https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1kpggmu/the_stat...
What I don't get is why Valve isn't backing such efforts financially. There are millions of wealthy mac owners out there with pretty capable hardware. That should translate into quite a bit of steam purchases.
I just got a shiny m4 max laptop. I run Steam on a much less capable crappy old Samsung laptop (via manjaro). Would I run that on my mac if I could? Yes. Would I be tempted to spend a bit of cash on some fun games. Probably. Am I doing that currently? No, because that crappy old Samsung is too old and most games don't run on it. And I'm not in a mood to buy a dedicated gaming machine. I might at some point but just not a priority. But I don't mind dropping a few euros on a game to entertain myself once in a while.
I remember reading something a few years ago about how Valve basically gave up on Mac due to Apple being a complete pain in the ass to work with.
If Valve were getting high numbers of people installing the macOS Steam client, and you can bet they do already have that telemetry, then they would take the platform more seriously. But most macOS users aren’t interesting in gaming on their Mac.
And with Apple's hostility towards gamers with moves like refusal to support OpenGL or Vulkan (adding extra Metal support work to their developers) and refusal to keep stable APIs for a long time for game developers, it makes sense for them to rather focus on a crowd that is easier to support.
When it comes to gaming, Apple is its own enemy since forever and has been similarly failing to gain serious traction even on iOS (considering how powerful the iOS hardware is). iPads could be Steam Decks of their time and Apple just never cared enough.
It's kind of hilarious and sad... but it works darn well and it's less work than porting to Metal and 64-bit macOS.
My point was that volunteers got quite far getting steam and many games running on macs with decent framerates. The main person driving this recently moved on from working on that. Likewise, Asahi linux is getting quite capable at running steam and lots of games. That too is being driven by a handful of people.
Supporting stuff like that doesn't sound like it should break the bank for Steam. Basically sponsor a few people; maybe hire a few more to support them. It's basically all working at this point, it just needs a bit of love and attention. This wouldn't take years of additional development. And once steam runs properly on macs with thousands of games running smoothly, a lot more people might be using steam on their macs.
Yes, they'd be picking a fight with Apple. But as Epyc (Unreal engine) is showing, those fights can be won if you have deep pockets. And Apple is under a lot of pressure to moderate their anti competitive behavior. Perfect timing for Valve to make some money of all this with a minimum of investment.
Tell me you're only interested in talking about the gaming you care about without telling me directly.
In simple terms, iOS is the only growth market in gaming. Consoles and PCs are basically stagnant, with around 200 million people worldwide in that market and that number hasn't moved in decades. The only growth being made is by raising game prices and making ever more expensive Pro consoles.
iOS is the biggest game market in terms of revenue. You can disregard the games on there, but Apple is laser-focused on that gaming revenue they're making. Apple is the biggest gaming company in the world by revenue.
Android is the main competitor here, and is struggling (low profit/sale). I guess handhelds like the Switch and Steam Deck might somewhat be relevant ?
Apple decided the benefits of moving to ARM outweighed the loss of gamers.
Gaming on Mac died when they killed 32bit support and didn’t support Vulkan. Apple has pretty consistently shown almost no effort in making gaming on Mac work so everyone else has just ignored it.
Why the down-vote? Do I need to flood HN with links? It actually had ads. Go ahead and search for it (or ask me), there were ads in more than one places. It even had ads in its motd (and gnome notifications, and somewhere else I forgot)... I do not care if it is your favorite Linux distribution, it ACTUALLY had ads (and might still do) in more than one places.
So "not getting cluttered with ads" is not so certain. Only if they got rid of all ads, but the future is still not certain with regarding to it, as they have done it before without blinking an eye.
See some links https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44079458 for Amazon ads.
Also https://askubuntu.com/questions/1083504/how-to-disable-the-a... for bit.ly links in motd.
