably priced Steam Machine that is actually marketed.
Otherwise, if Valve doesn't give SteamOS another push then Atari will actually have a better chance of succeeding than Valve.

[nslay]

But reading it again, I think maybe you were serious?

You deserve to be called terrible names! I'll leave those names you deserve to your own imagination.

Welcome to Phoronix, a community of computer enthusiasts that seemingly mostly use Linux and care about things that no user will ever care about. Thanks for almost figuring out that the posts highlights the rift between gamers and Linux enthusiasts. Any malevolent non-humorous intention you may have read into my post is also purely in your imagination.