Video Game Theory

When Steam Machine reviews enlightened me about its hardware details, I wondered how my home theater PC - which was a gaming desktop, before my last upgrade - compared to those specifications. (I'm imagining that future Steam games might be benchmarked with them.) And when the specs turned out to be fairly similar, then I wondered: what's up with this SteamOS thing?

Now, after a few weeks of using SteamOS for living room gaming - Hades II is going great, by the way - as well as casual video streaming, I'm overall happy with it.

  • Installation wasn't completely painless, but very close; the first-launch setup wizard needed some CLI help finding my network adapter. After that, everything wizard-ed just fine.

  • For my personal use-case, I wanted to default to "Desktop Mode" at startup, since web browsing and video streaming works better there than in Valve's "Game Mode." A single steamosctl command made that happen.

  • I did struggle for some time with audio output. There seem to be some common issues in the current SteamOS stable release (3.8) with surround sound, even on Steam Decks -- though I found a working hackaround, the built-in sound configuration definitely needs some attention.

That latter part is where some of SteamOS's cracks started becoming more visible to me. As it's a Linux build and ecosystem curated specifically for Valve's own devices, any use-case other than those devices - and the features Valve tests on them - is liable to rot, unsupported.

And while I'm personally willing (happy, even) to be my own tech support and sysadmin this, the other thing about SteamOS is that it treats almost all system configuration as sacred: making large swaths of it read-only by default, and overwriting customizations in updates. Which, hey, is a nice safeguard for rolling updates. But an annoyance for personal customizations.

Hopefully, features like built-in surround-sound support will become more of a priority as the Steam Machine itself lands in more homes.

I'll say though, that despite its warts, and despite those administrative hurdles, SteamOS in my living room is already a more-than-satisfying replacement for Windows. I was genuinely impressed by gamescope's runtime performance; Proton compatibility is practically a given these days, as is Linux support for USB and/or Bluetooth gamepads; and the desktop mode's KDE Plasma environment does everything I need in a home theater context.

Between Microsoft's continuous pressure to force online accounts and cloud storage, Windows updates pushing in unwanted AI features while simultaneously breaking existing systems - really making a habit of it - and, fuckin' ads in the menus, I don't miss the old Windows install at all.

As for my main desktop, a dual use-case of software development plus gaming, SteamOS doesn't fit; it's just not flexible enough. But now I'm wondering how easily I might squeeze the same juice from gamescope and proton in a more generic Linux distro...