If you need more, I am willing to provide.
https://www.thefastcode.com/en-idr/article/how-to-disable-th... (How To Disable the Amazon Search Ads in Ubuntu's Unity Dash)
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/10asnf/ubuntu_will_n...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/10hmmb/ubuntu_privac...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-am...
So yeah, no. To all the down-voters, they were actual ads, and they actually were in Ubuntu. Sorry.
And yeah, Windows is awful, too.
My point is that the statement that Ubuntu is without ads is not accurate. They already put ads into Ubuntu, and if currently there are no ads, there might be in the future, because now we know that they do not have an issue doing so.
Genuinely, are the folks who advocated and pushed for the Amazon tie-in even still working for Canonical?
What OS do you use?
Back in the late 2000s/early 2010s, Canonical/Ubuntu did good work fixing up lingering issues (e.g. their 100 papercuts program), but for whatever reason (maybe the people left) that was replaced by an era where have they tried to produce alternatives to what everyone else was using, and failing badly. Maybe if they went back to their origins then things might improve, but I suspect they've lost that culture, and they've become the linux distro most matching the trajectory of Google.
But with 10 and 11 Windows became a massive adware, user experience plummeted, and the OS constantly gets in my way.
The only good thing about Windows in 2025 is wsl. So what does that say?
I tried daily driving Mint and I was instantly filled with nostalgia and appreciation for how the OS really tries to help me do whatever I need, gets out of the way, doesn't ask for anything or makes product "suggestions". It's so smooth and simple compared to Windows right now.
Of course it helps that by now I have more than enough Linux experience, but I would still recommend Mint over Windows to most people.
To be transparent, I use Windows Pro and am a Microsoft 365 subscriber for my business. Is this why I don't see ads?
My pipe dream is that Proton becomes so successful that it kills itself by making linux gaming profitable enough to be first party supported. My long wish of having a decent gaming and development environment will finally come true, just in time for me to not care so much about one or the other.
I'm waiting until there's a big download button on a Valve page, and ideally a supported upgrade path from an existing Windows install.
Use any low maintenance Linux distro and install Steam through flatpak and you got the exact experience you want. There is no difference. You are waiting for something which might never come out so that installing might be 10 minutes faster. That is totally absurd.
Steam OS ist not more maintenance than any other low maintenance distro.
Kernel level anti-cheat is unethical and dangerous. The sign-ins are mostly spyware.
All around it is the worst computing experience I have ever had. KDE easily outclasses Microsoft at interface design and basically any Linux distro has a superior user experience for a tech literate person.
Windows by default groups windows of the same app in the task bar, isn't this what you're asking for? I can still access the other windows of the same app by clicking or using keybinds (win+number). On osx if a settings window is behind the main window I need to press some keybind to cycle through windows or go into the menu to get it on top again.
You can’t hide, minimize, or restore all windows belonging to an app for example, and you can’t move all windows belonging to an app to a different virtual desktop, either, all of which macOS is capable of. The per-app grouping also enables OS-provided tabbing for apps that want it, giving you browser-style tabs in non-browser apps with the ability to merge all windows into a single tabbed window.
The Win+number key shortcut for cycling through app windows is better than nothing, but falls short in that it’s only reasonable to remember the shortcut for apps pinned to your taskbar, since non-pinned apps will shift around, it’s limited 10 apps, and is awkward to use for numbers in the middle. Command-` doesn’t have these issues.
For closing inactive windows, if its corner is peeking out is behind your other windows, you can hold down Option and click the close button to close it without bringing it forward. This isn’t very helpful for users who keep their windows tightly tiled and is more aligned with the style that the Mac desktop has always been developed around, which is to let windows pile up organically and be sized to fit their content rather than keeping every pixel of the screen filled at all times.
Last year I was fed up with Windows, and switched to Linux. Since I had a lot of experience with Linux already, I went with Arch. I thought it was going to be really difficult. Sure, the initial setup was a lot of work, but now I'm extremely happy with it. Much happier than I ever was running Ubuntu, Mint, etc.
