Today is the 10th year anniversary of Steam being officially out for Linux (opens in new tab)

I started using Linux around 2002. I evaluated and quickly dismissed it as a desktop OS largely because it didn't allow me to play the games I wanted to play. In 2021 or 2022 I finally switched, thanks entirely to Steam on Linux (more specifically, thanks to the Proton/WINE integration). I haven't looked back. I'm on Arch, if anyone is curious.

What Steam did for Linux is very similar to what Ubuntu did for Linux: made the actual work to make sure there's something for non-nerds to use.

No one cared about the "non-nerd" until these two came along. Because sure "you can alway select <one of thousands distributions> and <build/compile/config your own stuff>", but this doesn't scale.

Even if this started as a way to keep being relevant in the world of competing OS-level stores and shenanigans (IIRC Steam for Linux started shortly after Windows Store was announced), the achievement is still nothing short of miracle: there are actually games you can play on Linux now.

Proton is great.

I have played some games on it and mostly it is parasite apps like EA App or whatever that is a problem.

It Takes Two worked great when running but lunching was always 5-20 minutes of restarts. And two times out of like 8 EA bricked their launcher app with updates and the game stopped working for some days.

The next gaming rig will surely be Linux only for me.

But still only as a 32-bit binary, in 2023.

is it just me or is it just Unusable on macOS? for a few years now

Man, I got confused why the steam Linux sale wasn't on the front page when I noticed that this is a ten year old post. I thought it was a celebration for 10 years of Linux support lol. Also got excited for the Tux TF2 item and I feel a little let down that I am 10 years too late

I've switched over my main desktop to PopOS and while I'm missing out on some games which require anticheat, I'm constantly surprised as to how much I can actually play. It also seems like newer games have better proton support.

It has been a fun adventure. We used a lot of RHEL at work, so I set out to get it to work on my Centos workstation and was shocked how well it worked. Gave the SteamOS distribution a try, which worked great for Steam... but really made me work harder than expected to get a terminal so did not expand on that, beyond seeing how it got the hardware right. Current workstation is Ubuntu, which also matches up with how work is done today. Proton is amazing.

The jump from https://i.imgur.com/dGOw1G4.jpg

to steam (2019!) https://i.imgur.com/H5QYFbz.png

was incredible. My Linux box has the 'good' CPU/Video card these days.

As a coincidence other day I resized my desktop's win10 partition, installed PopOS taking care to make my own partitions instead of the default clean install, and found a guide for steam, protonup and lutris. I think a lot of the steps would trouble folks that haven't used Linux extensively before. Dualbooting, pip as a user not root, flatpak vs deb, saving some Nvidia settings elsewhere, and I still can't figure out why my identical second monitor doesn't display anything until I change the resolution once after boot (Nvidia, working one is dp, other one is HDMI if anyone has ideas)... but overall I'm impressed with the few games I fired up and they just worked. Good stuff Valve. That was not the case last time I tried.

Thank you for that. I found 2012 gaming computer in the garbage room three years ago. Now I am 2-star General in GS:GO.

I have never had Windows computer. Moved right from DOS to Linux around 1992. And I gave up gaming after DOOM/MYST in 1990's because there was nothing new happening and hardware requirements were excessive.

With a hoping 2% market share.