SteamOS is about Valve not paying Microsoft a license fee. It’s not some egalitarian move by them but a cost saving. From a game dev’s perspective it’s additional cost and effort to port a game, or hope it runs under emulation with Proton.
I am surprised they haven’t used it for cloud gaming yet since that’s where the real cost savings kick in but I bet they’re still saving on each Steam Deck they sell without Windows on it.
I’ve finally banished Windows to a virtual machine, and am gearing up to fistfight Easy:
Anti-cheatRootkit AKA Fucking piece of shit that does precisely fuck-all to stop cheating despite having access to kernel space in order to get Sea of Thieves working on my virtual machine.Lemme know if you figure out how to get that working
Update: It’s now working.
Oh nice, congrats! Could you share info about it? That’s been my biggest barrier to dropping Windows as a gamer with many games that I enjoy using root access anti cheats.
I followed a tutorial meant to bypass Easy: Anticheat for VRchat. I manually defined the hardware names and versions of some of my computer’s components in KVM’s XML code. It wasn’t very difficult and only took about 30 minutes in total, setting up GPU passthrough was difficult though.
Thanks so much for the info!
It’s not about killing windows… but if it were to have an accident, y’know… I’m just sayin’…
I need Windows to die because I’m tired of having to use it just to get proper HDR and Nvidia support. Or at the very least, AMD GPUs need to get better.
Windows is done. The only thing that can save it is if they turn it into a spy machine that can do your laundry. Then users will happily give them the keys to their lives and underwear.
Shots fired!
Big “if” these days
Ouch, someone got roasted!
“If”
For real, the “if” in that sentence could reasonably win an Olympic powerlifting competition
its honest a boon for gamers as microsoft now actually has to spend more effort making windows betters for gamers then spending all of its effort on windows for arm and AI. one of the things windows as an OS lacks is that the handheld experience is actually trash, and the OS is a resource hog for a handheld device
They tried to make the handheld experience better in windows 8… 🤣
imo the metro take of windows 8 wasn’t the wrong approach for its intended market(tablets) it’s just forcing it on desktop/laptop users as well as a boneheaded decision.
They need to stop forcing windows changes for ALL users, including to the users that can’t use said features properly (as it was designed with touch screens in mind, and not everyone had touchscreens). Same idea with the more recent stuff involving Recall. not everyone has AI capable pcs, so its dumb to include the change to all users that will exist on the main branch of the OS, and would apply down the line to windows handhelds as well, who will likely not need recall as a feature as its using up resources. And im not like a person whose like fully Anti AI either, it just has its specific userbase that may need it, and there are others (like with a windows handheld case) that should not have it at all, as it is likely a detriment to battery if enabled by default.
Honestly the metro design language didn’t look particularly attractive for touch screens either. I knew someone with a Nokia Windows Phone, the interface seemed… clunky. Quirky but not in the right ways.
It has to cater to mice and fingers, and so ends up with the lowest common denominator. Can’t have information density because of the butter fingers, can’t have neat swiping gestures because of the mice and especially trackpads. So, big squares and huge buttons, repeat ad nauseum. Like a DUPLO set.
Surely the UI/UX designers and Microsoft knew this, but I guess Ballmer had his way. Meanwhile Valve didn’t have to contend with cranky executives, so they just slapped Big Picture on top of KDE and let use decide when to switch between console mode and desktop mode.
That’s what I was implying with the elipses, I just couldn’t be bothered writing all that 😅
Microsoft keeps doing it, and I don’t expect they’ll do anything different this time. They’ll shove handheld UI into work laptops and piss off a ton of people, and then 5 years down the line they’ll tear out a lot of work that they did and leave behind some remnant bloat
Competition is always great. To be fair, Windows wasn’t really designed with a handheld game console in mind as its target distribution platform. SteamOS, at least its current version, was designed for that exact purpose. Would definitely welcome a more lightweight Windows to come from this though, not just for handhelds but just regular desktops too.
That “If” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence. Really interested to see where SteamOS goes in the future.
It’s easy to understate what an unusual project SteamOS is. It represents over a dozen years of work from some of the industry’s finest, is funded by a private company, yet is open source and free for everyone to use. “I’m pretty happy that we’ve managed to find a balance that’s beneficial to everyone, while still being able to help this PC ecosystem in this way,” says Griffais. “I’m really happy about that.”
I can’t wait to try it
The way that’s worded implies that the only way it can hurt Windows is if Windows sucks. Subtle and true. Do better Microsoft. Or don’t. We don’t care, we’re just doing our own thing.
See that’s how you get people to like you more. Not whatever the hell social media CEOs keep doing.
They don’t care about being liked, they just want to prop up the oligarchy by controlling access to information.
Killing windows would just be a little happy accident
