Steam Machine

Steam is the only reason I have a Windows desktop, I'll probably just get one of these next time I want a hardware refresh (which admittedly will probably be many years).

Interesting that it uses KDE Plasma for the desktop

I like SteamOS a great deal, though it's not my daily driver (yet). I'm curious if people will begin to use it as a daily driver and thus expect Valve to be an OS developer on top of creating software for their gaming hardware. That's a different set of expectations and I wonder how they'll navigate it.

> thus expect Valve to be an OS developer on top of creating software for their gaming hardware. That's a different set of expectations and I wonder how they'll navigate it.

They've been doing it since Steam Deck launched, or even since they started to contribute to Proton/Wine (depending on exactly what you see "OS" to be). They seem to have grips on it more or less already, Deck upgrades are a breeze and the machine and software itself is open enough for a Linux hacker like me to be very comfortable on it, and also closed down enough for my nieces to not be able to brick theirs by just tapping around.

It doesn't boot into the desktop by default — it uses its own session with the Gamescope compositor. The desktop is easily accessible through the power menu though.

Linux is my daily driver, and I run steam to play games (though, not on a work linux partition for reasons).

It can run just about everything I want to play, but yes, there are plenty of things that don't work yet. Doom Dark Ages, for example.

I have been using Steam Deck oled as my main computing device for 2 years. It has been amazing. It's fast and silent.

Indeed, even much earlier. With Steam Deck they achieved wider adoption but the first generation of Steam Machines came out in 2015 and they have been committed to the SteamOS linux distro since then.

Yeah, I'm sure you're right overall, they've been at it for a long time. I think it's worth keeping in mind that all of the SteamOS'es before Steam Deck were pretty much nothing like the current (3.0) iteration. If I recall correctly, I think they were based on Ubuntu or Debian, compared to the current Arch Linux distribution.

They seem to have worked it out well by limiting SteamOS to their hardware, so they don't have to handle all the varieties a regular distro has to. There's a significant number of people who want an 'official' release as a regular installable distro but I doubt it'll happen and Valve are happy to delegate that to others

I've used SteamOS as a daily driver for half a year. Immutable distros have limitations and my distrobox images failed to work after a SteamOS update.

If you're ok with running work stuff in a separate VM within SteamOS, that works great. Using Geekbench I saw only a 5% cpu performance penalty. Io takes a bigger hit, but that wasn't a blocker for me as I was intending to run VMs with encrypted storage anyway (which adds even more latency) but still a good experience for my work.

> Interesting that it uses KDE Plasma for the desktop

SteamOS on the Steam Deck already used KDE Plasma for the desktop.

Gamescope is really nice. I am running Steam headlessly with that on my home server.