I'd like you to read what you just wrote very slowly and imagine it's somebody else saying it, just to visualize if it's an absolutey bonkers thing to say.
To be absolutely clear, this is not new. Steam accounts being non-transferrable and not your property has always been how Steam's terms work. It's not even the first time the death situation comes up.
Because digital ownership sucks, and that absolutely, very much includes Steam. If you can't keep an offline copy you don't own it.
But honestly, given the new family groups Steam came up with this gets weirder now. Other accounts that are more closely tied to hardware are one thing, and I do wish we had a more effective and reliable way to hand over passwords and credentials to relatives in case of emergency, but it's so weird that now your mom can have an accident and you slowly see the games she was sharing with you over that system fade away as her account gets shuttered. It's such a grim, sci-fi distopian piece of minutia. This is not a great timeline we landed on.
This is absolutely not true. The publishers get very little of a say on what Steam does, as evidenced by the fact that a bunch of them, including Activision and EA, arguably the two most powerful third party publishers, left in a huff over fees and microtransaction revenue splits... and then came back because Steam is the only game in town.
So no, Steam isn't the good guy having their arm twisted by evil publishers, they are a large corporation that invented most of the practices in both digital distribution and games as a service, including this one.
Owning media and owning the copyright to the media aren't the same thing. There is a well recognized right to resell and transfer physical media, regardless of what the EULA says. You can't sell more copies, but you absolutely sell (or gift, or leave in a will) the copy you have. The question here isn't whether you should have a copyright on your digital purchases, it's whether your rights to digital purchases should be analogous to your physical purchases.
The difference is that your Steam account is probably holding thousands of dollars in value while your pirated copies of Steam games are worth nothing. And presumably that whichever of your grandchildren gets nerdy gran's stash will likely not care to reverse engineer your warez archives just to play Bioshock again in 2075.
It's not about access to the games, it's about whether you own what you buy.
This. It's absolutely already enforced. Valve simply will do nothing to enable access to a relative that comes asking and most of the currently existing accounts will just fade into the ether because in most cases relatives aren't going to be particularly worried about recovering game accounts of all things when somebody passes away.
To be clear, I'm far from the average user. I've installed Linux on my PCs many times over multiple decades. I'm looking at a RedHat installation CD that was printed in a different century right now. I'm way more tech-savvy and platform-agnostic than the average Windows user.
And even I went "wait, GNOME hasn't figured out mousewheels and touchpads in 25 years? Yeah, nope, I'm out".
Desktop Linux is a hobby for hobbyists. If you think troubleshooting that stuff, customizing your setup and distro-hopping for fun are engaging things to do on your PC it's a good time. If in the process of doing that you set it up just like you want it the performance, stability and compatibility aren't terrible. By the time I hit those annoyances I had a mostly working setup. Audio was fine, iGPU was fine, touchscreen was fine, performance and responsiveness were better than Windows, manufacturer software alternatives were installed and mostly working.
But if you just want a computer that works any one of these roadblocks is a dealbreaker. Going online and seeing the related drama (posts complaining that GNOME devs will close issues about this out of personal preference or spite, hacky half-solutions, arguments about whether this is a real issue or how much better/worse other platforms or distros are) the entire ecosystem seems less than serious and definitely not sustainable for any device you need for user-level, reliable use.
You're arguing about naming conventions, though. If you want to refer to Linux as Linux Kernel that's fine, if a bit pedantic, but then you should be very strict about sticking to a separate name for the ecosystem of OSS Linux distros for desktops and laptops.
I haven't once thought of Android or ChromeOS as Linux, for the same reasons I have never once thought of Linux as Unix or MS-DOS as a PC DOS version. If we're going to conflate Linux with its proprietary alternatives let's just call it something else. Dinux? There you go.
Dinux has all those problems you outlined in your first post, I agree.
I may because I'm clearly an outlier and it's a bit of an experiment now, but...
... you realize how just saying that is an absolute dealbreaker for Linux, right?
I mean, if you're a base Windows user trying Linux for the first time, it is arcane gibberish. If you're just trying to get a working computer it's a major hassle. If you're, like me, a grumpy old fart, you're getting flashbacks of sitting in front of a Pentium-133 doing this exact exercise of flipping back and forth across environments and bumping against different frustrations on each and just can't believe this is still the feedback you're getting online this many decades later.
Yeah, honestly given the time this has been at play I'm surprised nobody has tried to do that type of full control integration besides Google. Given how well ChromeOS and especially Android worked as platforms why hasn't... I don't know, Valve? Adobe? Apple, even? tried to create a major desktop PC take on Linux that does have the type of support and sensible UX you want out of the box?
It's probably too late now that MS is hell-bent into turning Windows into that sort of platform, but there was a period of time there, probably during the Win8 debacle or the early parts of Win10 where you could have come up with a "big boy ChromeOS" take that would have gotten this done. It's nuts that Valve only got as far as doing the basics of SteamOS and then failed to deliver on their promises of wider support before the community basically turned installing that into the same kind of nightmare every other distro is.
If a first time user installs any random combination of distro and desktop environment and they can't get it all to work smoothly right away with zero effort they will never use any flavor of Linux ever again.
That's how much of a chance to secure a user you have for a software platform or OS. Less than one. Any amount of troubleshooting during FTUE is a user gone forever. The solution to any amount of friction is "Install Windows" or "return this laptop and go buy a Macbook Air".
