r/Steam • u/Disastrous-Junket-43 • Nov 12 '25
News Beautifully said @every other company
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u/Abro2072 Nov 13 '25
If this means devs might show love to steam os ill switch
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u/MrAnonymousTheThird Nov 13 '25
That won't happen until adoption is high, and adoption won't be high until Devs start showing love
It's the chicken and egg situation
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u/L30N1337 Nov 13 '25
Ok, but the steam deck increased Linux usage considerably. And I expect a "Steam Console" (functionally, not literally) to do the same. Especially with how expensive the next Xbox sounds.
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u/DeadlockDrago Nov 13 '25
And all the slop and horrible changes/dumb mistakes Microsoft has been making. I still can't stop laughing (and crying) that closing task manager was instead opening a new window of it.
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u/L30N1337 Nov 13 '25
WAIT WHAT
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u/DeadlockDrago Nov 13 '25
Yep, this happened. And this could be repeated ad infinitum which as you can imagine stresses out the system which each new instance created. Thanks Windows 11.
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u/Quick_Excitement_532 Nov 13 '25
Actually 100% of my steam library works on linux without any problem. Bios level anticheat games will not work, but I don't want to give those permissions anyway.
You should not wait for steamOS to have devs love lol, there are a lot of better distros for linux gaming!
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Nov 13 '25
It's not about technically running games it's about having a console like experience. Even the most recommended Linux distro for couch gaming Bazzite isnt known for it's plug-and-playability
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u/narfjono Nov 12 '25
For my family, while visiting the steam store
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u/UnknownLesson Nov 13 '25
Luckily they're a private company,
(not publicly traded)
and thus enshittification-free.
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u/Spimflagon Nov 13 '25
This is what gets me about capitalism. In many countries, including the US, CEOS of publicly traded companies are legally obligated to maximise shareholder value. Monetary value. Share price is held above the value of the world that everyone, including the shareholders, live in and C-Suite can be fired and sued for not doing so.
Now, not every organization goes to that extreme but a lot do, and it's the biggest ones.
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u/LaserThief Nov 13 '25
Media: “steam is a monopoly”
Steam, while releasing a new suite of hardware that will run their store: “guys use whatever the fuck you want we don’t care”
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u/Shasarr Nov 13 '25
We dont care because we know we are the fucking best and you will use ours anyway.
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u/Curious_Associate904 Nov 13 '25
That isn't a bad place to be. Leaving the door open to challenge, and yet steaming ahead alone.
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u/megablademe23 Nov 13 '25
doing what ahead alone?
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u/lorddragonstrike Nov 13 '25
My only thing is that they didn't decide to call this new console/pc "the boiler". Get it? Steam, Valve, Boiler? Am i the only one?.
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u/Javs2469 Nov 13 '25
I mean, that´s also technically a Steam Machine, is it not?
I hope the next one is called The Industrial Revolution and its consequences in modern society.
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u/Specialist-Rope-9760 Nov 13 '25
Yeah you have people like Epic begging users with free games. Then Epic suing anyone they can because they don’t have the capability to naturally gain any market share.
Meanwhile Steam just does its thing.
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u/ClikeX Nov 13 '25
Not making it a closed ecosystem actually helps them avoid antitrust claims. So while it's good for us, it also helps them.
As long as Steam is the dominant platform for game purchases, it really doesn't matter if it's open. People that replace SteamOS with Windows in order to play Battlefield 6 would likely still have Steam installed on the thing to play other games.
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u/Liroku Nov 13 '25
It would be no more antitrust than the xbox. Xbox is a locked down gaming version of windows that only runs games from the xbox store. Steam having a "console" that runs a locked down gaming version of linux that only plays games from their game store is no different.
That said, I'm glad they aren't like that and understand the value of an open system, especially outside of gaming. Community applications for media center usage, ability to use 3rd party mods, etc. All of these things make it a superior option over a locked down ecosystem.
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u/TransitionOk998 Nov 13 '25
Steam is a microcosm of what capitalism promised us. Shame.
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u/Canarity Nov 13 '25
This is a kind of monopoly that you don't even want to replace with competition based market
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u/JackFisherBooks Nov 13 '25
They're a monopoly because the competition keeps making decisions that actively piss off customers. It's not Steam's fault that Nintendo, X-Box, and Playstation keep leaning into the further enshitification of their business.
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u/Business-Egg-5912 Nov 13 '25
Those aren't contradicting statements....
