I haven't gamed in almost a decade but what an exciting time to be alive as a PC gamer:
- almost every classic console is easy to emulate
- most modern consoles are, less-legally, emulatable
- we have thorough archives of Flash games and ofc almost all non-flash web games are still functioning
- cross compatibility across OS's has never been better
And, best of all, almost all of this is achievable on Linux! You can also plug in almost any controller, VR headset, or monitor/projector. Remote gaming has also made incredible progress allowing gamers to access their expansive libraries while not even at home.
In fact, I can't think of a single thing a console can do that a PC can't
While I personally very much enjoy all of the things I can do on PC and Steam Deck, I can definitely understand why my wife - who's not as technically inclined - prefers the PS5.
> - most modern consoles are, less-legally, emulatable
wheres the PS4 or like, any xbox emulator?
It's just Nintendo that has modern, usable emulators for most of the games you'd want to play. xbox never got lucky for basically any of their consoles and Sony never got anything usable after PS3.
I'm pretty into emulation. It's very misleading to claim that "modern consoles are emulatable" when no, only nintendo has emulators you can boot up, pick from a very large list of compatible games, and have a consistent experience that any sane person would want out of these.
Sony disappears after PS3 and xbox... well I guess xemu is Fine, but you're going to play for an hour and then come to the conclusion that you're better off hooking up the old console
I was gonna correct you and then I realized 2013 was indeed 12 years ago.
I guess in my original comment when I said "modern" I just mean not the classics. Other than the latest Xbox and Playstation models, emulators for those lineages are quite mature. Even the Nintendo Switch (2017) has multiple really great emulators.
The point is it's easier to list out which consoles don't have emulators than it is to list out consoles that do. Other than nintendo, there are pretty few console-exclusive games nowadays
Consoles are just loss leaders for software now. Hot take: this is true of the Steam Deck and Machine as well. Yes you can play games from other vendors, but PC gamers are very loyal to Steam and many will never bother. I imagine at least half of steam deck users just use it like a console, not like a PC.
It's pretty good as a consumer but they take a massive cut out for developers. I'm not crying about EA not getting its profit margins, but the cut Steam takes can really hurt indie devs.
> I'm not crying about EA not getting its profit margins, but the cut Steam takes can really hurt indie devs.
Indies actually lose more of their margin than EA does, because Steam reduces their 30% cut to 25% after $10m in sales and 20% after $50m in sales. Few indies are doing those numbers, so it's functionally a discount for AAA publishers to discourage them from leaving for their own launchers again (EA did leave back when it was a flat 30% rate for everyone).
Steam is a good experience and a good price relative to consoles, but other PC gaming storefronts do undercut them. See: Epic free games, isthereanydeal.com (competitive marketplace for legitimate game code resellers, which you can register with Steam,) and the class action lawsuits from Wolfire Games for price fixing.
Yes, but unless you have a library from back in the day classic console games are hard to find and/or expensive. Try finding a copy of Biker Mice From Mars, for example.
So to summarize: Valve provides source code for what they distribute, in compliance with the GPL, but this person went on a personal crusade to demand they open up their private GitLab to the world?
There appears to be some interesting history here, but this takes the cake as the weirdest README I've ever seen in a git repo.
The writing is impenetrably wordy and filled with excessive bolding and parentheticals. It goes completely off track and turns into an extremely long rant that implores the reader to "abstain from procreation", among other things. There are hundreds of links and hundreds of quotes mixed into long-winded sections about the author's self-importance.
Does anyone have a link to a more down to earth, less self-important, and more importantly concise explanation of what's going on?
From what I understand from this repo, the problem is that the official Valve source code release contains PKGBUILD files with build steps that reference a private Gitlab repo that's internal to Valve. So while there is a public release of all source code available for download from Valve's website, these sources cannot actually be built because they want to clone a repo that cannot be accessed.
(In other words, even if you download a tarball of all SteamOS code, you cannot build it, because the build script insists on downloading source code from a Valve-internal remote, instead of looking for it locally.)