None of that is unreasonable. Those are perfectly reasonable expectations and reactions to these issues.
Wait, if Steam VR works on Linux for Index are Quest HMDs not usable through Steam Link? Or does that still need the Oculus software installed? I'm not actually sure.
Well, no, that's not applicable here. I'm suggesting a proprietary, corporate-backed desktop default in the way we have a proprietary, corporate-backed laptop reference in ChromeOS, a corporate-backed mobile reference in Android and a proprietary, corporate-backed handheld default in SteamOS.
It's not about covering everyone's use cases, it's about applying commercial priorities and funding to one specific use case.
I mean, you know the Linux community craves that opportunity, because the amount of hype around SteamOS when that dropped on the Deck was insane, and despite their clear lack of interest in expanding it into a Windows alternative for other product types there's been no pushback in those circles.
That's a fair point. I suppose conceptually that's what those organizations were trying to do. So it's a failure in execution which then probably acts as a deterrent for other corporations considering stepping up to challenge MS on modular desktop PCs, which aren't that big of a market in the first place.
I guess if you were going to do that you'd pair it to rigid hardware instead for that reason and at that point you're Apple and we're talking about MacOS.
It's not about being 1:1. I have used Android, iOS, MacOS and a bunch of other systems. Most of those have been easy to adapt. In fact, like your friend, I prefer the GNOME look because the MacOS-ish UI feels fun and fresh after being on Windows for so long.
It's the ratio of troubleshooting versus usage and the lack of definitive resolution for things.
FWIW, I just went back to Windows, not because I found the terminal commands hard to grasp (I started working with computers in the 80s, I'm not intimidated by a command line), but because they often didn't match what tutorials said, or because something that didn't work didn't generate an error and simply did nothing, or because something just randomly stopped working for no reason and just dangled there, broken, indefinitely.
Say what you will about how haphazardly Windows is architected, but most of the time if something breaks it's a matter of either installing the right thing, uninstalling the right thing, finding the right setting or reinstalling the OS. That sense of rebuilding your bike as you ride on it that Linux still forces upon you is just so friction-heavy, and the failstate of it is so frustrating. There's a reason why a dedicated Android or ChromeOS for your hardware feels just fine but desktop Linux is untenable for 90% of users, and it's not the 1:1 parity with Windows.
It doesn't, and it can't. Also can't do any UI scaling between 100 and 200% out of the box. There are some astounding gaps in it for how long it's been around.
I mean, it is, but part of the appeal with the stock GNOME was how streamlined and un-Windows-like it was. I tried moving to KDE but, honestly, it does feel a bit worse to use.
Not that it matters, because eventually a bunch of other more fundamental unsupported features made me switch back instead. Couldn't get the Nvidia dGPU to work and messed things up enough in the process that I'd have to start over, which is a dealbreaker. Plus it turns out that the suspend/restore functionality was completely broken and the hardware volume buttons were partially broken.
As a person that also went "screw it, I'm going back to Windows 95" for the exact same reasons in a previous millenium...
...no they aren't.
This isn't new, this has been the way this works for decades. Sure, there have been improvements, but also plenty of steps backwards. This run at it has been a noticeably worse experience than, say, being told about Ubuntu and being surprised at it having a smooth installer for the first time. Sure, gaming then was a no-go, but with PC hardware being a much narrower path then, it was so much easier to get the hardware itself running.
And yes, it was about to be the year of Linux desktop then, too.
You used a bunch of words but you aren't saying much new.
Again, those differences are meaningful. It makes sense to have a different name for it. You can lump it and MacOS and Android as a singular family of OSs, but they're clearly different products with different branding and different functionality.
You're also ignoring how much all of those "succesful Linux" non-Linux systems are tied to hadware, which is ultimately the issue. The terminal isn't as much of a dealbreaker as the Linux community makes it out to be (and neither is the UX not being identical to Windows, BTW). The problem is the lack of hardware support and the finicky configurations, terminal or no terminal. Steam OS, all the flavors of Android and Chrome OS are all customized to the hardware they ship with and work well with it. In all cases the hardware is locked and it doesn't need much readjusting, and when it does it's often through a live support update system.
And yes, I have thought of ChromeOS as Linux, don't be patronizing. I am saying it's not the same as the desktop-focused Linux distros that are trying to support modular PC hardware in the way Windows does. Because it isn't.
It's roughly consistent with Steam survey data, and given the current context, Linux Steam users are heavily incentivized to contribute to the survey. The numbers are what they are.
Plus the guy's argument is that relevant data sources separate ChromeOS out because it's substantially different, which is a fair point, regardless of the accuracy of the data.
Quest Link yes, I was referring to the alternative Steam Link app that is available on Quest. That's maintained by Valve (and honestly works better than the wireless version of Quest Link, IMO). I was wondering if that works as an alternative, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are still dependencies for controller inputs and head tracking that need Oculus software installed to work on the server side.
You guys know that MS rolls out updates through a system of multi-layered opt-in channels and deploy to the wider channels in chunks over longer periods of time, right?
They may not be the most competent or scrupulous megacorp, but they do hire actual software engineers and stuff.
Valve confirms your Steam account cannot be transferred to anyone after you die | Your Steam games will go to the grave with you (www.techspot.com)
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