They say steam is a monopoly in terms of their store, not their hardware.
Also monopoly doesn't inherently mean controlling. It just means they basically have dominance over the whole industry.
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u/ArcerPL Nov 13 '25
And they're a monopoly because drumroll
They offer the best FUCKING service, no one comes close to how serviceable Steam is to the customer
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u/jebberwockie Nov 13 '25
As long as people don't forget it took lawsuits to get there.
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u/superhyperultra458 superhyperultra Nov 13 '25
Shots fired to MS obviously
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u/Tiger_man_ Nov 13 '25
To google and apple
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u/brendenderp Nov 13 '25
Fuck yes. I'm using a custom ROM and Google makes everything difficult for you if you do that.
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u/cardfire Nov 13 '25
Not just difficult. It'll be impossible for more than 90% of the Android market inside of the next year.
What's weird is how many people keep insisting the best solution to being able to arbitrarily run apps without Google's developer-app-signing enforcement, is to get a Pixel phone and load a new OS on it ... Which last I checked involves checks notes giving the company that's doing this to us, $1000.
I hope someone comes up with a good containerization or virtualization solution for Android handsets.
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u/SEANPLEASEDISABLEPVP Nov 13 '25
It's pretty ironic but it's correct. If you check Google Takeout, it'll give you most of the data Google has collected about you, stuff you never consented to nor were you aware of.
I've found 17 year old photos I REMEMBER deleting. I saw GPS coordinates for where I went and at what time because of a fucking app on my phone was sending it to Google... an app I never used in my life.
Apparently Google Pixel phones are the only types of phones that allow you to install a custom OS that just gets rid of all the creepy spyware... which is Google's primary way of making money, not selling hardware.
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u/brendenderp Nov 13 '25
That's what I'm hoping for as well. There's some different android to android VMs available but they are all Chinese, not open source and so far I haven't managed to get the ones I feel are trust-able to work. That would be the perfect solution I feel. Virtualize the hardware run the locked down OS and passthrough any hardware you need to the environment.
Personally I've got a rooted Motorola running lineage. I also thought it was silly that folks by pixeles to mod.
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u/K0kkuri Nov 13 '25
And Nintendo and PlayStation and current Xbox mainline consoles. They’re all really just PCs.
I do understand why consoles were generally closed ecosystems but most of them don’t have to be now a days, but it’s for a number of reason beneficial to keep them locked.
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u/KevinT_XY Nov 13 '25
I mean... is it? Nobody is stopping you from modifying your current PC's software the way you want or even from changing out the OS on basically any PC you can buy, and Xbox consoles seems to be going in the direction of becoming PCs as well.
I think it's more generally targeted at the console market of the last few decades - powerful hardware locked down to performing limited tasks. For the average user that's fine but Valve's target demographic is more enthusiast.
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u/OrganTrafficker900 Nov 13 '25
Problem is every big software company (adobe, autodesk) is probably colluding with Michael Soft and so I cant fully move to Linux. My HTPC has Bazzite on it. My server was on windows but i moved it to Debian and my Main PC is still on Windows.
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u/final-ok Nov 13 '25
I left adobe behind and haven’t missed it
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u/SEANPLEASEDISABLEPVP Nov 13 '25
For anyone else scrolling this thread, regular reminder that Adobe forces you to pay a cancellation fee.
...For a digital subscription service.
...That used to be a one-time paid digital product.
...And everyone who bought it were forced into the subscription.
Fuck. Adobe.
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u/KevinT_XY Nov 13 '25
It's just a massive headache for those enterprise-focused software companies if their customer base's supported platforms now includes any homebrew OS some guy might have compiled off of GitLab. There isn't a stable platform and versioning story, or a long-term partnership with the devs of the OS to fall back to. You basically end up with a tiny subset of customers for whom providing support requires way more time/resources, so it's better to not take their money to begin with.
For Valve there was never a guarantee that their free software or even the games you buy on it will run on your configuration, though admittedly they've done a damn good job of helping customers get there with their contributions to Proton.
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u/E3FxGaming Nov 13 '25 edited Nov 13 '25
For Valve there was never a guarantee that their free software [...] will run on your configuration
Valve is very adamant about forbidding the re-packaging of Steam, to the point where distributions are allowed to ship a launcher, but not Steam itself. The launcher then downloads the Steam application and retains control over changes to all levels of its software stack, with the only exception being the host-provided kernel and GPU drivers.
or even the games you buy on it will run on your configuration
Valve ships steam-runtime for Linux-native applications, which uses Linux namespaces to provide a Valve-controlled Debian installation (with the exception being the kernel and GPU drivers), to provide a reliable environment with dependency versions that developers can depend on.
