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Comment by warning26 | Hacker News Reader

Everyone likes to joke about "the year of the Linux Desktop", but I would argue the Steam Deck has come closer to actually achieving that goal than any device before it.

Want proof? Go have a look at the reviews on the Discover Center, KDE's Flatpak UI. Almost every review now, by a very wide margin, is posted by someone with the default "Steam Deck User" name.

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The year was when proton came out for me. These days I have Linux on my gaming PC and can play virtually everything flawlessly. I don’t even notice it’s running on a compatibility layer. It all just works.

Its true - Steamdeck finally made it JUST easy enough for the somewhat motivated and JUST worth the time investment to learn. Who would have thought that gaming would be the thing that finally made Linux more mainstream?

> Who would have thought that gaming would be the thing that finally made Linux more mainstream?

Probably a lot of people considering that gaming was the elephant in the room for why a lot of people were still using Windows.

Yeah, I get the sentiment but for my moderately technical to highly technical friends, it's clear that gaming is the biggest thing that has kept them on Windows (either solely, or dual-booting) at home for the past ~10 years at least.

It's the various multiplayer fads that really pose an issue. When an important part of your social life is trying the game of the day with a bunch of your friends, incompatibilities, delayed releases, and all of that really suck.

I'm ditching windows finally in favor of steam OS 3.0 on my desktop

Is it finally out yet?

I don't think it really counts as a desktop. Although it does lead to better software support for, and exposure to, linux on the desktop.

I see it more as separate device segment that linux could very well take over, like it has for phones and servers.

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