But anyway, nowadays I don't even think about that I'm running Linux anymore. I have a pretty big Steam library and play a lot of games. I install a game, I run it, and play it. I haven't found any instance where it doesn't work yet. Granted, I don't play multi-player games nor games with DRM (I'm a patient gamer, most games I play are >2 years old).
I have enough programming adjacent hobbies (and I'm a SWE/SRE at work). Windows is requiring too much management, and I don't want to move to a DIY gaming setup on Linux, I'd rather wait for Steam OS to be fully supported, or just buy a console.
And before someone pushes back with Linux being easy to manage, that's not really the point. I use Linux, it requires more sysadmining than my Steam Deck does. Just because I can do it doesn't mean I want to.
Is it the updates that break your system? There are mature immutable distros like Fedora Kinoite, which I personally used for years without reinstalling. Is it hardware workarounds? The only way to solve that is to use OEM-tested hardware, which in the case of Linux laptops is sparse and still requires some research for desktop. If it's Windows compatibility, Steam itself has supported Proton years before the Deck was released.
The only thing SteamOS provides is an immutable base with preconfigured kiosk UI. Unless your use-case is exactly that, a home console, I don't see any added value in it specifically.
Why do you care about having that particular Arch derivative? Any mainstream distro (except Ubuntu derivatives) are perfectly usable for gaming.
There really is no point in waiting for Valve to drop their own Arch derivative. It won't do anything you can not do right now.
The thing that sucks the most (and SteamOS doesn't fix) is that the PC ecosystem is fracturing out of control. Steam alone can't do it for me - I have games now in Oculus, Meta, and Xbox. Or my favorite game (Anno 1800 being locked behind a POS Uplay launcher). Windows is the only game in town if you want to do everything, but they can't get out of their own way.
I think there is an opening for SteamOS to create console-type compatibility guarantees for a machine which also doubles as a general-purpose PC. Honestly if Valve doesn't get their act together somehow, I might just switch to a traditional console. I love Steam's Big Picture Mode, but if half my games don't even work, what's the point? (And don't get me started on how they killed the Steam Controller...)
If you want something that just works, get a console (though looks like even Nintendo has fallen to the "some games require an Internet connection" issue with the Switch 2, weirdly because of too big storage cards). But you will be limited by what the manufacturer mandated.
If you want diversity and freedom, use a PC. But you will have to tinker to make it work.
P.S.: I guess that there's also MacOS / iOS / Android / ChromeOS / ..? in-between, but they perhaps provide even less options foe gaming...
It has a proprietary launcher for games, but also comes with Plasma Desktop.
I’ve tried using Fedora as my TV gaming rig but steamos is much better as it out of the box has everything you need. No installing extra drivers for things like Xbox controller support. And it has a fully controller navigable OS that lets you do a lot of advanced system management stuff that you’d otherwise need a mouse and keyboard for.
Also for a while now Valve has been the main contributors towards wine and other gaming on Linux projects.
Linux is nicer than Windows for developers and power users; the main issue is hardware compatibility. Preinstalls address that.
Valve tried “steam machines”, OEM devices intended to provide a console-like experience. It wasn’t a big success (although that might have been a botched implementation rather than something fundamentally wrong about the concept, IDK)
Here's one way to think about it. The Steam Machine was asking gamers to buy a new device so they can game on their TV. Its failure shows that most Steam users were happy to keep gaming on their PC.
But, almost everyone wants to buy a laptop every once in a while. And as long as you're buying a laptop, if you're a gamer, you might as well buy the gaming laptop which is running SteamOS and has really strong gaming compatibility.
Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part.
>I've been hearing gaming laptop manufacturers tell me for years that gaming laptops are the future or whatever, but now that a laptop GPU is sitting securely at the top of the Steam Hardware Survey, I'm actually starting to believe it.
https://www.ign.com/articles/gaming-laptops-are-apparently-m...