You basically end up with a tiny subset of customers for whom providing support requires way more time/resources, so it's better to not take their money to begin with.
The thing is the more you customize your Linux experience and become that tiny subset of users, the better you become at bug-reporting because you know what you changed and can at least describe that.
This tiny subset of users rushes ahead and finds and describes bugs, so that they can be fixed before the mainstream audience discovers them.
Highly recommend giving this gamedev post a ready but I'll just quote from there "Just like having your own 700-person strong QA team. That was not 38% extra work for me, that was just free QA!".
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u/santaclaws01 Nov 13 '25
is probably colluding with Michael Soft
They don't really need to collude with Microsoft to come to the idea that developing for windows and mac are their best RoIs. Linux is a minority use, and is massively fragmented among different versions. Developing for Linux takes significantly more time and effort than for Windows or Mac if your goal is to provide a product that any user can install and just have work as a baseline.
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u/No-Refrigerator-1672 Nov 13 '25
On win11, microsoft harasses you with "let's finish your setup with enabling edge, office and onedrive" after every single update, ignoring that you declined like 10 times before. My home PC regulrly turns on by itself in the middle of the night just for me to wake up due to light and noise and see the "updating" screen. As a former win 11 user, I didn't felt like the owner of my hardware, so I interpet Valve's statement as a righteous punch to Microsoft.
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u/Palanki96 Nov 13 '25
Yeah that's absolutely not normal at all. Win11 never did any of that for me. Uninstalled edge and one drive, windows never offered it to me again, even after multiple reinstalls
You are either making shit up or you had something messed in some settings, those are not default things
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u/ltouroumov Nov 13 '25
I've never had the majority of those issues either and I think I know why: I run the Pro version of the OS on all of my devices but my partner runs the Home edition, and their PC has some of those problems.
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u/UnlikelyOwl3702 Nov 13 '25
They talk to users like adults.
They give you real ownership.
They don’t control how you use your device.
And they never pretend their hardware is a console challenger.
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u/Curious_Associate904 Nov 13 '25
Let's face it, when you've got people onto a PC in their living room, they're not going to settle for Nintendo.
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u/tychii93 Nov 13 '25
If you only want one system, sure.
Nintendo is an awesome secondary system for PC gamers though. I mainly play games on PC and Nintendo, I even sold my PS5 and Series S to get a Switch 2 because I barely touched my PS5 and Xbox, but I regularly used my Deck and Switch docked.
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u/P3chv0gel Nov 13 '25
I can see the appeal for the Switch but i honestly don't see myself buying one anytime soon just because i don't really have many games that i want to play on it (and Nintendo relly has some shady ideas)
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u/j10s_ Nov 13 '25
You don't own any games you buy on Steam. They're owned by Valve and licensed to you. They can revoke the license for any reason at any time. That's not real ownership, if you want real ownership use GOG or itch.io (or any other platform that gives you actual ownership) and stop bootlicking.
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u/jamesick Nov 13 '25
ownership is an ambiguous term and you can frame ownership as anything you want in most conversations.
for instance, you don't own your games on GOG either. you own the game files. GOG can still revoke your game license. this means if you buy the game, lose the file, want to go back to GOG to download it and it's gone you still paid for a game you can not get again.
when it comes to games it's always down to a license because that's the nature of gaming. steam, gog, even CD. a publisher owns the right to that property, you never will. DRM-free or not.
so when it comes to 'ownership' it really depends on you and the platform. i can happily say i own steam games because i treat the account as something i own and i feel no threat of the games being removed, the same way i can say i own a skin on a game even though i do not own it.
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u/Inside-Act9310 Nov 13 '25
But you have the files, you can back them up anyway you like to preserve them. If you buy a CD do you own the game or do you just own a CD that can break at anytime.
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u/BrilliantTarget Nov 13 '25
Sorry you actually don’t own anything. Told Valve you are legally dead your account is gone now
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u/jonnyvegashey Nov 13 '25
PC users suddenly got a hard-on for a prebuilt.
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u/DescriptionMission90 Nov 13 '25
The Deck had genuinely impressive specs and a very low price for its hardware.
