well on the business side of things, Microsoft won't completely go walled garden until they know they have all the major companies on board with it. So far EA has their own storefront setup that I don't think they want to relinquish everything to the MS store anytime soon.
Everything is in flux, which is why things with SteamOS have stagnated. But with more vulkan development around the corner. all throughout next year should start the next evolution of gaming, which is where we will see DX12 and Vulkan go head to head and we find out the performance is almost identical. with some edge cases of each API having better performance over the other.

plus wine will get dx12 support which I'm really curious to see what sort of performance there will be. (i'm assuming there will be little to no performance hit). which will be all the more reason for Steam to incorporate their own version of wine at that point, as part of their runtime. this will help to alleviate most compatibility issues on Steam OS.

When it comes to the mainstream gamers all they want is for things to work without much fuss. it all boils down to what games can I play and what is the performance compared to price. Where as most of us geeks it doesn't matter so much.
Wine, Vulkan and DX12 development will be a good time for Steam OS to try to shine. Which will be over the coarse of the next couple of years.

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yeah I've been testing this since alpha 0.6, it has ran quite well on linux pretty much the whole time since it was designed from the Unity engine. even through some of the hickups on the transfer to the Unity 5 build this dev team was quite aware of the issues it was having with Linux and worked around a lot of those issues through the early beta stages.

there are a number of quirky bugs still, even after 1.0 release. even some that I've never seen before until this 1.0 release. but most of them are minor, like at very random times the game may crash when insta-traveling to towns or when going in a dungeon. this happens about once in a few hour play session, typically.

The dev team is planning to continue development as well. (i hope we see a possible vulkan build when unity 5 has matured enough for Vulkan builds)

and flying in a fast aircraft can be a bit annoying because as you discover new land blocks the game generates and renders said blocks on the fly as you discover them apparently. (this was mentioned by their dev team). So in a fast flying aircraft you will end up with periodic pauses because of the time it takes to produce and render. but when you fly back over this area later on it's only a little laggy from render time. (i'm surprised there not a better pre-fetch system in place to generate nearby blocks, outside the visible range)

don't get me wrong though, I love the hell out of this game even with some quirky bugs.

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I dual booted windows for a long time, it was mainly because of certain games that didn't work well under wine I would have to use windows for. mainly the early MMOs like Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, Guild Wars/2 and the like. although they all work fine on Wine now. I don't play them anymore, so it's not an issue. it did take awhile before wine was able to run those games well. but since Steam came to Linux all this has changed for me.
these days there's only some older titles I might want to play for nostalgia and then there are the other Blizzard games I can't live without which are D3 and Hearthstone.
Wine allows me to use Linux all the time without a need for dual booting or even a windows partition. it would be nice if the big companies would port their games to Linux, but I highly doubt it will happen until the Linux market share is at least the same or better than OSX/MacOS.

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I look forward to these presentations, everything looks like it is still early. But early implementations and tools are coming around. within the next year everything should be a bit more exciting for linux and Vulkan.

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GNOME and KDE were the originals from back in the day. they always seem to be the most popular. once KDE 5.9 drops in January I'll most likely be switching to KDE again for quite awhile. I've been on GNOME since 3.14, which I was on Cinnamon since 1.3 before that and Ubuntu then KDE4 before that. I guess about every couple of years I switch DEs :) although I like testing out a lot on VMs and dual boot from time to time.

Quoting: MohandevirWhat is a typical use case for "Windows manager only"?

typically sysadmins and developers like these sort of interfaces because they are catered to only using your keyboard. they are considered very efficient but only for those that are proficient with their commands. highly configurable the most light weight desktop linux has aside from being terminal only.

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just grabbed the company of heroes 2 collection and 7 days to die finally :)

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this is awesome news, i wonder just how many games they will be able to port over using Vulkan? if that makes porting easier in the long run with the right dev tools. this should be some interesting things to come next year.

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uh oh, that's a good idea :) sweeten them up so we can get that CivVI port sooner rather than later :P
but I really appreciate what Feral and Aspyr have done for Linux Gaming. this honestly wouldn't have been so exciting without them.
But the Linux devs working on the Unity engine like Na'Tasha Bard, along with the devs from the cryengine working on Star Citizen. To the devs like Yaakuro doing work on the UE4. To all the various indie devs that continually give Linux some love with so many interesting games.
This has made the leap from dual booting windows and Linux to being a 100% pure Linux user a fun and interesting time.

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wow, Feral, I'm having a hard time keeping up. just started Mad Max ^_^ . I'm finishing MM before jumping to Deus Ex :P

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everything seems to run fine, doesn't seem to matter what level of settings I go for it performs about the same. I've tested it on High and Very High presets. High seems to have an odd bottleneck that causes the FPS to drop a lot periodically. But on Very High the FPS don't drop nearly as often, just seldomly.

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