SteamOS update 3.7

[Black_Mage]

One step closer to replacing Windows 11 on my gaming desktop. I'm excited!

 

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/steamos-3-7-brings-valves-gaming-os-to-other-handhelds-and-generic-amd-pcs/

[BoomerDutch]

Oh i already knew it's coming, heck they even fixed bootloader and detect if steamos is running on VM so it switches to desktop instead.

 

The trust in valve is high because they usually do what we all wanted.

[NoLeafClover]

It would be interesting to see how it fares but I would moderate my expectations. SteamOS is not magic - just another Linux distro. This time from Valve - and they have already contributed a lot of kernel, mesa, and wine patches upstream. Proton is also not magic, as awesome as it is.

 

Realistically, I would expect it to behave and feel more cohesive, and perhaps more "stable" especially on hardware that it is primarily aimed for, which is what Valve appears to be targeting compared to SteamOS back in the olden days. Beyond that, I don't think it will be the silver bullet for Linux gaming that many people expect. Titles that have issues on other modern Linux distros, on the same hardware, will probably have marginal if any gains. I hope to be proven wrong, but I just don't see it.

[Mark Kaine]

On 5/24/2025 at 10:32 PM, NoLeafClover said:

It would be interesting to see how it fares but I would moderate my expectations. SteamOS is not magic - just another Linux distro. This time from Valve - and they have already contributed a lot of kernel, mesa, and wine patches upstream. Proton is also not magic, as awesome as it is.

 

Realistically, I would expect it to behave and feel more cohesive, and perhaps more "stable" especially on hardware that it is primarily aimed for, which is what Valve appears to be targeting compared to SteamOS back in the olden days. Beyond that, I don't think it will be the silver bullet for Linux gaming that many people expect. Titles that have issues on other modern Linux distros, on the same hardware, will probably have marginal if any gains. I hope to be proven wrong, but I just don't see it.

However buggy and cumbersome Linux may be (I'm convinced it is quite a bit with drivers and auto updates breaking all the time from the stories we're hearing) fact is its usage numbers amongst gamers is rising, currently at like 3%? That's huge compared to just a few years ago... Microsoft is really pushing hard to make people switch, I guess pays off! (and Linux getting better allegedly)

[NoLeafClover]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

However buggy and cumbersome Linux may be (I'm convinced it is quite a bit with drivers and auto updates breaking all the time from the stories we're hearing)

I'm not convinced this is an accurate representation of Linux at all. Auto updates and drivers most certainly do not break all the time, or hardly ever for that matter. People will always have anecdotal experiences with things breaking, myself included, but that is not enough to make a general statement on the stability of Linux as a whole. Just like with Windows, it's inevitable that with day-to-day use an issue is encountered at some point. On a counter point, I have been daily driving the same installation for close to 10 years without a single hiccup - software upgrades and all. It has survived multiple hardware and disk (including partitioning) migrations and has yet to break in any shape or form.

 

When things "break" it's important to understand the background - all of user, software, and hardware. Bear in mind most people do not or cannot even install Windows, let alone anything else (why should they). So unless one wants to learn and/or tinker, it's always best to get somebody who knows how to do it to do it for them, and this includes Windows. The reason my installation has been functioning perfectly so long despite all the changes is because, at least most of the time, "I know what I'm doing" - something that cannot, and perhaps should not, be expected of the majority of people who just want to use their device. Unfortunately, Linux still has a higher entry/maintenance barrier, albeit significantly lower than it used to be. When things "break" it's often not because "Linux is buggy" per se, rather unfortunate user ignorance. Personally, I have this with Windows - if something less trivial breaks beyond an easy fix I simply wipe Windows and reinstall it. Each OS has its own paradigm that one has to be used to to be able to deal with problems, and I'm too ignorant of knowing how to diagnose Windows issues -  I also don't really care to learn as I only use it for games (less than 1% of my time).

 

Re drivers, particularly GPU drivers, as this is what matters most to gamers, the issues often come from their proprietary nature. Nvidia is a primary example - they simply don't care enough to provide a quality first party driver that is good enough for gaming, so their drivers are mostly "okay". Machine learning and GPGPU computing, on the other hand, work flawlessly - what a shocker AMD, who used to have terrible if not worse than Nvidia drivers, shifted significantly in their mindset and started contributing most of their driver workings directly to upstream open source Mesa and the Linux kernel. Intel too, whose GPU drivers are entirely open source and contributed directly to relevant projects. They still rely on a proprietary firmware blob to be loaded on the GPU, but the drivers themselves are very good and this contributes significantly to the general experience and are far more stable.

