I really appreciate all the work Valve is putting into Linux.
My first experience with linux was when I was only 15 years old, this was 15 years ago. It was usable and it gave new life to the laptop I had gotten from my grandma that didn't work with windows very well. It was amazing.
After that I kept using linux for personal use for a while, but there were always issues, for one I couldn't really play any games (it didn't matter to me that much, but I couldn't recommend it to friends for this reason). But there were tons of quirks you'd be constantly fighting against.
In the past ~5 years the situation has changed dramatically, I remember when proton first came out. I told everyone at my work place (we were all using linux at work, given that we were doing deep learning research) and it tanked our productivity for a while. One my my closest friends had moved entirely to linux years ago but used to be a massive age of empires fan, now he could actually play again without any effort whatsoever. I thank the wine team and valve for this effort.
Now the gaming situation is pretty good, but there are still some linux quirks that need to be solved for it to be really mainstream-friendly. But the future looks bright, people have been joking about "this is the year of the linux desktop" for a while and I do think it is finally coming. I'm not sure about mainstream adoption because, well, it's impossible to compete against pre-installed operating systems in the big manufacturer brands. But I'm hoping there will soon be a time where we will be able to do everything mac users or windows users can do without having to put any significant effort into it. Of course, some software (such as adobe software) might never come; but the move towards the cloud has also helped and will continue to facilitate usability.
Anyway, linux is in a great place and it's still improving. That's good and I love it.
I wish they would bring HDR to Windows games first! Their Source engine uses a 16-bit linear light HDR back buffer that is then tone mapped to 8-bit SDR. This technique was used as far back as Half Life 1!
Roughly speaking they could just update games to directly output the HDR, or just change the tone mapping to a different curve and 10-bit output.
This is so easy that Microsoft hacked it into a bunch of games in Windows 11, without access to the source code! This “Auto HDR” is not as good though as proper, first-party support would be.
That's an old meme. Audio "just works" for years. With pipewire, it's actually better than MacOs and Windows in many scenarios. (yes, yes, there's always some one-off issue, but that's not Linux-specific - I've got some "audio broken on windows" stories to trade too, and can tell you about macbooks going right-channel-only mono when using specific BT codecs)
I don’t think it’s that big of an issue, but having come back to linux via the steam deck this year I laughed that literally the first bug I encountered was an audio one. This one: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/822
My first experience with linux was when I was only 15 years old, this was 15 years ago. It was usable and it gave new life to the laptop I had gotten from my grandma that didn't work with windows very well. It was amazing.
After that I kept using linux for personal use for a while, but there were always issues, for one I couldn't really play any games (it didn't matter to me that much, but I couldn't recommend it to friends for this reason). But there were tons of quirks you'd be constantly fighting against.
In the past ~5 years the situation has changed dramatically, I remember when proton first came out. I told everyone at my work place (we were all using linux at work, given that we were doing deep learning research) and it tanked our productivity for a while. One my my closest friends had moved entirely to linux years ago but used to be a massive age of empires fan, now he could actually play again without any effort whatsoever. I thank the wine team and valve for this effort.
Now the gaming situation is pretty good, but there are still some linux quirks that need to be solved for it to be really mainstream-friendly. But the future looks bright, people have been joking about "this is the year of the linux desktop" for a while and I do think it is finally coming. I'm not sure about mainstream adoption because, well, it's impossible to compete against pre-installed operating systems in the big manufacturer brands. But I'm hoping there will soon be a time where we will be able to do everything mac users or windows users can do without having to put any significant effort into it. Of course, some software (such as adobe software) might never come; but the move towards the cloud has also helped and will continue to facilitate usability.
Anyway, linux is in a great place and it's still improving. That's good and I love it.