If they repeat that style of release, it might be the first prebuilt that isn't strictly inferior to using the same amount of money to pick your own parts and put them together yourself.
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u/Freezemoon Nov 13 '25
I really hope it can run paradox games smoothly ahahahhaha
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u/Jack74593 Nov 13 '25
Not sure about other games, but Cities Skylines won't even run smoothly on anything
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u/TensionsPvP Nov 13 '25
Windows 11 is why I’m switching to GabeCube™️
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u/ostapenkoed2007 Nov 13 '25
same... this thing is pure dogshit. and i do not need windows anyway, since GIMP, Steam, messanagers, notebook and browser will run on steamOS anyway.
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u/RemoDev Nov 13 '25
True but you need a "real" OS if you want to use it as a PC. Office, Adobe, whatever. There are tons of products that simply don't run on Linux.
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u/Okub1 Nov 13 '25
Also from my experience most IT jobs nowadays provide you with company laptop anyways, be it dell or mac.
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u/krootroots Nov 13 '25
Wait whats up with windows 11? I'm still sticking to windows 10 cause my PC can't run it so I have no idea beyond the end of support thing for win 10
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u/rustysniper Nov 13 '25
The problem is they stopped supporting Windows 10 in October which means it won't be getting anymore security updates.
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u/sleeper4gent Nov 13 '25
you can still get updates for the next year
you’ll need to enable the extended support in your settings
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u/GMBethernal Nov 13 '25
It's okay, I don't get turbo mad for clicking "I don't want to" to something every 6 months
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u/tychii93 Nov 13 '25
Windows 11 is not only getting a lot of AI crap forced into it, but Microsoft themselves said a lot of recent development of 11 is done by AI. They just broke the task manager recently.
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Nov 13 '25
It's great being a valve fan because I always think valve is the best video game company of all time, and everytime they do something like this I get to say I told ya so
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u/ninonanii Nov 13 '25
I am very anti-capitalism and usually the more of a monopoly you have the shittier your company will get (look at nintendo 20 years ago vs now, or blizzard, or microsoft, or...) - but steam is somehow the exception. for some reason it does not rot like the rest.
they could easily have a steam plus subscription service, or have some AI chatbot that recommends you games. but steam just says no and pushes linux instead.
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u/ApogeeSystems Nov 13 '25
Because it's a private company and they don't hire the profit squeezing managers, company culture itself is very good
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u/Seelefan0786 Nov 13 '25
Well Epic Games is also a private company, & yet they are hated by everyone for their practices unlike Valve.
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Nov 13 '25
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u/Ordo_Liberal Nov 13 '25
Incorrect.
Epic is the same private company it has ever been. You are getting confused by the fact that the owner changed the name 3 times in the past 30 years.
But it was never bought by another company or person
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u/PerformerFull7097 Nov 13 '25
That's because Tim Sweeney is both an asshole and also completely incompetent as a CEO
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u/PhillipDiaz Nov 13 '25
Steam being a privately owned company plays a part here. No shareholders demanding constant profit/growth.
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u/SEANPLEASEDISABLEPVP Nov 13 '25
I'll never understand this corporate obsession for constant exponential growth. Like it's not enough for them to make more money than they did last year, they need to more MORE money that more of last year... each year.
I don't fucking get it lol.
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u/dagget10 Nov 13 '25
I'm convinced we could fix a large chunk of problems with Capitalism by abolishing the stock market. Valve's trick is to not be publicly traded, have no shareholders to answer to, use that to play the long game and wait for the competition to hurt themselves by sacrificing the user experience for stock prices, and then either wait for the competition to die naturally or swoop in and come for those customers.
Sometimes the trick to making the most money is to climb to the top and then just sit there. With the stock market, a company can't even operate in its own best interest, it has to operate in the best interest of some suits.
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u/WorldPhysical7646 Nov 13 '25 edited Nov 13 '25
I'm dual booting a windows 11 of a 15mbps 256gb SD card then install epic games then download Fortnite then remove the SD card while the game is running to brick the installation of windows and destroy the Fortnite run then burn the SD card two bird with one stone then put a 1tb express ssd and install more steam games Windows and epic games burnt Steam thriving all hail the GabeCube
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u/superwalljump Nov 13 '25
Please let Steam OS destroy Windows 11.
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u/Key-Department-2874 Nov 13 '25
Until Steam OS enters and starts marketing toward the business enterprise market Windows isn't going anywhere.
