It failed because the market of Linux native games was minimal and at that time compatibility tools like proton didn’t exist and wine was nowhere near sophisticated enough and required too much fiddling to get to work, especially for the layman which steamos very much was and is targeted towards.
Being based on Debian is not one of them, and any others are honestly made irrelevant by the gave that a gaming centric OS couldn’t run 99% of the games out there
that’s fine and all but the problem with zhe debian based SteamOS were the horribly outdated GPU drivers. The runtime was fine but the OS lacked support for bleeding edge hardware (which is somewhat important for a gaming OS)
that’s fine and all but the problem with the debian based SteamOS were the horribly outdated GPU drivers.
SteamOS doesn’t use plain upstream GPU drivers. Back when SteamOS 3 was announced, Valve employees said in interviews that switching to an Arch base would allow them to more frequently update the OS, yes, but now with SteamOS 3 being out since quite some time it became clear that this is simply not the case. Big Arch package syncs are a rare occurrence, kernel and Mesa are maintained in their own downstream branches.
neshura@bookwormstory.social 2 weeks ago
tbf back then they picked possibly the worst base for a gaming distro, a problem that has been remedied with the new SteamOS
icogniito@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
That is not why it failed.
It failed because the market of Linux native games was minimal and at that time compatibility tools like proton didn’t exist and wine was nowhere near sophisticated enough and required too much fiddling to get to work, especially for the layman which steamos very much was and is targeted towards.
neshura@bookwormstory.social 2 weeks ago
A thing can fail for multiple reasons at the same time
icogniito@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Being based on Debian is not one of them, and any others are honestly made irrelevant by the gave that a gaming centric OS couldn’t run 99% of the games out there
bobby@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
The actual runtime the games run on is still based on Debian, though.
neshura@bookwormstory.social 2 weeks ago
that’s fine and all but the problem with zhe debian based SteamOS were the horribly outdated GPU drivers. The runtime was fine but the OS lacked support for bleeding edge hardware (which is somewhat important for a gaming OS)
bobby@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
SteamOS doesn’t use plain upstream GPU drivers. Back when SteamOS 3 was announced, Valve employees said in interviews that switching to an Arch base would allow them to more frequently update the OS, yes, but now with SteamOS 3 being out since quite some time it became clear that this is simply not the case. Big Arch package syncs are a rare occurrence, kernel and Mesa are maintained in their own downstream branches.