And I can believe them when a discrete mid-range card being announced for $350 is "relatively cheap":
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/amds-radeon-rx-9060-xt-want....
But on the other hand 3D-heavy games coming out right now seem to be a combination of poorly optimized and very badly looking on low-end hardware, making ~new gaming laptops less viable too...
Steam OS is much more refined now and with proton there is significantly better compatibility.
I would be definitely interested on a Steam Deck consolle-like appliance.
Of course you can just connect the steam deck to the TV, but it seems wasteful, you could have a better CPU/GPU while not need battery and screen. Also we need a new version of the steam controller!
Maybe one day.
Bazzite is a Linux operating system, built on SteamOS, that's designed to make it easy to use with different hardware and controllers. It simplifies the installation process and works really well with other game launchers that aren't on Steam, and you can set it up to look like a game console with the SteamOS interface or a regular computer with a desktop.
The only real problem I had was with competitive multiplayer shooter games require kernel-level anti-cheat software, that doesn't work with Linux.
But if playing online multiplayer isn't your main thing and you’re sick of windows being as intrusive as it is, Bazzite is an outstanding choice for a gaming or home theater computer.
It ia a larger distribution better maintained and supported underneath..
All that bazitte does is put steam os interface in front of it..
Every single person would be better served by just using Fedora. The addition layer is either so thin that the value added is zero or it creates a drastically worse user experience, as the layer around Fedora is poorly maintained by a few volunteers and very little testing is done. Bazzite is pointless and a total waste of time. Nobody should use it.
All of these "layer around actually popular distro" projects are pointless and make using Linux on the desktop a worse experience.
Bazzite, as far as I am aware, is closest thing that you can get from a console-like experience for a HTPC*. Although it is possibly to configure Bazzite to launch directly into desktop mode, the key idea behind it is to launch in Big Picture mode, so you can manage the UI using a controller. Once that is done, you are pretty much into SteamOS/SteamDeck-like UI.
The appear of the Distro for me was always to get the convenience and console-like experience, while enjoying more powerful hardware and the benefits of the Steam platform.
Merely having an immutable OS, sandboxed Steam preconfigured, plus propietary drivers for Graphics and Controllers preinstalled, puts it leagues apart from just installing fedora, for people that don't need or want to care about it
The ublue/bazzite guys are hard at work making the experience as streamlined with upstream as possible, while simplifying the rest (Because the less they personally need to maintain the better)
When installing Bazzite for a living room pc, I literally didn't need to step outside of steam once, I could have been setting up an actual console for all I cared to know
I also think that nvidia might not like it, and I wonder if there are actors who can undermine steamos.
Oh, ok
> Valve still hasn't said whether its long-term plan is to offer a "generic" version of SteamOS that can be installed on any PC hardware, a la the original release of SteamOS back in the early 2010s, or if it will just offer the software directly to PC makers.
So what is this article about then
weird_trousers•8mo ago
I believe that Microsoft does not care about Gaming those days, so it is definitely time for Valve to jump in and win some percentages in the market.
We know for sure that Windows shares will not drop drastically based on this move, and that the tendency will progress among years (not months). Now, we have to make sure that Valve is not evil... and I do not believe they are angels they claim since the beginning. To me Valve is like Google was in beginning of 2000s : invest on open-source, have a good fanbase, ... and once you have a significant percentage of the market share / users then you can move evil.
coffeebeqn•8mo ago
Manfred•8mo ago
It does not use any of the popular desktop environments (unless you drop into Desktop Mode). It heavily curates hardware, kernel, and drivers to keep the platform from breaking and install with sane (performance) defaults for gaming. It doesn't rely on a common package manager.
Beside a Steam Deck I also use a Linux PC for gaming and even with 25 years of Linux experience I still struggle sometimes to keep hardware acceleration working after a driver update, sometimes spending an evening of troubleshooting instead of gaming. Certain parts of the desktop environment sometimes lock up to the point where I have to SSH into the PC to fix it. It's like owning a vintage car in a certain way.
