Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark

TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• magic_lobster_party@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Is that really needed?

  I think what could really drive adoption is if computers with Linux pre-installed was more easily accessible. Just boot the computer, choose which DE you want to install and then it’s done. It doesn’t need to be SteamOS. Just any good distro will do.

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  • damnedfurry@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Just boot the computer, choose which DE you want to install

    Yeah, that’s not at all accessible to the average consumer; they don’t know what a “DE” even is, much less why they should choose any over any other.

    Very, very few people want to deal with something other than a ‘just works’ situation.

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      They don’t need to, just give them 3 screenshots and ask which they want. Show KDE, GNOME, and whatever the distro wants as the third. Maybe include some bullet points below each explaining what they are (pick one from the last two):

      • KDE - familiar, extensible
      • GNOME - modern, minimalist
      • Cinnamon/Budgie/MATE - something in the middle
      • XFCE/LXQT - super lightweight for older systems

      Maybe select one by default that the OEM likes, but showing the option helps nudge them toward the idea that this is a flexible system.

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      • captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Bazzite offers KDE or GNOME, and in the menu mentions KDE is what is used in SteamOS.

        I installed Bazzite on my HTPC recently. It was the worst install process I’ve seen in over ten years of using Linux. I shall enumerate the problems I had:

        1. The image is weirdly large, it’s like 9GB in size. It takes awhile to download and a weirdly long time to write to a USB stick.
        2. Once written, you boot the image, and GRUB has the options to Install Bazzite or Test Media And Install Bazzite. By default, Test Media is selected. It always fails this test.
        3. If you use the typical non-live environment image, the scaling is tiny on a 4k monitor, and there’s no way to adjust this.
        4. If you use the live environment image (in beta at time of writing), it might just lock up. I had that happen twice just while clicking through the Anaconda installer.
        5. The Anaconda installer, which I think they inherited from Fedora, was I think designed by one of the contrarian idiots who work for Gnome. There’s a DONE button up in the far upper left hand corner of the screen that sometimes acts as a back button, sometimes acts as a forward button. You have to move the mouse from the top corner of the screen to the center of the screen a lot, for no reason. The top-left corner of the screen is a dumb place to put a DONE button because most languages read top to bottom, left to right, the DONE button is where a START button should go.
        6. There isn’t a simple way to tell it “put / on this drive, put /home on that drive.” There’s an automatic installer which will do god knows what…fail, most likely. There’s a “custom” partition dialog which I couldn’t make heads or tails of, and then there’s a “custom advanced” one that lets you set the size and position of each partition to the byte. Doing it this way apparently REQUIRES you to not only set up a /boot/efi partition, but also a /boot partition separate from /root.
        7. If you’re in the habit of putting /, you know, operating system and software, on one drive, and /home on another drive, you have to learn from osmosis that part of Bazzite’s immutableness means that there is no /home, there’s a /var/home symlinked to /home.

        And if it doesn’t randomly lock up, you’ve got Bazzite installed!

        Bazzite markets itself as a newbie friendly Linux. They’ve got that configurator on their website that gives you a little Cosmo quiz about what system you have, what desktop you want etc. which is good! That is good user friendly design. But the actual software you get rattles like a Chrysler. How many noobs are going to bounce right off that?

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      • magic_lobster_party@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        EndeavourOS has that kind of menu during the install process. A few screenshots and a brief explanation of each option.

        I thought it was nice. It’s something I want to see more with other distros. The DE is what most people will notice about the OS either way.

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      • someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I agree with the other guy, that’s too much choice.

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    • sparky@lemmy.federate.cc ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I think the “friendly” distros like Linux Mint with built-in driver detection/management and pretty broad package repositories (surfaced as an “App Store”) are probably to the point where many normal people could use them, without significantly more technical chops than Windows. Particularly as a gaming rig where you basically just need Firefox, LibreOffice and Steam.

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  • Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    A brand name that people trust is a huge deal in marketing

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  • psx_crab@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    The issue with that is, people have no idea what these “choice” even mean. SteamOS is SteamOS, Windows 11 is Windows 11, MacOS is MacOS, but Linux is a big list. If pushing adoption is the key purpose, the manufacturer need to pick one that they believe is reliable and in active development. Just one. All these editions will very likely cause choice paralysis, which lead to people deem it as “too complicated”.

    Also Valve will not likely go that path again.

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Who else has an incentive to do so other than Valve? Even when you buy a pre-built with Windows today, those things are subsidized by bloatware that’s already installed on the machine.

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  • The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Some companies sell Linux prebuilts, like System76, but that's pretty niche for the average person to even know to search for.

    Now, if stores like Best Buy had a section for Linux prebuilts, that would reach a lot of people.

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    • Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Lenovo too news.itsfoss.com/lenovo-cuts-windows-tax/

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      • The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Ooh, Lenovo is a much bigger deal.

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  • Jankatarch@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Strong agree. Everyone agrees chromeos is not THE best OS but you won’t see a single person dualboot windows on their personal chromebook.

    How google fucked up gentoo I wish not to talk of.

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• chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Bazzite already fills this niche. It just doesn’t have the Steam name on it.

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• PanaX@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I can attest that SteamOS does work on my rigs that are AMD gpu/cpu. It actually works great. I haven’t had one single issue. But I don’t do multiplayer games either.

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• logicbomb@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I’d guess Valve wants whatever makes more games work on Linux so that their Steam Deck works better and is more compatible.

  And that means the most important thing is Linux desktop adoption by game developers so they make more native games. So somewhat ironically, I don’t think SteamOS would be as high a priority as other distributions, since it focuses on players instead of developers.

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  • samus12345@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Ironically, some games run better on the Steam Deck through Proton rather than the native Linux version.

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    • missphant@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      A lot of games received their ports during the Steam Machine era, used outdated technologies like DirectX to OpenGL translation, and never got updated, so it’s not surprising unfortunately.

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