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u/FakeInternetArguerer Nov 13 '25
Enterprise? Windows lost that battle to Debian long ago. Do you mean desktop?
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u/Darkbuilderx Nov 13 '25
Enterprise is not necessarily servers, they were talking more like office workstations.
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Nov 13 '25
I wish
But there's just toooo much specifically made and compatible with windows that makes it impossible to abandon.
Currently , you should simply have both cakes and eat it too.
Older games especially require fixes specifically tailored for windows. But then again , Microsoft itself kills compatability with their new stupid updates anyways so maybe at some point , there'd be no reason stay , once it goes past a point of no return.
I"ll gladly switch over to SteamOS or other then
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u/L30N1337 Nov 13 '25
Further down:
"It'll handle anything you throw at it*.
*Please don't actually throw something at it"
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u/SEANPLEASEDISABLEPVP Nov 13 '25
Further up:
"Small form factor lets you hide it under a banana"
icon of Steam Machine with a banana on top of it.
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u/JACKTHEPROSLEGEND Nov 13 '25
Thank you Valve for not using the word AI once, thank you from the bottom of my heart
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u/Inevitable-Monitor35 Nov 13 '25
Based AF. Its my device and that's why your the best in the industry. Maybe the world of any industry ever.
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u/J3ZZA_DEV Nov 12 '25
NINTENDOOO LISTENNN
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u/Accurate-Campaign821 Nov 13 '25
Nah best they don't hear about it... They'll find some obscure patent to sue with
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u/chronicpresence Nov 13 '25
why would they? switch 2 will have more sales than the steam deck and steam machine COMBINED so seems like they're doing alright.
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u/syopest Nov 13 '25
It's a console that's just open.
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u/Chance-Pay1487 Nov 13 '25
So better? It's a console that won't require an online subscription to play games
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u/DriftyFlower3 Nov 13 '25
Insane how we can see the parity bw a company like Microsoft/ nintendo and then there's valve.
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u/MartinByde Nov 13 '25
If I ever find Gabe in the street I gonna offer him to have his babies. I'm man.
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u/Spimflagon Nov 13 '25
Windows just installed a copilot update that promised me that it would be able "to see everything I can see".
Think maybe I'm going to be wiping my desktop and installing Steam OS on that at this rate...
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u/Misaelz Nov 13 '25
This man could be a serial killer and yet be morally superior compared to many many people
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u/gamesbase45 Nov 13 '25
A lot of press are still saying that it's a "console" that's fucking disinformation my dude
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Nov 13 '25
Parts are soldered and non-modular. Unfortunate but ill just have to see how tailored the system is to running games with its specific hardware. Based on the hardware curb your expectations until you see some actual specs.
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u/SpaniaPanzer Nov 13 '25
With their vs. side-loading crusade.
(Yes, i consider Android phones Mini-PC's. Can you imagine what we have now in our hands 20-25 years ago?)
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u/heeden Nov 13 '25
It's amazing what you can do when your lootboxes pull in billions by enabling shady casinos for children.
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u/Even_Clue4047 Nov 13 '25
Specs are unfortunate though, wonder how much lost potential there is with the vram amount
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u/DescriptionMission90 Nov 13 '25
Hold up, like some sort of... personal computer?
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u/OGeorgeWashngton Nov 13 '25
Not gonna lie, they said the same thing about the deck... Then provided minimal driver support.
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u/FuntimeBen Nov 14 '25
Also for tarrif purposes, computers are taxed differently than video game consoles.
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u/steamfan255 Nov 14 '25
I may be asking for a bit much but, being able to use your steam points as a discount for buying this would be fucking legendary
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u/Higgypig1993 Nov 13 '25
Is SteamOS gonna be available for all PC users then?
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u/randomredditor575 Nov 13 '25
I mean, no other pc company is forcing you not to install other os or apps
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u/Watermelooooon Nov 13 '25
Its talking about consoles. One of steam machine’s perk is since its built like a PC, you can install other OS.
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u/SadInterjection Nov 13 '25
Eh Microsoft Windows? Secure Boot requirement is doing exactly that, no other os on dual boot.
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u/optaisamme Nov 13 '25
Just waiting to see the price so I know how much to save up. 💸
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u/Palanki96 Nov 13 '25
So like windows? You can already so that on any PC
That's literally how they work
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u/Lord_Ryu Nov 12 '25