So to fix this, the author of this repo did two things: they created public mirrors of all individual git repos that are referenced by the PKGBUILD scripts (presumably by extracting the tarballs from Valve's release and running git init/add/commit/push), and then they created a "master" repo (linked here) that has only the PKGBUILDs, which the author fixed so they reference their own public mirrors instead of Valve's internal GitLab repos. See [1], for example, which contains the build instructions for the Steam Deck's DSP driver. The referenced git repository ([2]) is an inofficial mirror of Valve's internal repo, created from the source code release from the Valve website.
So no, it's not a "personal crusade" to demand Valve open up their "private GitLab to the world". It's a serious grievance about Valve releasing an "open-source" software that cannot actually be built from source, and a request for Valve to provide a public GitLab mirror themselves, such that their PKGBUILD scripts will actually work.
I agree that the author has a confusing writing style, but I do understand their frustrations and concerns.
oh no, this again.. I remember checking out HoloISO when I was looking for SteamOS at launch… did a quick lookup on the creator and yeah, turns out he's a racist furry (literally)..
> These public repositories (@gitlab.com/evlaV) are an unmodified 1:1 public copy/mirror of Valve's latest (currently private) SteamOS 3.x (holo) GitLab repositories
Then define public and state what's wrong with this repo which conflicts from your definition of public.
For me this looks like a fine public resource and after a short glimpse it looks like that you should be able to even build this effing source code from this repo.
Edit ps. If you edit your own content then please leave a note about what you have changed please
The linked repo isn't the official public resource. Valve provides the source packages for what they distribute (aka GPL compliance) but this person wanted them to open up their private GitLab instance to the world.
As far as I can tell, they wrote a script to download the source packages they provide and then try to reconstruct them into a GitLab repo.
Well based on the paragraphs in the README it's not actually being updated anymore, it only reflects SteamOS as of August and the author quit running their process to update it.
> (April 1, 2024): After over 2 3 years (and 2 Steam Deck model releases - LCD and OLED) Valve still hasn't publicized their private GitLab repositories nor fully complied with the GPL. I decided to (finally) release the relevant portion of my automated "bot" project, aptly titled srcpkg2git. This/These software/tools haven't been updated/modified much since 2022, but should allow users to easily access and even mirror Valve's SteamOS private repositories (as I've demonstrated with these public mirrors (@gitlab.com/evlaV) the past over 2 3 years).
Yes indeed. That's hardly public what we can get...
If I understand this correctly, Valve provides the src packages for the packages they distribute. This person wrote a script to download the src packages and extract them. The README misleadingly claims it's a "mirror" of Valve's private git repos, which is not accurate.
The author wants them to open up their GitLab instance, showing their internal development. That's not required under GPL.
Valve appears to be complying. This person wanted access into their internal development systems, though.
The rest of the README is tens of thousands of lines about capitalism, abstaining from procreation, and withdrawing from society with hundreds of links to videos and hundreds of quotes. It's very strange. These are not the writings of a healthy person, sadly.
That is not for desktops. I would assume they meant a proper steamOS desktop release. We haven’t seen one in many years and the previous one is basically useless for most people.
Many of us have been waiting for a proper release for a LONG time. Bazzite is nice but I want to see what valve does next.
my guess is it will be mostly the same as for the SteamDeck but with
- Game Mode becoming getting a not Steam Deck specific desktop version, which I would love to see, e.g. last time I installed Bazzite+Steam Game mode, the Game Mode will default to 1080p even if your GPU can render 4k ...(easy to fix in the options menu, tho. But not very convenient.).
- slightly different defaults, tweaks, builds (e.g. AFIK not to long ago if you tried to put SteamOS on a desktop with RDNA3 graphics it didn't work. But they seem to more or less just use a standard linux graphic stack, so it's probably was just something on the line of "as it's not expected the parts needed for RDNA3 wheren't compiled in/shipped in the SteamOS for SteamDeck image)
There's nothing stopping you from installing it on a desktop with the right hardware.
I have a Ryzen 5 5600 and a 7600 xt in an sff pc, installed steamos directly from the recovery image. It supports the GPU, controllers, even the super fast sleep/wake.