And yes, I prefer all of that over the Windows experience, but it's not seamless and not simple enough for anyone to just jump into.
selivanovp•8mo ago
Manfred•8mo ago
You can look for things like "nvidia drm broken" and find thousands of threads of people all types of problems spanning decades, meaning; old and new. Some of them are pure driver issues caused by NVIDIA but that doesn't matter because we're not trying to assign blame, but we're trying to see if the ecosystem is "mature".
Gigachad•8mo ago
Their package management also isn’t that exotic. It’s a lot like Fedora Silverblue where the OS is an immutable image and user software is installed with Flatpak.
Manfred•8mo ago
Ygg2•8mo ago
In essence Linux suffers from a Lisp curse. Whenever two OS nerds disagreed on something they made their own slightly different distro.
This means wasted effort on multiple DE, window managers, app flavors, installed libraries. To this day, almost no two distros can agree on baseline libraries every Linux must have.
ekianjo•8mo ago
It's only a problem if you think it is. In practice I use at least 3 or 4 different distros on a daily basis and I never have any issue juggling between them. For most of the typical use cases it does not even matter, and on the desktop side flatpak resolves many issues.
Ygg2•8mo ago
No. It's a problem, if you as distro maker support non-technical consumers as well.
Imagine troubleshooting Windows but you also have to figure out which DE, WM, libraries the user updated and so on.
> desktop side flatpak resolves many issues
You mean AppImage, Snap, etc.
tuna74•8mo ago
Ygg2•8mo ago
tuna74•8mo ago
And if there was such a nightmare to create a distro, how come there are so many?
spookie•8mo ago
ashdnazg•8mo ago
If a free Linux distribution is more successful, its resources don't scale accordingly.
Affric•8mo ago
Predation: win-lose
Competition: lose-lose
This is how dynamically coupled systems work.
Ygg2•8mo ago
tuna74•8mo ago
xtracto•8mo ago
tuna74•8mo ago
xtracto•8mo ago
Back in the 90s when linux came out and started getting traction, Richard Stallman was adamant that people should call the operating system GNU/Linux , because Linux was only the kernel, but mlst of the userland utilities were the GNU software (which were planning to make a full OS like GNU/Hurd).
Some people made fun of that, and I was just kind of paying the joke.
akagusu•8mo ago
Ekaros•8mo ago
tuna74•8mo ago
akagusu•8mo ago
nfg•8mo ago
I’d be interested in hearing you expand on that!
Disclaimer: I work there :-)
petepete•8mo ago
* is difficult/impossible to install without tying up a Microsoft Account
* has ads baked in
* is trying to force feed everyone Copilot when most people just don't care
* comes preinstalled with bloat
It's a pity. There's a great OS hiding in there somewhere. A consumer version of LTSC would probably make gamers very happy.
charcircuit•8mo ago
Gamers probably already have a Microsoft account as its required for games like Minecraft or services like Gamepass. A Microsoft account is needed for Windows Hello to function.
>has ads baked in
Do you have an example. I think it's more likely the user installed malware if ads are showing up unexpectedly. Gamers are more likely to install malware like this and Windows's security is not good enough to stop it especially when gamers use admin accounts and disable uac.
>is trying to force feed everyone Copilot when most people just don't care
How is it being forced? I haven't seen it on my machine. I assume people who don't care could just ignore it or disable the feature if they don't want it. Being able to look up help for games using Copilot seems like a feature that gamers may find valuable.
>comes preinstalled with bloat
Bloat is subjective. Actual performance issues caused by unneeded things running while in games would be. The mere existence of unused pteinstalled applications doesn't necessarily cause problems to gamers.
Gigachad•8mo ago
petepete•8mo ago
If I want to use these things let me opt in.
> Do you have an example [of ads]
There are hundreds or thousands of articles on the subject. Here's one.
https://uk.pcmag.com/migrated-3765-windows-10/151992/microso...