 

Finally, re gaming specifically, running any Windows applications on Linux (or any other platform) is really not a trivial thing to do. This is why Wine has taken so long to get to the state it is today, and Valve's work with Proton has been truly God sent - it's nothing short of a miracle and brilliant software engineering. But the challenge is significant and may never be as good as running the application natively. People need to moderate their expectations here - FPS may be lower, it may misbehave, it may crash, or may not even run at all. Linux also has "packaging" problems when it comes to desktop use, though a lot of this has largely been mitigated with Flatpak. The myriad of distros is also a huge problem from the perspective of the "layman" and some distros will deal much better with stability than others.

 

I'm not sure Microsoft being adamant to alienate people more and more from Windows will necessarily "make Linux better" (too abstract and subjective) but might, hopefully, encourage software companies to consider making native Linux ports to their products.

[Mark Kaine]

13 minutes ago, NoLeafClover said:

When things "break" [...]

I mean sure things break on windows too, I'm just saying it seems far more often on Linux (might depends on the "distro" I admit I don't actually know that)

 

The whole driver situation is just worse, from fancurves to overclocking to RGB support. And that Nvidia apparently hates Linux doesn't help either. 

 

I know you can get it to work, it just seems very involved, often cumbersome, and kind of esoteric, if I may say so.

 

On the other hand my current win10 install is about 8 years old, no significant issues, and I mostly do *not* know what I'm doing, I do however know how to look up solutions for issues and how to prevent most from even happening (it took me around a year to finally eliminate the biggest issue windows has, namely "waasmedic"... It's smooth sailing since then... )

 

Ie. I would need to kill "sudo" (or whatever is the equivalent)and then it probably would stop working entirely (I just hate change aka updates :D)

 

 

22 minutes ago, NoLeafClover said:

I'm not sure Microsoft being adamant to alienate people more and more from Windows will necessarily "make Linux better" (too abstract and subjective) but might, hopefully, encourage software companies to consider making native Linux ports to their products.

No I meant that's what makes people switch,not that that's necessarily why Linux gets better.  Larger userbase is what does that... SteamOS,may or may not help furthering progress.

 

MS just wants out (imo), so naturally that helps the competition.

 

 

 

 

[YellowZedman]

5 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

However buggy and cumbersome Linux may be (I'm convinced it is quite a bit with drivers and auto updates breaking all the time from the stories we're hearing)

Dunno where you heard that... I made the switch to Linux almost two years ago and I have encounter some problem yes, but a lot less then Windows. I guess I know what I'm doing and I take the time to RTFM which saves a lot of problems.

I agree that automatic updates may cause issue. Most easy to use distros will have auto-updates enabled by default but at least, compared to windows, its as easy to disable and it wont disturb your workflow by updating random components at random times.

As of SteamOS, Just the fact that the known and trusted entity that is Valve is behind it may push some people to use it instead of Windows on their gaming machine. If the share of people who use it keeps growing, I believe developer and big game studios will have to take it into account to make their games run on the OS. I'm not asking for a native Linux binary. It's not uncommon to see the Windows version of a game run better than the Linux one. But at least that they make sure that it runs from start to finish on Linux.

[Black_Mage]

On 5/27/2025 at 6:04 AM, Mark Kaine said:

However buggy and cumbersome Linux may be (I'm convinced it is quite a bit with drivers and auto updates breaking all the time....

In the time I spent testing Linux Mint on a 2011 iMac, I had the opposite experience. Many updates were installed, and there were no problems. I like Mac, but I hate to admit it seems like there have been more bugs with MacOS than Linux Mint lately. Meanwhile, Windows updates break stuff all the time. It took Microsoft over 9? months to get the dual boot feature they broke. Some people think it was malicious. Maybe it was. If it was, at least Linux (and Mac) devs don't break things on purpose. 

[Mark Kaine]

34 minutes ago, Black_Mage said:

Meanwhile, Windows updates break stuff all the time.

I mean that's true, and often on purpose. Get a new feature? Well we'll remove one or two old ones then, it's just fair!!! 

 

But that's what bugs me about Linux, it feels like you're supposed to update because the old stuff didn't work properly anyway (drivers, apps, etc) 

 

That's the bright side of windows, as long you don't update things just work (you'll still occasionally need to update drivers and such, it's the 'feature updates' that are dangerous, ms always trying to invent the wheel and you're the "free beta tester" lol...)

 

Maybe I'm just jaded but I see this all the time in Linux topics "NEW UPDATE GOTTA UPDATE GUYS IT'S SO AWESOME!"

 

No, just leave my stuff alone I don't want your updates, you had over 20 years to get it right lol >.< 

[NoLeafClover]

On 5/31/2025 at 12:38 AM, Mark Kaine said:

Maybe I'm just jaded but I see this all the time in Linux topics "NEW UPDATE GOTTA UPDATE GUYS IT'S SO AWESOME!"

