Ars Technica declares SteamOS the victor (plus other 🐧🎮 news)

Thank you

There's more to it than that, but that's a pretty big factor.

The other two main things:

Windows is full of bloat/malware garbage that spies on you and does shit you don't need, and it gets harder and harder every year to figure out how, or even if you can strip this garbage out...

And all of Windows is a jumbled mess of 30+ years of spaghetti code at this point.

New versions of windows are not like ... ok, we're gonna refactor everything, build it all again from the ground up in a more efficient way.

More like a snowball that rolls through snow and mud and sticks and dead leaves.

Miracle it hasn't collapsed under its own weight at this point, what with so much work being done by temp contractors who have no singular consistent approach to anything, who tend to either not document things at all, or very poorly.

My understanding is that SteamOS, while having a desktop mode, is a stripped down OS lacking some basic functionality that you might expect from a desktop OS. Functionality that is also found in other distros with similar intentions like Bazzite.

Though this understanding was based more on a bit of older information, and I am not certain on the current state.

SteamOS is not designed for general computing, so if you use your machine for anything outside of gaming, a desktop distro would be a better fit. (If I were to do this as a first step away from Windows, I would probably choose Linux Mint and switch to the KDE Plasma desktop environment after installing the OS.)

You could then install Steam and get all the gaming goodness without giving up productivity apps. Maybe use Steam's Big Picture Mode if you really want a console-like interface.

SteamOS, at this point, is not officially supported outside of select hardware (Basically, Steam Deck and other handelds), so while it is prominent and talked about - it may not be the best choice for home PC usage.

As @chortle_tortle@mander.xyz said already: Bazzite is probably the closest equivalent, it also has gaming optimisation, but a more fully-fledged Desktop experience along with it. There are other gaming focused distros (e.g. Garuda, PikaOS) as well, but if you are prone to choice anxiety, just go with Bazzite - and check the others out if you get sucked down the "I want to tinker more with my system and try out more, different Linux flavours" pipeline later.

I'd say CachyOS there is a learning curve but if you know these windows terms: registry, batch, sfc /scannow ... then you already have enough technological know how to get started with rolling release.

My advice for gaming on Linux is to have a seperate hard drive where you store things you care about (including games) so you are able to wipe everything in case something goes wrong.

Pop! OS might be a good option. It's Ubuntu-based and is pretty easy to get running. I switched from Windows 10 earlier this year and it's been mostly fine. A couple points to ask yourself before experimenting with Linux:

1. Is your data backed up? Will it be okay if you lose all of your computer's data? I backed up all the important documents just in case I made a mistake.
2. Do you need Windows specifically for anything important? For example, do you use your computer for work? Stuff like Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Cloud either doesn't or can't run on Linux. However, there are tons of FOSS alternatives to replace Office and Adobe software.

I really like Pop! OS because it's a nice bridge distro from Windows to Linux. It's possible that I'll switch to a more "advanced" distro like Arch in the future, but it's nice just not having to worry about Windows 10 or having to upgrade to 11.

Keep in mind though, I still keep an install of Windows 10 on my machine in case I need to switch back for work software.

https://github.com/Jovian-Experiments/Jovian-NixOS

You can turn basically any Linux distro into "Steam OS". There's nothing magical or different about Steam OS.