At least in 2013 when I started using Steam more seriously if your connection dropped it would prompt you asking if you wanted to switch to offline mode. And I know this because I had Steam on a laptop that I carried in my bag hibernating and I didn’t had internet in some places I went to. So that has been fixed for over a decade.

But that is an apples to oranges comparison, just because you personally don’t care about those features doesn’t mean others don’t care either. For games without those features mentioned in the original comment (like Baldur’s Gate 3) not having join by IP is ridiculous we agree there. But for games that do it’s just not feasible, there’s too much of what makes the game the game in those features. Don’t get me wrong, I personally think that companies should not just kill the game and should provide ways to make their game playable offline after closing the servers, but it’s not as simple as allowing you to join by IP for the games being discussed here. What level would your character be? What load out would it have set? Which items would be unblocked? Etc, etc, etc, the servers that control all of that are too engrained into the fabric of the game, and that’s something that happened organically because people liked those features and wanted cross-progression, security, etc. Can all of that be removed? Sure but then you’re left with a shell of what the game is/was, still I believe companies should make such a release before closing the servers, but again this has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with direct join by IP.

You’re again mixing the point, your friends IP doesn’t have authentication, progress, chat, etc, etc, etc. You’re talking about a different kind of server.

This is the relevant bit of what you’re replying to:

I don’t see how modern games would function without that service running. Who am I playing against? What’s their name? How did I get my account progress?

None of that comes from the game-server but rather from the service-server. Even if social games that have those features allowed you to connect to a server directly, you would still need to connect to their servers for all of that stuff.

Direct IP connection has nothing to do with authentication and social flows (e.g. names and progress like the comment you’re replying to mentioned) and would not help in the slightest with it.

You’re mixing stuff up, the direct connect for multiplayer where you put the IP has nothing to do with authentication that he’s talking about. Whenever you open up a multiplayer game it will authenticate yourself with PSN using the account you have on the playstation, then if your authentication succeeded it will authenticate with the game service-servers which will reply with stuff like your progression in the game, whether someone has sent you a message or a friend request, etc. Modern games are a platform in and of themselves, essentially they have an entire Discord on steroids internally which you’re using before, during and after playing online matches. If the PSN is down you can’t authenticate with those servers… I mean, they could allow you to login using username and password, but that’s: 1 not needed since the PSN is almost never down and 2 probably against some TOS from Sony for you to release games on their platform. So if the PSN is down you would not be able to get into the main screen for multiplayer anyways, so there’s no place where you could input the IP for the game-server you want to connect to.

I’m not defending the system, but it is what it is, games have organically evolved to have all of these social features which people do use and like, it makes sense that Sony won’t allow you to go over them and authenticate directly with the game specific service-servers and it makes sense that if you’re relying on all of that for login you also rely on it for matchmaking (which is where the IP would come in place). Could it be better? Sure, but there’s no incentive for it to be, PSN is rarely down and games (at least large ones) take forever to be sunset, and by that time there are almost no people playing them anyways.

I don’t disagree completely, but it’s not as easy as you think. We’re not talking about server in the sense of a headless game client that will coordinate a match, we’re talking about a whole infrastructure of micro services and a web of communications and APIs just to get a basic authentication working. Not to mention possibly encrypted hard coded addresses to contact. That being said I 100% agree that before a game is abandoned a plan should be put in place to allow people to keep playing it, even if it’s complicated and cumbersome to setup, or even if it’s as crude as removing authentication entirely.

The pictures are different, so it’s hard to evaluate them the same. Objectively the bowtie makes it all too crowded around his face. On a more subjective note, it might be because of the lighting, but the necktie looks like a distinguished gentleman, whereas the bowtie is giving me serial killer vibes.

While I also strongly recommend Dead Cells like others, I think it’s best if you first play Rogue Legacy. Let’s put it this way, if Rogue Legacy is like a good cup of coffee, dead cells is cocaine, or maybe crack.

All of that sounds really awesome, but I think I still stand by the conclusion I had even if some/most of my assumptions were wrong, it might be too much for a new person. I get that for you it wasn’t, but I’ve also seen people whose first distro was Gentoo. The rollback to a working state feature is really cool and I definitely could have used that back in the olden days when I first started using Linux and broke my system periodically, but those were different times (be glad you don’t know what a Xorg file is hahaha).

Overall in theory it seems that Bazzite is a system I would like to use, but I thought the same of NixOS and couldn’t get used to it. But I’ll definitely try it in the future.

As an anecdotal point I have in fact ran rm -rf /etc in the past, you are correct that the system doesn’t boot (had to do a full reinstall that time). And as a completely unrelated note be very careful with pressing enter in the middle of typing a command, for example trying to delete a folder inside /etc hahahaha.

My experience with Bazzite is very limited, so I appreciate the corrections. Since you seem to know a lot about it let me ask you a couple of things:

• Bazzite is immutable, right? I’m sure I saw that somewhere and Fedora Atomic is also immutable IIRC

Assuming it is immutable:

• How does the config changes not get overwritten? The whole point of an immutable distro is to prevent changes to files to ensure things keep working
• How are packages installed? The docs you sent recommend flatpak, which while very good in theory still has a small fleet of apps available. Also they suggest using distrobox among other things, that’s definitely not beginner friendly, although an interesting concept for an advanced user to have your main machine be an immutable host to any system you want.