Valve has specifically taken down the (desktop) steamOS download page and only kept up the recovery page because it just isn’t a viable desktop OS if you want to play modern games consistently (as well as other shortcomings). They explicitly discourage its use for desktop on the recovery page IIRC and emphasize it’s for handheld hardware.
The amount of tinkering and driver patching and just general work it requires to get it to play games properly (especially if the person is not AMD CPU/GPU) now makes it a non-starter except for people who explicitly want to make it work.
It can run. It generally runs poorly and with major holes in it.
What you are saying just doesn't align with my experience. I've done no tinkering and definitely no patching and have been able to play several modern games (Cyberpunk, Spiderman 2, GoW: Ragnorok). I expect it's not the same for Nvidia based pcs or ones with exceptionally old or new AMD hardware, which is why I specified the hardware I'm using.
Telling me that the computer I've been gaming on for the last 7 months "isn't viable" for gaming based on CYA language on the downloads page is annoying and unconstructive.
You don’t have to argue with me about it. Feel free to dismiss my opinion. But I encourage you to go do a cursory search online about this and see what comes up.
I never said it can’t be done, just that it’s ill-advised given the limitations and specific hardware requirements to make it work stably/consistently. You yourself said “with the right hardware,” which is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Valve doesn’t stand by it as a desktop OS currently. Whenever it comes up, people almost always instruct folks to go to bazzite. What I am excited for is what they have planned for the steam machine because it’s hard to imagine that an updated version of steamOS built for desktops isn’t coming.
I don't think there's anything concrete at the moment, they're just working on improving hardware compatibility, you can hear it directly from Valve at the 5:05 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuJi1-Csrds&t=305s
I have a SFF pc with an AMD GPU and AMD CPU both with better specs that the new Steam Machine just waiting for them to release a standalone installer for SteamOS :(
I just use vanilla debian and Steam works great. Just set it to launch steam on login and set your system to auto-login, that should get you most of the way.
Have you tried Bazzite? It’s basically a drop-in replacement. It’s based on Fedora’s Atomic stuff instead of Arch, but if it wasn’t for the logo at the start, I’d be hard pressed to notice I was using it and not vanilla SteamOS.
I did try using Bazzite but I had weird issues with stuttering/throttling on the RX 7600 which made most games totally unplayable (I confirmed the same hardware worked fine on a windows install). That was a while ago though, it's probably worth me trying again.
Normally I just use regular Fedora/Arch/OpenSUSE for gaming on Linux and never see any issues (albeit that's on a 6800xt at the moment) but I want that consolized experience.
Apple giving you more than consoles do is damning with faint praise, the Mac bootloader is technically open but without any public hardware documentation it's borderline impossible to do anything useful with that. Asahi have done incredible work but even they are still catching up with the M3, nevermind the current M5.
They can afford to make a big song and dance about this because chances are they are not selling the hardware at a loss and they have the regular steam store to offset the short term costs. If they were selling the hardware at a loss, I think their marketing trying to sell this device would be very different.
they probably will handle it like with the Steam Deck
- no loss
- but small profit margin anyway, to max reduce the price, to max increase adoption/reach
for Valve people using Steam on non Windows platforms is more important then making a big buck from Steam Machines (because this makes them less dependent on Windows, MS has tried(and failed) to move into the direction of killing 3rd party app stores before, and Windows has gotten ... crappy/bloated/ad-infested which is in the end a existential risk for Valve because if everyone moves away from PC gaming they will lose out hugely)
Switch was always sold for more than component and manufacturing cost. PS4 crossed the threshold quickly (per Sony iirc?)
However, that ignores R&D costs which presumably have to be amortized, largely through game sales and platform fees. The same is true for other platforms like iOS.
Even if you didn't want to use the Steam versions. Steam OS is essentially a customised Arch Linux and you can install stuff as you would on other Linux distros e.g. via packages and flathub. Basically it is a regular computer underneath. That is why I am very excited about this Steam box.
