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Comment by neverminder | Hacker News Reader

> Really what I would love is a gaming focused Linux distro that actually works.

I think SteamOS was supposed to be that distro, but at some point it just kind of... ran out of steam?

I'm hopeful it'll get better. Steam itself was _awful_ in the early days. There's an old NSFW animated gif of the Steam logo that's tells you a little bit about how early users felt when Steam became mandatory to play Counter Strike. Look at Steam today, though. It's gone through a tremendous evolution.

ha! yea, I tried it early in development and it was a bit of a mess I should give it another shot that it's a little more mature. Their whole steambox/steamcontroller thing seems to have flopped but I'm sure it's better than it was on initial release.

I think that it was just ahead of its time, and people didn't really "get it", and it wasn't marketed with the right message or marketed enough. The next PlayStation and Xbox seem more like gaming PCs than consoles, and it looks like the market is trending toward a shared experience across all devices in the future.

I really hope that SteamOS continues and sees wide adoption, but I also agree from my experience mining btc on Linux years ago that drivers need to improve, as does the hack factor. As a sysadmin then, I struggled for hours to get the AMD + OpenCL stuff working right. Not sure if it's better now, but no way would the mainstream accept that type of experience to play games.

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