[lug] Does ayone know much about Steam OS?

[Simos]

On Mon, 20 Nov 2017 20:14:49 -0500
geobodley at aol.com wrote:

>  Will Steam games run on the more popular Linux distributions based on Ubuntu?  (Mint)  If I were to buy a Steam Machine like the ones from Alienware, would I be able to run my standard Linux applications such as Inkscape, LIbreoffice, GIMP and so on?  What are the advantages or disadvantages?  Has anyone built their own Steam OS machine and exactly how hard is it to do?  Is it worth the trouble.  I'm not much of a gamer in the first place.

Hi,

I've been gaming on Linux since before the first Humble Bundle and have well over 1500 Linux games on Steam, GOG, etc. There's no need to buy a Steam machine unless you really like the *looks* of the hardware. They're typically underpowered and overpriced for what you get, difficult to upgrade, and to be honest, Valve seems to have all but abandoned the concept. Though it's not hard to do, there's also no need to install SteamOS (basically Debian testing) unless you want a dedicated gaming system to sit behind your TV to run Steam in Big Picture Mode. If you want to run applications alongside gaming, you're much better off just installing and running the Steam client on your regular Linux box with a decent Nvidia card. I run Debian and Ubuntu, but any modern Linux distribution will run the Steam client with no problems (Debian and probably others even have a Steam package in their repos).

Good luck & happy gaming!

Simos