Comment by Forgeties79
3 months ago
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.