> How is it being forced?
Maybe force was too strong a word, but 'incessantly nagged regardless of previous rejection' sums it up nicely
https://tech.yahoo.com/general/articles/microsofts-latest-co...
> comes preinstalled with bloat
If I install an operating system and there's a Netflix logo in the application menu when I don't havw a Netflix account and was never asked if I wanted it, it's bloat.
When people have taken the time to write debloating scripts it's fair to say some people think it's bloated.
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
If you enjoy using it don't let my high standards stop you.
charcircuit•8mo ago
This is a case of whether the device should be secure by default or if the user should have to opt in to security. Microsoft has chosen the position that account security should be there by default which is why it's not opt in for using an Microsoft account. I think this is a reasonable design decision to make.
>Here's one.
An app store recommendation is not an ad. The OS is helping the user find content that they may be looking for. It isn't an ad surface where companies are bidding to show up for keywords. The word ad is used by the article to stir drama and drive clicks.
>If I install an operating system and there's a Netflix logo in the application menu when I don't havw a Netflix account and was never asked if I wanted it, it's bloat.
But there are plenty of people who do have a Netflix account and Netflix showing up there is helping them accomplish something they want to do with their new computer. You have to understand that most people are not that good with computers and surfacing these things in more places can legitimately help them out.
tauoverpi•8mo ago
> This is a case of whether the device should be secure by default or if the user should have to opt in to security. Microsoft has chosen the position that account security should be there by default which is why it's not opt in for using an Microsoft account. I think this is a reasonable design decision to make.
Opt-out security is the better model to have but I don't see how security features require a microsoft account to function. This isn't the case on any other operating system as security is not bound to having an account for some external service. Rather this seems like an artificial limitation that microsoft has created to push other microsoft services on the user as someone that only uses windows to play steam games that don't use a microsoft account have no use for one regardless if they use windows or not.
Can you point to a particualr security feature that would stop functioning and that needs to have an account and that couldn't use a hardware security key for 2FA (if 2FA is a requirement)?
> But there are plenty of people who do have a Netflix account and Netflix showing up there is helping them accomplish something they want to do with their new computer. You have to understand that most people are not that good with computers and surfacing these things in more places can legitimately help them out.
Helping users use the app store which the majority are capable of should be sufficient unless the app store is so complex that it's practically unusable for the majority. The majority are also capable of using phones to install games, netflix, and other applications without having to be tech savy to do so.
Those users which aren't capable of operating the app store (usually the elderly) either have family that help them set things up or simply aren't your customers as they don't own computers.
charcircuit•8mo ago
No, as the security key can provide the identity instead of the Microsoft account.
>Helping users use the app store which the majority are capable of should be sufficient
If you want to provide a good user experience you shouldn't stop at sufficient.
>Those users which aren't capable of operating the app store
It's not about a binary yes or no. It's about making it easier to accomplish what users want to do.
petepete•8mo ago
If that's not an ad I don't know what is!
I hate it and won't use a computer that does it.
charcircuit•8mo ago
ThrowawayR2•8mo ago
petepete•8mo ago
Yeah, it's unavoidable on phones with either Android or iOS without making huge compromises on things like banking and payments.
dartharva•8mo ago
ekianjo•8mo ago
weird_trousers•8mo ago
I know this comes from the Microsoft management side, and not from the devs.
owebmaster•8mo ago
Business dark patterns aren't bugs nor something you can change :)
SleepyMyroslav•8mo ago
tbh, I don't think community here actually cares about games or technical details to go through lists of topics :)
bitmasher9•8mo ago
Have you seen the Microsoft Merger and Acquisition list for the last ten years? They are spending money like they care about gaming.
BlueTemplar•8mo ago
Valve is a private company led by Gabe Newell. Once he's gone and Valve goes public, Valve will become evil too. And people who relied too much on Steam will be sorry.