Regardless of that, yes one’s first intuition should be to go for the docs for your distro, but we know that’s not the case and that most people will just Google their problems with Linux in front because we keep telling them that all distros are the same (which they are, once you know what you’re doing).

I am fairly sure Gabe expected this, in fact I think he expected more. See, back when Windows95 was first released people were skeptical that Windows would be a good platform for gaming, they cited non-existent technical issues (similar to how they do with Linux now) that drove the employees at Microsoft mad, so one particular employee had the idea to port the most advanced game at the time to Windows, they contacted ID software, and got in an agreement that they would write the Windows port of Doom and give them the code back, ID agreed and after Doom was released for Windows more and more people started to port their stuff over since it was clearly possible. So essentially Windows being a gaming platform was only possible thanks to that employee, who after working with games liked it so much that he quit Microsoft to create his own gaming company which he called Valve. Yup, Gabe Newell is responsible for both Windows and Linux being seen as a gaming platform.

Why do you want SteamOS though? Unless you’re making a Steam Machine there are better options out there for desktop usage.

Exactly, they said desktop use to replace Windows that is more than gaming, by your own phrase:

If you want more than gaming as the central focus then sure look elsewhere.

They should look elsewhere.

Isn’t Bazzite an immutable OS with very limited package availability outside of gaming? At least that’s what I remember from a while back. If so it’s an excellent distro for getting a Steam Machine just like ChimeraOS, but I’m not sure it would be a good experience for someone just getting into Linux, since most of the help he will get online will direct him to edit config files which would get overwritten on update.

For example, say the person wants to install Skype, or something that is not in the graphical UI store on Bazzite. Most guides they would find for Linux would tell him to add a PPA, or download a .Deb, or if he manages to find something that works it would be to download an RPM and they would need to redo it every update, or they could find a guide on how to install it via flatpak (but for that they would need to know what flatpak is) or snap (and go into a lot of troubleshoot figuring out why he doesn’t have snap). We take a lot of Linux knowledge for granted, but people using it for the first time won’t know all of this.

If you want more than gaming as the central focus then sure look elsewhere.

That’s exactly my point, OP talked about replacing Win 10 desktop, not about a gaming machine (for which I agree SteamOS is an excellent choice).

Cool, so did I a while back, what’s your point? It’s still not a great replacement for Windows as it’s not the intended use of the OS, and will be frustrating for someone without Linux experience.

Yes, for you and me who understand what that means it’s just the same, but for someone with no Linux experience is going to be very different. Googling any issue he has will direct him to alter config files or install packages, neither of which would be permanent on SteamOS, while the OS is the same the usage of it is completely different, so for a person with no Linux experience to try to use it as their daily desktop system it would be frustrating because none of the help online would apply to him.

Don’t use SteamOS as a desktop OS, that’s not what it’s meant to. You might be used to Windows and think that a different distribution of Linux is just a different customization of the OS, but it’s almost an entirely different OS that happens to run the same binaries.

If you’re interested in getting an alternative to Windows, try some beginner friendly Linux distros on a Virtual Machine or an old laptop. I recommend Linux Mint to newcomers, but if you’re used to the desktop mode on SteamOS maybe Kubuntu. The closest you can get is Bazzite but that’s also not a desktop OS so I wouldn’t use that unless it was for a Steam Machine. The second closest (that’s also somewhat beginner friendly) is Manjaro K DE version, but being Arch based I don’t tend to recommend it to new Linux users, but of you’re dead set on getting something as close as possible to SteamOS that’s it.

Wine was in a great state, it just wasn’t integrated on Steam so it was clunky to get it working. Long story short Steam Machines only had a handful of games available (those with native binaries) unless you jumped through hoops to install steam on wine and launch steam from steam or something of the sort.

At the time we thought that the steam machines would make devs port their games, but that didn’t happen, so Valve invested heavily on Wine to make the games come to Linux regardless of the game devs. If Valve hadn’t invested most games that run today would still run, wine has always been an amazing piece of technology, their investment was mostly on a library called dxvk which translates directX calls to Vulkan instead of OpenGL, for technical reasons this was needed for any game that only supports DX12, but also gave some performance boost to other titles. I’m not trying to downplay Valve’s hand, dxvk was a much needed piece of the puzzle that Valve singlehandedly financed, not to mention all of the other stuff they’ve done that benefitted Linux gamers over the years, but if they had integrated wine on Steam without dxvk 99% of cases would be mostly the same (but that 1% are heavy hitters).

If you backed up your game folder yes you can. Most games on Steam have no DRM, so just copying the folder is enough to play it on another computer. Then there are badly implemented games which you would need to replace the steam library with an open implementation (which doesn’t involve cracking the game). And finally there are games with DRM which are not available on GOG so they’re irrelevant to the discussion.