If you're basing your opinion on comments in online threads, especially in circles where people want to try something they're not familiar with or go asking for help, then this is objectively not a good way to develop a balanced and informed opinion. If you read threads on Microsoft Answers, and the rather useless responses from the incompetent "independent advisers" there, you'd think it surprising to hear Windows is even capable of booting, let alone be actually usable for anything. Of course we all know that Windows, as much as it deserves much of the hate going its way, is overall really not that bad.

 

I genuinely don't know why people seem to think Linux is, as a whole, unstable. Most of the world's compute infrastructure is run on Linux. Some servers have gone more than a decade without a single reboot (anyone else remember the original Uptime Project?) Now of course, desktop use cases are not the same as enterprise or infrastructure, but "unstable" or "constantly requiring updates" is a bizarre myth that is being perpetuated.

 

If people's only experience of Linux is a "bleeding edge" or some obscure distro that somebody concocted in their basement as a weekend project, well... Meanwhile if you slap Debian on a system, it's likely your hardware will become obsolete before you have any bizarre OS issues. The trade-off is you'll only get major updates every 2y. But people want the latest and greatest yesterday while also wanting a perfect experience. People complain when they try Arch and experience the odd dependency issue or a crash, complain when they try Debian but can't install the latest NVidia driver due it not being in the package manager and Nvidia installer complaining about old kernel and/or build tools, complain when they try MegatronOS because it advertises "gaming" yet has zero documentation and you can't control the bloody RGB lights, etc, etc. It's an unwinnable situation, not just for Linux but for any OS.

 

It's been more than 20 years since I officially "retired" from Windows and Linux's Achilles heel has always been its entry bar and, on broad terms, "user unfriendliness", which has since improved massively. Stability has virtually not been an issue at all. But I've also never tried MegatronOS...

 

On 5/31/2025 at 12:38 AM, Mark Kaine said:

But that's what bugs me about Linux, it feels like you're supposed to update because the old stuff didn't work properly anyway (drivers, apps, etc) 

That is simply factually incorrect. Linux has some of the longest hardware support. It's only just recently been decided to sunset support for the Intel 386 and 486 - x86 CPU architectures from the 1980s! Yes, Linux can still run on that thing. Completely impractical ofc, because even if the base kernel will run, you'll be hard pressed to find any device of that era that has enough storage and memory to fit any modern software, let alone run it in a responsive manner. But if the OEM only has their own crappy proprietary drivers, refuses to release specs, and doesn't want to support Linux then... yeah it won't run or will have issues. But who's to blame here?

 

If I were to guess it's the same old phenomenon of twisted perception due to imbalanced feedback. You don't read many success stories, because people's machines work fine and, shockingly, they don't find that annoying. Nobody goes to Twitter to praise the logistics company for on-time delivery, but everybody goes mental as to how terrible their services is when a parcel has been delayed by a day or, God forbid, two.

[Mark Kaine]

6 hours ago, NoLeafClover said:

If you're basing your opinion on comments in online threads, especially in circles where people want to try something they're not familiar with or go asking for help, then this is objectively not a good way to develop a balanced and informed opinion.

"Topics" was unintentionally a bit misleading I guess, I meant topics in forums as such but also publications such as videos and written articles. 

6 hours ago, NoLeafClover said:

If people's only experience of Linux is a "bleeding edge" or some obscure distro that somebody concocted in their basement as a weekend project, well... Meanwhile if you slap Debian on a system, it's likely your hardware will become obsolete before you have any bizarre OS issues. The trade-off is you'll only get major updates every 2y. But people want the latest and greatest yesterday while also wanting a perfect experience

It's not so much about unstable more so about missing features and features not working properly, and of course also driver/software "support".

 

You make a good point about if companies don't want to release their codes then there isn't much Linux devs can do other than finding workarounds I guess. Btw I think that's kinda illegal, think if Nvidia would stop releasing windows drivers, ms would sue to hell and back lol.

 

Also true people are conditioned to expect multiple "updates", it's part of the "experience", but that's not necessarily a good thing imo, updates more often than not make things obsolete (missing, broken functions etc)

 

Updates can be useful, but for "experience" sake they rarely are.

 

6 hours ago, NoLeafClover said:

It's been more than 20 years since I officially "retired" from Windows and Linux's Achilles heel has always been its entry bar and, on broad terms, "user unfriendliness", which has since improved massively. Stability has virtually not been an issue at all.

Funnily I'm currently trying to get a Legion Go SteamOS, but there are so many different SKUs it's a bit overwhelming to say the least... I'd also need to check compatibility for games I actually wanna play first (monster hunter wilds, overwatch,for example)

 

I already know battlenet apparently won't work without workarounds, but ow is on steam too so there's that.

 

And, I suspect there literally won't be any software support like gimp, capcut, or even web browsers...

 

But I want it for the small form factor and it would maybe be a nice way to get to learn Linux / SteamOS.

 

Funny enough the windows version seems to be complete trash (not surprising because windows 11 specifically surely ain't meant to run on a handheld )