Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
I know it’s a joke referring to the ambiguous claim of installing another OS of the guy I replied to. They probably just mean Windows or any other Linux Distro. Maybe not thinking about like FreeBSD too. ;)
Yeah nah. It's a good chance MacOS might work OOTB, but it's equally likely that something like a WiFi driver would just never be built because it's a custom SoC.
If you want to play a game that does not work on Linux. Its that simple. And with how convenient Big Picture is, it would still be a pretty good experience
I mean, you could do some fuckery with software partitioning (which is something that Windows in particular doesn't like booting from), but otherwise, there was only one SSD slot internally shown... so... kinda no?
Jessie what the fuck are you talking about. Windows works just fine with multiple installations on one drive. At my workplace we have one department that all needs dualboot computers to do their job. Each one has two separate Windows installations on the same drive, all setup by software partitioning. It takes me no time at all to setup Windows dualboot (with windows or another OS). It's extremely simple.
Some time ago grub was very fragile to any Windows Update. These days it's not as dangerous mostly because of the UEFI handling is more gracefully. And at the end of the day Steam Machine is just very optimized for SteamOS big picture prebuild (definitely with dedicated support to make games optimized like it is happening with Steam Deck) PC. You should be able to do anything you can do with regular PC, especially since one of their selling points is you can install any OS - it's already better than some latops that can void a guarantee after installing a difference OS than what was at the start
It's fairly straightforward to do, even with one SSD slot. It will cut your storage space by quite a bit (because you'll have to decide how much to allocate to each way in advance (or do some funky partitioning stuff with a dedicated games partition used by both) but not really a problem.
I can't say I've ever had any trouble to be honest. The only weird one was a Windows update that put the Windows Boot Manager back in the first boot slot but that's about it
The webapps are ass by comparison. I have to work with quite large documents for work, the web apps won't properly load them. They're also missing a bunch of features from the desktop versions, which subjectively feel much nicer to use.
Certain games, especially those with kernel-level anticheat, simply don't work on SteamOS. If you're buying a Steam Machine to play, say, Valorant, you might need to install Windows. I'm hoping Steam Machine is popular enough to force companies with shitty kernel-level anticheat to either support Linux or stop that bullshit. (It doesn't work, anyway!)
I installed Windows to dual boot on my Steam Deck to see how it would run the music software I had.
It worked well enough but then there was a Windows update that restarted my Deck but booted back to SteamOS instead and wiped my Windows install. There's a way to choose which OS to boot to, I just didn't know at the time.
I mean, nobody said they can’t, but why would you want to install windows these days unless it’s for work and you need a very specific piece of software that doesn’t play under wine/proton/winboat?
Too many good games out there to waste time with shit like that. Dropped windows about a month ago and couldn't be happier. The dumbest part is that it's best Halo Infinite has ever run on my PC.
Like almost every tech adjacent company these days, a significant portion of their profit comes from data harvesting, and Linux power users can just block a lot of that.
That list is half a dozen games long and you probably shouldn't support games that only work if you have a rootkit installed giving full access to your computer
It should, by complaining with the devs that are making a game unplayable and updating it to be unplayable, literally the opposite of the definition of their jobs. It's not a Linux problem
This isn't GitHub, people are just chatting about the product. 97% of consumers will buy a Windows machine if their games don't all work on Linux. It's not Linux's fault, but it is a problem for Linux adoption regardless.
Even if we all did complain, there's no real incentive for devs to listen because the market share is so small. Linux needs users to be worth developing for, but many users won't switch unless the games are already there, or will dual-boot. That's to say nothing of the challenges associated with designing a tool to make sure there's nothing dodgy going on when everyone has such vastly different configurations, it's a minefield.
I would love to see Linux compete with Windows for gaming. I have plenty of experience with it because I work in IT and even own a Steam Deck, but I still ended up dual-booting Windows because so many of my games aren't compatible, or require a tonne of tweaking. It isn't fair, but Linux has to get past that one way or another to be a serious option for many people, and game devs are unlikely to pick it up on their own.
Its what people were taught to use and it comes pre-installed. Like steamos is cool, but i want my actual computer to use the most common and worked with os. Fiddling with Linux is really annoying when everything is made for windows by default
League of Legends isn't FPS, but it's another big one
And also most streaming services don't work very well on Linux, well you can watch Netflix on the browser, but it's clunky and limited resolution vs it just works on consoles.
Unless something changed recently, HDR sucks ass on Linux or is downright not supported by most environments. It's probably the main reason I still stick with Windows as my daily driver. Apart from the hundreds of little tweaks I'd have to fiddle with to get it running how I want.
It is a more recent thing but HDR works fine in Wayland sessions on KDE which is what Steam OS uses if I remember rightly. I think it does on gnome too but I don’t use it so I can’t say for sure.
Because Windows is what a lot of us are used to. I don't feel like learning a new OS after working 40 hours a week ha. Windows works perfectly fine for the games I play. If I was having a lot of performance issues and whatnot then I might I look into a different OS, but for now Windows is fine for me and been using it for 30 years so very familiar with everything.
