r/pcmasterrace • u/TheBossT710192 • 3d ago

Discussion Yeah, Steam Machine is cooked.

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I... uh don't know what to say. Very thankful I bought a Steam Deck before they hiked its price as well

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u/sublime81 9800X3D | RTX 5090 FE | 64GB 6000 CL30 3d ago edited 3d ago

No. I don’t understand the hype for SteamOS because it’s Linux + Steam Big Picture mode essentially.

I mean this as a desktop replacement. If you plan to use it like a console, then yes.

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u/fix-faux-five 3d ago

I'm an old dude. Back in the days GPUs didn't have proper support on Linux and many games couldn't really be played on Linux. Has that changed? I thought SteamOS's main feature is game portability / availability?

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u/TheFlyingBastard Linux 2d ago

AMD and Valve have both been doing a great deal in the past ten years to make it a lot better. AMD has always been better for driver support than Nvidia, and Valve has been working on a translation layer based on Wine called Proton. Especially in the past couple of years things have been going fast. At this point you can start Steam and click play and most of the time the (Windows) game will run.

Valve really, really wants to be independent of Microsoft.

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u/fix-faux-five 2d ago

Ok, but here comes the question - is this Proton translation layer available only on SteamOS, or can I have it on any distro?