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Comment by notepad0x90 | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the comparison here. Imagine comparing a Toyota corolla out of the dealer's lot with a highly customized Honda civic optimized for street racing. Guess which will be faster? lol

Windows is a general purpose operating system. Can SteamOS run random accounting software from 2002? makes no sense right? apples and oranges.

Why pick the obvious terrible choice for the category? A good comparison would have been consoles like playstation or xbox (Microsoft's gaming optimized OS/platform akin to SteamOS). Then if they used similarly specced PC, it would be reasonable benchmark.

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> Can SteamOS run random accounting software from 2002? makes no sense right?

I bet it can.

> Why pick the obvious terrible choice for the category?

They're selling the "obviously terrible" choice, even prioritizing and asking a premium for it.

Furthermore Windows has been the obvious choice for gaming for decades, that SteamOS seems to outclass Windows is indeed noteworthy.

Windows has been the choice for gaming, not because windows is great but because game devs supported it primarily. It was no property of windows itself but its market dominance that caused that.

For decades, most gamers preferred consoles, which have a purpose built OS like SteamOS. Windows still supports features that have been around for 3 decades despite their drawbacks and performance issues.

> Windows has been the choice for gaming, not because windows is great but because game devs supported it primarily. It was no property of windows itself but its market dominance that caused that.

Nothing has changed in that respect you know?

Games aren't targeting SteamOS, instead SteamOS (via Proton and Wine) emulates Windows and even adds improvements on top.

That's seriously impressive no matter how you look at it.

> For decades, most gamers preferred consoles, which have a purpose built OS like SteamOS.

The difference is of course that those games explicitly target those consoles. Games aren't targeting SteamOS.

I agree, that is impressive. I am all for SteamOS, it's great, I was just saying don't compare a race car to a potato, that only makes one question if the race car is really all it claims to be.

Steam OS is very much just a general purpose OS. It easily allows you to switch to desktop mode and just use it as a regular linux PC. It just boots into steam by default.

So I can deploy steam at any random company? or if I'm a graphic designer can I use it to replace my macos? is it a good distro if I'm working on embedded sofware development? Should I use it as a web server? it can after all run nginx or apache on it. If I have a VPS with 1GB ram, is this a good OS for it? or a laptop from 2011? all I'm saying is it can do lots of things, but it isn't built to support all those things. it's built for gaming. if it really is a general purpose OS, the litmus test (in my opinion) is that someone starts shipping it with general purpose computing hardware and people actually start using that.

Say you want to play Outer Wilds on an airplane. Your options are Windows or SteamOS. Which do you prefer?

No one in that scenario cares if it's easier to run Office on Windows.

I'm not disagreeing, that's in fact exactly what I'm saying. Purpose built OS' serve their purpose best. Don't compare them with general purpose OS. I would prefer a vanilla debian or ubuntu myself since I'm not a gamer.

The Steamdeck is a general purpose computing hardware device shipping with SteamOS, it's just an x86 APU with a handheld form factor and SteamOS is just a customized linux distro (but not a proprietary one). Install Windows on it if you'd like, or install SteamOS on any other hardware you'd like (though it's not really meant for this, just go get a more generic linux ISO)

But you already can, though not for macos but for regular pc hardware with amd chips. just download the installer and copy it to a usb drive with rufus to create a bootable installer, then boot the installer to replace your windows installation with steamos.

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/65B4-2AA3-5F37-42...

SteamOS has 'desktop mode' which is full fledged Linux + Kde environment. You can use that accounting software most likely via wine ;)

I get that, I have VMs for various linux distros as well, all purpose-built. i wouldn't use Kali RockyLinux for office use cases for example. there is a lot to a distro than merely downstreaming ubuntu. it can run libreoffice but can it support (not run,support!) other workloads? I can run netbsd on anything, i can theoretically port any software to it or run a VM in it, that doesn't mean it can support what I'm doing with it well.

How well does this work? I have been trying to justify this toy to myself. Could it act as a crummy laptop replacement so long as I can dock it with a real monitor and keyboard?

Short answer is yes, it’ll work.

There is no long answer, it’s just a laptop without a keyboard.

it has 4 zen 2 core, 16gb ram and decent iGPU, perfect for 90% office task

> obvious terrible choice for the category?

the same hardware for gaming is being advertised and sold with Windows 11. That's why.

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