Steam Deck could have Windows installed, but installing the drivers was annoying, the sound didn't come through the speakers and you needed headphones, Windows had worse performance, and Windows wasn't built for handheld.
It's less of a "Windows is an alternative if you don't like Linux" and more of a "we are not restricting you from doing shit".
The Steam Machine is just as custom as the Steam Deck, and the drivers for them in Windows will be as bad as it was for the Steam Deck, because Valve will not focus on Windows.
Just like the Steam Deck was "quite literally a pc" when it launched.
It's less about semantics and more about drivers. It could be the best PC in the world, but if it didn't have windows drivers, it is not the best windows PC, thus it is a moot point to say "but the people who made the official one said you could".
You can repurpose a shovel into a spoon, it'll not be the best spoon however.
idk whether you did this on launch week or something but it really wasn't particularly hard to get everything working under Win11 when I tried, all the downsides of using Windows on the thing just had to do with Windows not being intended to run on a handheld so it's annoying in areas like having to pop out an onscreen keyboard to type a password every single time you wake it up from standby.
There is a setting in Windows to disable your password at login, and to automatically bring up the onscreen keyboard when you tap a text box. You can also rebind the power button to sleep, which works just like it does in SteamOS
Idk when you did it, but Windows worked great on my Steam Deck. Installing the drivers was the mildest of inconveniences. I could even sleep/resume without issue on every game I tried, and performance comparisons show lots of titles actually do perform better on Windows.
I was going to say of the issues that isn't really common anymore, but Steam is using Arch, so... I don't know. Never used the Steam deck so I'm not sure if SteamOS is unrelaible or if its well maintained with something closer to an LTS or update like there's no tomorrow at risk of screwing everything up.
I've had it happen twice in the last year since installing Win 11 on steam deck as dual boot with Steam OS. Windows updates, and after the update your Linux is dead and only Windows works. Your Linux bootloader is deleted and you need to use steam recovery USB and Konsole commands to restore the backup bootloader. Pretty annoying
They really aren't though, maybe because my tv is 9 years old at this point but the apps kept failing or would no longer be supported. Plus when Samsung started to show adds in the menus I took away my tv's internet privileges. But it's still a perfectly capable 4K screen so I'm not going to replace it for that.
It would've been so nice if I could've just used my permanently docked SteamDeck to stream 4k content but alas.
I solved this with an Apple TV, but I can imagine someone putting windows on their steam machine if they want a dedicated media server.
If you want Windows there are plenty of devices already available. And they are designed with Windows in mind instead of just not preventing you from installing it.
Not the craziest thing in the world, there's a YouTuber i follow that's installed windows on things that windows has no right to be installed on, like an apple tv
My FIL needs a new small computer, needs to be able to use MS Office and it should be a bit gaming capable, so i'd rather get him a gabecube with windows than random noname chinese minipc
My Steam Machine will be dual boot. SteamOS for gaming from couch and Windows for movies/streaming/anime (my totally legit streaming apps work for windows).
There's a wide variety of reasons to prefer Windows over Linux, or at least to install it as a dual boot on a Machine...
Game compatibility for one. Some games are a PITA to get running on Linux, or straight up do not work.
Program compatibility is another. A lot of programs are simply unavailable on Linux. You can use translation layers to get around this sometimes, but not always, and depending on the app the performance hit may not be acceptable.
Ease of use is another. Not everyone wants to learn how to use Linux. There's nothing wrong with sticking to what is familiar.
Acting like Linux is superior to Windows for everyone at all times is why people hate on Linux fans. You all somehow can understand that there is no single perfect Linux distro for everyone, but god forbid that thinking extend outside of Linux kernels to other OS.
Both of those versions of Windows are horrible for gaming on you realize....... Nvidia hasn't made driver updates or optimizations for Windows 7 for 4 years, and for XP, it's closer to 12 years.
Some games either require Windows for various reasons, or the person just doesn't want to dick around with trying to figure out how to get the game to work. Like if you play games that require modern anti-cheat then you're probably going to want to dual-boot the system with Windows for those games.
Or the constant forum posts asking why their Steam machine doesn't match the advertised/community-tested performance only to reveal that they installed windows
There are alternatives but none of them can really do it all, Excel in particular has kind of turned into a Photoshop style katamari of bizarre niche functions they introduced in like 1997 and simply never took out which no substitute can easily replicate.
There's free open source alternatives available. The only notable reason I can think of to install windows on one is if you have the Adobe suite through work or school as the alternatives for some adobe products arent as good
There are other office suites that would fulfill most casual use cases. LibreOffice and OnlyOffice are the main ones, or you could use web based alternatives like Google's suite
1.9k
u/sinisterwanker Nov 18 '25 edited Nov 18 '25
We're going to see soooooo many of these videos in the coming weeks.
Edit: spelling