The Duff CEO with a Windows-Logo on his forehead: “Gamers use Windows because of its’ user experience not our de facto monopoly.”
Next Image: Duff CEO with Windows-Logo in front of a “Out of Business” sign. Subtitle: “30 minutes after SteamOS is released”
Edit: Yo, I’m not saying this is gonna happen. I just want to say that Windew’s UX sucks ass.
That’s the “damning with faint praise” that has been the bane of Linux since slackware came on 500 floppies.
Sometimes that “mostly” is just “oh, you have to do this simple thing that is in a FAQ once and then you’re golden”. Other times it’s “oh, that hardware isn’t supported, so I guess you don’t have a usable video card”.
I think what many of us are hoping with when it comes to SteamOS is that a few of the remaining really sharp edges get sanded off. And, just maybe, there will be a tipping point where the smoother the experience, the more people use it, and the more people use it, the smoother the experience will be.
Bro I had to spend 4 hours on forums trying to figure out why Windows won’t reboot into BIOS. It’s linked to the Fast Start option that won’t turn off without rebooting into BIOS.
Frankly I just shouldn’t have put the mostly. I’ve literally had one issue in the last year. Point is: just try it.
What distro do you recommend if it’s a machine mostly used for gaming?
If you’d otherwise just be waiting for SteamOS to drop: Bazzite. It’s the closest thing to Steam OS, but with a better Desktop mode when you want to switch to that.
I’ve primarily been using PopOS, which has been fantastically stable and very easy. I have an all AMD system, but my understanding is that the nvidia version of Pop also makes some of the nvidia driver stuff a lot easier.
I also play on Arch sometimes, but realistically you probably don’t want bleeding edge stuff if the point is just making sure games work. That’s where the relative stability of something like Pop / Mint / even just pure Debian comes into play.
Easy doesn’t matter as much for me, since I’ve been using Linux for more than a quarter century, but stable is important. And, something that makes it easy to deal with the video card drivers sounds very nice.
I assume that if it’s Linux that a system that is optimized for playing games could still be used as a web server, or to develop software. But, seeing as how my gaming machine is mostly used for gaming / web stuff, it would be nice to choose a distro with that as the focus.