Why more PC gaming handhelds should ditch Windows for SteamOS
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
And as a game user, I would also just rather have games be cross platform, than use whatever OS specific optimizations happen now. But I've also never really cared too much about having high framerates, high resolution, millions of polygons, etc.
Vanguard must be launched during boot, and has to remain running 24/7 in order to launch and play the games. Not to mention that Riot Games was bought by Tencent... TikTok mass surveillance spyware was bad enough. Fat chance I would ever let the CCP pwn my personal rig with 24/7 running kernel-level malware/spyware that can never be validated because it's obviously closed-source.
Many of those, with UNIX like OSes, could easily port their games to GNU/Linux (specially the Android NDK ones), they don't because it isn't worth it, monetary speaking.
The Linux native ports keep breaking because of outdated dependencies, while Wine/Proton offers a stable experience that keeps getting better (most recently the Wayland support).
It seems to me that releasing native Linux games at this point cost more than it's worth.
I think you overestimate the number of game developers who depend on Microsoft's tools, game engine devs who target Xbox/PS5/Switch, sure, vendor tools require windows, but for 1 engine dev, you find 100 game devs
Besides, cross compilation is a solved issue nowadays, all it takes to target Linux, Windows, mobiles or console is a checkbox in Unity/Unreal/Godot
This data speaks for itself
DirectX 12 wasn't a huge success, except for Xbox; wich sells 3x less than both PS5 / Switch [1], you don't see it anywhere else
Vulkan gets on on both Windows/Linux, but also Switch and Android, so if you are a small indie studio who work on your own engine, Vulkan makes a lot more sense
.. and even cloud gaming ;) https://www.phoronix.com/news/Amazon-Linux-Graphics-Jobs
.. even for Ubisoft, even for their Windows release https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/rainbow-six/siege/news-up...
It certainly did not.
Unity only added Mono to their stack when they went cross platform, during their Mac OS X days, they only supported Boo and JavaScript for scripting.
Unity 1.0 did not have .NET in the picture in 2005, however they went cross-platform already in Unity 2.0 around 2008, so Mono was anyway part of the story early on.
What are you upset about? You’re worried people will target windows to target steam? Or worried people will…target Linux?
Within Win32, it's similar though there's an overuse of HANDLEs. I like initializing things as structs and I like that ComPtrs provide built in memory management. A lot of posix APIs feel underpowered (semantically designed around reading files from tapes), and Microsoft often provides a safe _s version of most of them (Yes, some of which are part of the C standard library and some of which are not). There are various Win32 APIs I like (IOCP, for example), and it's all tied together with MSVC and the static analyzers available to the compiler (SAL). I don't think GCC has anything even close to SAL. I also haven't found a C++ IDE I like nearly as much as Visual Studio. I used to hate jetbrains UI but I actually tried IntelliJ recently and they redesigned the entire thing to be quite nice now, so maybe clion is nice (but I'm not willing to pay for it).
I also VASTLY prefer powershell to bash
It's easy enough that the kids and wife can pick up the Deck or power on the PC and get a gaming environment that's nicer to use than the PlayStation's.
Hogwarts gave a bit of a problem on the Deck, but the desktop was fine and luckily none of use want to play any of the online crap that requires anti-cheat. Couch co-op and competitive is much more fun.
There are plenty of Windows handhelds if you really want that awkward interface.
For a large percentage of us, we don't need Windows to play all of our games. I don't have any which doesnt work on the Deck (there were a few teething issues but they've now gone).
Why are you so angry that there is choice and we can use what we want, and you use what you want?
It is going to be netbooks all over again.
That's the pitch? Some games that run fine on Windows 'might' work acceptably on SteamOS?
SteamOS doesn't do anything besides play games distributed on Steam. There's absolutely no benefit for a Windows OEM to drop it for an OS that has < 1% market share.
Not everybody has the luxury of purchasing different computing devices for different use cases. An ASUS ROG will play games (Steam + everything else), but it's also a real computer you can write programs on or school papers with.
We need to reverse the tide of electronic products getting dumbed down every year in the name of "user experience".
Handling input from the gamepad and having a massive library of community contributed controller configs is a massively underrated selling point, imo.
SteamOS is not limited to playing games distributed on Steam. It's a Desktop PC running an optimized interface by default. You are always just three button presses away from launching Desktop Mode and installing whatever you want, as long as its either made for Linux or runs using a compatibility layer.
I'd even argue that a device like the Steam Deck, with its open approach in almost every design choice, is a counterexample for "dumbed down devices". It has an easy-to-use UI for people who don't want to fiddle around with it, sure. But as even its operating system is, for the most part, open source, you have many more possibilities than you have on a proprietary platform like Windows if you want to tinker around with it.
A Linux based desktop is often quite literally better as a real computer for regular people to get things done with than a Windows machine.
It's kind of a weird horseshoe: Obviously for a lot of power users Linux is better, but I'd also argue that Linux is a much better proverbial "grandma" operating system as well; she can do A LOT with simply a working browser.
Windows just really became a mess UI-wise, not only in its settings menu but it is bleeding to their user-facing stuff. The task bar is a mess, the notifications overlay is a mess, the startup menu is a mess, the copilot integration is a clusterf* if the user doesn't know what copilot is, the sharepoint integration is a mess, the popups to create and sign in with windows are a mess, all the useless microsoft built-in apps get in the way. Not to mention all the crapware OEMs add to the mix. Many of these problems also plague MacOS (and Ubuntu!)
Windows is going to die because most people don't need all this crap, they need to double click an application (usually the browser) and just run it. Maybe they need to task switch being applications and do some file management sometimes.
The enterprise and home operating system business as a whole is going to die, likely taking mobile OSes with them if anti-competitive legislation catches up. There is no money to be made. Big companies are sponsoring open-source Linux improvements that trickle down to consumer space for free.
Who knows, it is quite possible proper desktop applications like games will just start being shipped as bundled microkernels and loaded in a virtualised environment in whatever platform, or web assembly really takes off and we start seeing wasm-first apps being distributed outside the browser. It seems we are heading towards this direction of platform agnostic applications.