SteamOS destroys Windows

Linux Hardware, World Domination 1 Minute

With the release of the Lenovo Legion Go S gaming handheld, we’ve now got a real apples-to-apples comparison of how Windows 11 fares against Linux (specifically, SteamOS with KDE Plasma) on the same 1st-party supported OEM hardware in a gaming context. And the results are pretty devastating for Windows in terms of performance and battery life — according to even windowscentral.com! Neither WindowsCentral nor the original video from Dave2d mention desktop mode, but the answer there is just as clear, as all of us in the FOSS space have known for ages.

We’re winning, folks. If I polish my crystal ball, I see us peeling away groups of users from competing platforms one at a time: developers, gamers, artists, scientists, enthusiasts, and on and on. It’s happening. The snowball is rolling down the hill, gaining momentum.

It can be hard to remember the big picture when we’re nose deep in code, bugs, and icons all day, but that big picture is on our side. Never forget that everything you do in KDE is impactful!

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Published by Nate

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13 thoughts on “SteamOS destroys Windows”

  1. Just out of curiosity: has Lenovo reached out KDE directly in some way with their new handheld or is everything done with Valve as a proxy?

    Congrats to the low-level KDE devs anyway :).

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  3. I was a hardcore gamer, until 2005, when I decided to move 100% to Linux and KDE (I had a dual boot since 2004) and I never looked back. I’ve seen many of the changes that happened during the years, and it’s great seeing that it’s finally possible to play games and that they work even better.

    But most important of all, I want to say thank you to all the people who contributed in one way or another during the years and allowed to reach this point ❤

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  5. I’ve deleted several negative comments written in a similar style about vague and nebulous issues going back decades, or complaining about changes that have been well-received overall. Further similar comments will also be deleted.

    To the person posting this stuff, you aren’t succeeding in making me feel bad, and all your comments are being caught by the spam filter now, so, you’re just wasting your own time.

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    1. Nobody will succeed to make you feel bad : ). With all your awesome works by your side. Long live Kdevalley and all of Fossland!

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  6. A win ? Certainly for the companies behind Linux and shareholders once again, but a blatant failure once again on a human scale.

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    1. It’s a win for everybody! SteamOS being great is a direct result of money invested in the FOSS world, which benefits everyone. The people paid to do that work win, gamers win, other people working on FOSS projects that are in a better state because of the investments win, Valve wins, everyone wins.

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  7. For sure it’s good sign and hopefully more hardware vendors will give SteamOS/Linux serious consideration, which would a huge win.
    However I wish Valve would work closer with upstream Wine rather than pushing their fork. Also the way thy handle energy from Linux gaming community leaves lots of room for improvement.

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    1. About the “I wish Valve would work closer with upstream Wine rather than pushing for their fork” thing: There’s a reason as for why Proton exists, it’s just a completely different development model as compared to upstream Wine. Proton, vkd3d-proton and all focus on getting games to run, “move fast&break stuff” style. Meanwhile upstream wine applies a much more leisurely pace&focuses on things being implemented correctly. Both development models have their respective merits. Work done in Proton&vkd3d-proton gets submitted to upstream whenever it has reached the state that upstream wants for it to be in, has been done this way ever since Proton got started.

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    2. First I understand Wine guys aren’t the easiest ones to work with. There wre reasons other than code quality, why DXVK was rejected from upstream. But at least it works with plain wine just fine. Contrary to Proton OpenXR which has hard dependence on Steam, SteamVR/OpenVR and requires to be run inside Steam runtime container. It doesn’t work even with Proton outside of it, because of some weird design decisions.
      I think it’d be much better if Proton was set of patches from Wine staging + external libs you can slap to Wine prefix similar to how DXVK is done. This way it’s easier to tinker with Steam unsupported titles and work their way to the supported status. Win for both users and Valve as they can broaden their supported offer without having to spend hundreds of hour to find a way to run given app on Wine.
      Not wasting +10GB of disk space i nice bonus as well.

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  8. As an avid Windows user, I feel a bit skeptical about news like this because it feels like the technical details and configurations aren’t sufficiently described in order to properly evaluate the comparisons.

    For example, are both Windows and SteamOS using Modern Standby (https://learn.microsoft.com/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/modern-standby) when assessing battery life? If not, how does Windows fare on this gaming handheld if configured to use classic standby, assuming it is available (run “powercfg /availablesleepstates” in the CLI)? Furthermore, the ArchWiki suggests that the implementation of Modern Standby on Linux isn’t as thorough as those of Windows and also macOS.

    Then there are other features that only Windows has like fast startup: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/win32/power/system-power-states

    I’m not trying to diminish your efforts and those of KDE as a whole, they’re extremely positive, especially since KDE has helped Wayland mature and enhance the Linux desktop UX, but I just feel disappointed in the lack of information when it comes to this stuff.

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