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linux as a primary gaming platform works just fine for me, thanks to valve.

Confirmed by a happy occasional CS:GO player here.

Yeah, I have another comment from a different thread saying the same thing I'm about to, but the amount of linux compatible steam games has really exploded since the original Steam OS announcements. I think it's almost at half the top 100 most played games in Steam, but last I checked more than half of my steam library was playable on ubuntu at least.

I wish it worked on Debian, it used to but the last time I tried I lost a day and still didn't get it to run...

Its works fine in Ubuntu.

I've been running it on Debian testing here for nearly two years now, no major problems. Since jessie it's just an apt-get away.

> Even then, most devs don't optimize for OpenGL. That's again on the dev, and not valve,

Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, specially Microsoft, go the extra mile to make sure games perform well on their platforms, even special casing APIs for specific games.

Right, but Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo also make their entire systems (both hardware and software), not to mention that they don't provide games for other platforms, so it's obviously going to be a little different for SteamOS, which is essentially a second-tier platform from Valve and is running on arbitrary hardware.

SteamOS was supposed to be Valve's distribution.

Windows also runs on arbitrary hardware

I think it's a little disingenuous to compare Windows to SteamOS like this. Microsoft has quite a bit of pull with hardware manufacturers; there's a strong incentive for PC companies not to put out hardware that doesn't work with Windows (and I'd imagine extensive tests are done before releasing any such hardware to ensure that everything works with Windows, presumably with some degree of communication and cooperation with Microsoft). On the other hand, there's virtually no incentive for a PC maker to make sure that their hardware doesn't break things for SteamOS.

they also push those platforms as their only game platform. and try to discourage devs from using other platforms.

Valve isnt trying to discourage devs from using windows. Windows is still their main income source. Linux only devs aren't going to make valve money during the transition to windows. The goal is to build the game library on linux so it is a valid competitor.

Also, they can't really make a ton of special OS level APIs, since they are trying to keep things generic. they dont want to fork Linux, they want to maintain compatibility. I mean, open is the entire premise of leaving windows. And if you mean higher level APIs, there's things like: https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/ one of the top things in porting a game, is that directX covers more than just graphics. opengl + SDL2 covers most of it. steam audio makes it so you can write code once and have it work everywhere.

So yeah, they are working on making APIs that make it easier for devs to release linux/SteamOS games without needing the player base already there, because linux "just works" with the middleware.

The short of it is: they are actively doing a lot of stuff to advance linux gaming still, just a lot of it is behind the scenes now and aimed at devs or not directly steam related (you dont see the fact that they hire mesa devs through steam updates).

It is not only a matter of special OS level APIs.

When one attends GDC, they have booths were they give support directly to customers, they also fly-in to relevant studios to sort out any kind of performance or bug related problems they might be facing.

And theyve done that with some devs. rocket league obviously being the big one, where valve went to a linux dev and said "hey can you help port this"

And the point still stands that this is a future investment for them. They aren't pushing to make linux exclusive, they are pushing to make linux viable. Valve has ~360 employees. Linux has a ~1% gaming market share. If valve has even 4 employees working on Linux, they are essentially scaling their effort based on current income from the platform, whereas Sony/Microsoft get 100% of their income from a singular platform, so they spend 100% of their expenses on building that platform. If valve switched over and said "ok, all employees full bore on SteamOS, ignore windows", they would lose a LOT of money. Besides, the goal here isn't to make SteamOS "their" platform, they goal is to make gaming work on an open platform. Microsoft has to entice people with support in order to keep them locked in to their garden, Valve is trying to unlock the garden (to an extent).

if they want growth, they should spend more than just 1% on the platform, but people are acting like they are spending 0% on the platform. It's still improving and actively being worked on, but this is a big undertaking for a team of 4, OS updates, dev support, steam client, etc etc... And if the team is bigger than 4, then they are in fact spending more than 1% on a 1% market segment, which still proves the point of "they havent abandoned it, its just not growing at the 'right' pace in publicly obvious ways"

Another interesting thing is that Windows 10 / Xbox App recognizes and tracks all games on the system regardless of their origin. I opened the Xbox App for the first time the other day to turn off the annoying screen capture prompts it injects and found my "recent activity" which was populated with Steam Games.