You can add packages, but they can be wiped by the updates. Flatpaks work seamlessly and because of the Deck's popularity, most everything you would want is available in flatpak form
On the Steam Deck you boot into desktop mode and it’s a standard Linux. Install what you want. I have Heroic Launcher on mine, running games from GOG and Epic alongside Steam games.
I sure have installed a bunch of emulators on my Deck. It’s not too hard to get individual games to show up in the main Steam menu, iirc. Haven’t really fiddled with them since initial setup though.
It may be too late, but its probably a good idea to to shift the language and start saying installing software on your own device. Google likes the term sideloading because it implies its a weird hack to not get all your software from their store.
This isn't quite true. My GrapheneOS phone isn't lacking any "essential service." The only issue is that some apps distributed through the Play Store (or an alternative frontend like Aurora) that depend on proprietary Google libraries won't work. But this is a problem that rests with the developers of the apps, not AOSP per se.
Valve is even borrowing some of the work done for the Mac version of Linux to add support for Proton on ARM hardware.
> Gaming on Linux on M1 is here! We’re thrilled to release our Asahi game playing toolkit, which integrates our Vulkan 1.3 drivers with x86 emulation and Windows compatibility.
Apple gets the credit for designing a bootloader that allows you to run a third party unsigned OS without degrading device security when you do boot into MacOS.
Applying the security settings per partition instead of per device is much more flexible, and you don't have to worry about Microsoft controlling which OS signing keys are valid.
It's uncharacteristic of them and better than nothing. But simply not blocking the installation of a 3rd party OS should be the bare minimum required by law. Ideally Apple would publish documentation on the hardware so it didn't have to be reverse engineered.
For the sake of the argument, the topic here is running software on general computing devices, and most people don't put game consoles in that category. Also, according to my poor knowledge of game console history of past 30 years, game consoles never intend to run arbitrary software, unless you jailbreak the device which is obviously not allowed by ToS.
Apple allow this kind of thing only on Mac and while also ensuring it does not happen by providing 0 documentation and by not contributing to any outside project. FEX was not made as part of the Asahi Linux project btw. Please inform yourself before making statements
If this is your take on it, enjoy the surveillance state and walled garden Apple has surrounded you with. There is no comparison with Steam and Valve compared to "gaming" on Apple. Literally apples and oranges. And in this case the Apple is soft and tasteless.
Bro. I played what I consider a basic game, Inscryption, on my MacBook Pro M4 Pro with 24Gb and that thing sounded like an aircraft taking off. ...meanwhile the weak sauce Steamdeck plays it flawlessly. Fan hardly even spins up. There is a lot of work to do IMO on the Mac front. I doubt Apple cares.
I've played much more graphically complex games on my M1 MacBook Pro with 16GB ram and _not_ had that issue. I think the makers/porters of Inscryption are to blame for your issue, not Apple.
I agree with the other guy. Just plugging in my M1 Max Macbook to an external 4k monitor makes it hot to touch. I don't what they are doing with the cooling on this laptop.
My m4 macbook had a weird flashing external monitor issue. One that eventually led to my monitor appearing to break. But have no fear, it's a known problem since m1 times and not a priority to fix.
Do you mean plugging a 4k monitor in while gaming, or just in general? If just in general, something's going very wrong since I _only_ use my M1 (not m1 max, not m1 pro) macbook plugged into a 4k monitor (except when traveling), and it's never hot unless I'm playing a game that's really pushing the processor. For most games it barely even gets warm. And for normal web-browsing and netflix-watching it's cool to the touch.
Shrug. I think Minecraft qualifies as basic, and it runs just fine on a five year old M1 Air.
It can also depend on how much effort the developer has put into a particular platform. Macs have not historically had a reputation as being a big market for games, not even in a relative sense, so some developers may not much effort into a Mac port.
That is not 100% correct. Apple is slowing closing in the walls on a general purpose computer and preventing the bypassing of Gatekeeper with the execution of unsigned applications to _protect the children._ [0] [1] [2] [3]
From your mouth to Tim Cook's ear, friend.