Just thought I’d share something I thought was pretty interesting. I have a mother in law who is… well let’s just say she’s a stereotypical older mom who doesn’t own a computer, just an iPad. During the pandemic, she started getting into Nintendo games and bought herself a Switch. Fast forward a few years later and she’s interested in getting a Steam Deck, since one of her “mom groups” told her about some pandemic inspired games, similar to Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing that are only available on Steam.
When it comes down to it, she doesn’t care about her computer, she just wants to play computer games in a way that’s easy and accessible for her. We’ll be getting her a Steam Deck for her birthday, which in my opinion is just super neat. Even PC gaming is becoming extremely accessible, and it’s a fantastic time to be a gamer.
It’s also changing how normies think of Linux.
Also it basically doubled the % of linux users at Steam.
Normies don’t think about Linux. You don’t even need to see Linux if you use a Steam Deck.
Still, casual gamers did think Linux couldn’t game. It’s changing this opinion in the best way possible and that’s really important since Linux is the best OS. I personally think we still live in medieval PC times as long as Windows is the main OS used.
The parent comment is right. Most people don’t think about Linux. Ask a ‘casual’ Swtich owner what OS the Switch uses, and their answer is probably going to be pretty close to the answer that a similar Deck user would give.
I was going to say I slightly disagree, but then I thought about it some more and realized they probably just see it as SteamOS in the same way Android doesn’t make people think about Linux either.
Even so it made it significantly harder for people to make the dated throwaway comment that you’ll lose access to a majority of your games by switching to Linux.
With that I feel like people will see it’s just as usable as MacOS and Windows in a majority of circumstances.
I lost all my games when I swapped to Linux.
But that’s because it was a decade ago, and I was way too lazy to figure out why wine wouldn’t work, tho I don’t really pc game anyway and these were mostly older games, even then. Small loss.
I know there’s a lot of stuff either native dev or ported/cracked for Linux, just never really spent the time to look into it.
The only thing that’s going to cause problems for me now is idk how Linux handles vr. I assume not terribly well, since none (almost none?) of it is native dev. I’m looking to move away from consoles now that they are moving away from physical media (no point collecting if there’s nothing to collect), so Linux being more robust is great! But vr maybe my stick point. Depends how well developed it gets I guess.
VR headsets and games with anti-cheat software still have issues. I haven’t been able to get Oculus Rift S to work for example.
I think some headsets like the ones made by Valve and HTC work better though. I’m not sure if there’s currently the same degree of rapid advancements for VR Linux gaming as there are for gaming in general on Linux. I know OpenHMD exists but I haven’t tried it out myself.
Yeah that’s kinda what I was expecting.
I don’t really have a vr setup right now (have a psvr, the tracking sucks but I want to like it) but I was thinking maybe an index at some point…
Tho tbh if I need to keep a windows pc for that to work… I can… I won’t be thrilled for it, but my laptop is touchscreen and running 11… idk how Linux does with touchscreen so I haven’t changed it out yet, probs could upgrade the hardware to game off it.
that’s like saying apple is changing how normies think of Unix
Thats because its linux only in a technical sense
Most people probably won’t explore the desktop mode, but SteamOS is basically a full-on Linux distro.
How is it not Linux?