PC Gaming

Afaik SteamOS still only supports very limited hardware configurations similar to the steam deck, for example only AMD GPU are supported (Nvidia is in beta support as of recently, I think?).

SteamOS installs for laptops aren't supported yet. If you want something alike consider Bazzite

What would be the advantage of installing it on a laptop? Can't you just run steam on Ubuntu or whatever and use Big Picture mode?

I completely advocate for it. It costs you nothing but time and disk space. You can still run games from other sources with only slight tinkering.

Open source is so beneficial for humanity and for gaming there aren't really downsides for tons and tons of games.

You lose all the spyware from microsoft, the incessant mandatory patching and upgrade notifications and loads of other things that provide no value.

Nothing stops you from being able to dual boot windows or run it in a VM either.

I thought that was still not officially available, only forks or rebuilds of sorts?

Are you sure you don't want to create a microsoft ID? Microsoft believes that you should only trust them with all of your data and credentials. They promise they won't hand over your information to the government unless the government serves them a subpoena or has an agreement to access the data that is lawful or they detect something they have been asked to report.

Things which are holding this back

• Collaboration with OEMs to provide SteamOS OTTB (Lenovo is an exception)
• Nvidia support. Most gamers use Nvidia GPU unfortunately
• Certain industry-standard software which don't have a Linux port. PSA: Most people don't want to learn alt software. Johnny Mainstream is scared of new softwares. This cannot be changed
• End-users suffer from choice paralysis and Linux offers endless choice. Maybe SteamOS can help.

What we know so far, SteamOS won't be a general purpose OS, so it might not support every random piece of h/w.

We might not have the year of the Linux Desktop, but we can expect 2025-2026 to be the year of the Linux handheld.

SRC: Linux fanboy for the last decade

You forgot the endless pages of trick questions you have to periodically step through to get into Windows. One wrong move and you owe Microsoft money every month.

If Linux had better nvidia support I would swap in a heart beat.

Microsoft understood in the 90s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2V9TFrmQ_Q

St. John recognized the resistances for game development under Windows would be a limitation, and recruited two additional engineers, Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom, to develop a better solution to get more programmers to develop games for Windows. The project was codenamed the Manhattan Project, like the World War II project of the same name, and the idea was to displace the Japanese-developed video game consoles with personal computers running Microsoft's operating system.

To get more developers on board DirectX, Microsoft approached id Software's John Carmack and offered to port Doom and Doom 2 from MS-DOS to DirectX, free of charge, with id retaining all publishing rights to the game. Carmack agreed, and Microsoft's Gabe Newell led the porting project. The first game was released as Doom 95 in August 1996, the first published DirectX game. Microsoft promoted the game heavily with Bill Gates appearing in ads for the title.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX