Darmok N JaladWell, MS shot themselves in the foot when they dumped old hardware that can not only run many games just fine, but it can also run W11 just fine, too. Once you cast users aside for the sake of easing support, you end up forcing people’s hands. The ironic part is W11 should be leaner and less buggy by dropping old hardware, yet seemingly every week there’s a story of MS bungling something after a round of updates.

• Dropping support for old hardware (TPM 2.0) is one of them.
• A mandatory online login is another.
• Telemetry.
• Still broken Windows Update resource hogging.
• Other unknown background processes eating away your CPU and RAM for no reason since W10.
• No discernible difference from W10 besides the UI, yet, W10 support "had to" end.
• Speaking of the UI, it's absolute garbage. Empty spaces everywhere, the Start menu contains nothing, and even basic tasks like copy-paste got relegated to sub-menus.
• They also say ads, although I haven't seen any on corporate PCs at work (maybe it's only on home systems - still unacceptable from an OS that you pay for).

Darmok N JaladIs valve planning to launch SteamOS? I know you can attempt to install it via a recovery ISO, but it sounds like it’s limited to (or works best on) AMD hardware.

tpa-prAccording to Valve's devs it's being held back due to the driver stack from both Intel and Nvidia. They want SteamOS to be a simple install-and-go experience and with the out-of-tree Nvidia driver (and I guess the quality of the Intel driver?), the experience isn't there yet.

Darmok N JaladAh, makes sense. Doesn’t nvidia also do the BLOB approach, or are they getting better with the native driver like AMD?

NostrasI'm actually surprised the market share of non-steamos linux gamers is that high.
But methinks that a rather large amount only has steam installed and running in the background, not actually using it (in contrast to steamos users).


I'm not really a fan of denoting cachyos a gaming focused distro. Under the hood it's just arch with some sensible (but opinionated) defaults and where developers make sure that gaming works as well as is reasonably possible. Bazzite has some important caveats that some windows users may encounter, cachyos is a lot more of a "yet-another-distro".
When I think of gaming distro's I think of bazzite and garuda primarily. If you ask me for a linux distro that doesn't deviate too far from the windows philosophy yet tries to make your life easier for gaming I think of endeavouros, cachyos and pop os. Been a while since I checked pop os though.

Darmok N JaladAh, makes sense. Doesn’t nvidia also do the BLOB approach, or are they getting better with the native driver like AMD?

igormpTheir official driver now is open source, but it lives out of tree, so it doesn't come bundled with the kernel like AMD's amdgpu or Intel's Xe/i915:
github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/

The previous blob one is going to be eventually deprecated, Blackwell is only supported by the open source one already.
As mentioned above, they are also contributing quite a bit to the Nova driver, which is upstreamed but in early stages still.

Darmok N JaladWell, here's an interesting bit I just discovered. I just tried Forbidden West on Bazzite, and it runs great. Doing the same running Manjaro results in a glitchy mess, with flashing textures, rendering bugs, and eventually a crash. Wonder what all is different to get so much better results. Again, it sure seems like a great distro for going SteamOS-like.