this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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Even gamers nexus' Steve today said that they're about to start doing Linux games performance testing soon. It's happening, y'all, the year of the Linux desktop is upon us. ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ

Edit: just wanted to clarify that Steve from GN didn't precisely say they're starting to test soon, he said they will start WHEN the steam OS releases and is adopted. Sorry about that.

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[–] [email protected] 100 points 1 day ago (2 children)

"Pick a distro" is why they're waiting for steamos, presumably.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I think that is perfectly valid and I’ll happily recommend steamos to newcomers. I’m only a little worried about it being locked to flatpaks by default though. Hopefully that will change, but for most users it will be a good start.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago

locked to flatpaks by default makes sense long-term, I think.

Might be a little difficult in the beginning though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Locked to flatpaks? aren't they worried about the disk space?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 16 hours ago

The marginal extra disk spaces used by flatpak really isn’t a concern for most users, much less valve. If you do everything in flatpak and your apps only use current runtime versions, the additional space used by flatpak is in the megabytes, since libraries like libc are going to be on your host no matter what.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

One flatpak uses a lot of extra disk space, but for each additional flatpak you add to a system the disk space difference is much smaller because they share dependencies. When it's system-wide for all user-installed packages, the difference is quite small.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I was under the impression the didn't shared dependencies thus eating space.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

They don't share dependencies with the base system, but they do share dependencies with each other, so long as those dependencies are at the same version, which most of them are because flatpaks generally stay quite up to date.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I wouldn't say SteamOS for new folks, tbh. Flatpaks are very different from the typical Linux flow.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

The typical linux flow is not important to learn for most and flatpak is easier for the vast majority of people to understand and deal with

furthermore flatpak is rapidly becoming the typical linux flow

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

This is fair. I should have given my own suggestions.

Mint is probably the choice at the moment for new folks. Also, this will be controversial, but feel free with Ubuntu. It will get you started, and that's great.

Edit: I added some (open-ended) suggestions to my original comment.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I actually think mint is a terrible choice for beginners because it's not kde, which is by far the best for windows people, and it isn't immutable, which is a gamechanger for not having to maintain your system

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I see the point about KDE, though I don't think the learning curve on Cinnamon is hefty. I also think that KDE being so configurable can seem overwhelming to new folks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

As someone who gives kde to new folks all the time, most of them never configure anything and this isn't a real problem any of them face. I mostly give this to the elderly and tech illiterate.