Quoting: Purple Library GuyReckon a lot of people have been waiting for this.

Feels like I've been waiting for 74 years.

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Considering SteamOS 3.0 is a relatively new and young 'distro', to already be shooting up the charts like this is very impressive. From what I've seen, gamers love it, both existing and brand new Linux users, it's convincing many of them that Linux is ready to go on their desktops.

When Valve is ready to release SteamOS 3.0 as a regular distro OS, it's going to be a very popular option I believe and we'll probably see quite a few people put it on their laptops or desktops. But I imagine Valve is probably waiting for a number of reasons. Hardware support might be one of them. They could be working with some third parties on that.

If Valve keeps at it, SteamOS could have a very long and successful future.

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Good to see Valve taking this initiative. Never underestimate the value of localisation. About 95% of the world don't speak English as a first language, and 75% don't speak English at all.

Would be nice to see some more Linux distro websites translated as well. Hard to promote your distro to the majority of the planet if the majority of the planet can't read it.

For a quick sample, the following websites are only available in English as far as I can tell from looking at the homepage of their websites:
- https://linuxmint.com/ [External Link]
- https://manjaro.org/ [External Link]
- https://ubuntu.com/ [External Link]
- https://archlinux.org/ [External Link]
- https://www.centos.org/ [External Link]
- https://endeavouros.com/ [External Link]
- https://getsol.us/home/ [External Link]
- https://www.gentoo.org/ [External Link]

Shoutout to these websites for having numerous translations available on a visible dropdown on their homepage:
- https://getfedora.org/ [External Link]
- https://www.debian.org/ [External Link]
- https://www.opensuse.org/ [External Link]

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Quoting: BlackBloodRumSo my guess is the delay was "somewhat" intentional.

I also suspected the delay might be slightly desirable if not intentional on Valve's side..
The Deck didn't exactly launch in a perfect state. There were software issues, hardware quality control issues, and not to mention plenty of games that weren't compatible at launch that are now.

I suspect the first couple of months were 'an unofficial launch delay'. Rather than an actual delay, just ship a very small number of units, get lots of feedback, make fixes, treat it like early access basically.. Then once the issues are largely resolved? Ramp up production!

It's only a conspiracy theory but I could imagine someone at Valve considering it. I wouldn't hate them for it either, if it was on purpose, it wasn't a bad idea and has certainly worked out well in the long run.

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I view everything through the context of 'Is this going to help Linux gaming grow?' because it feels like that's Valve motivation to everything.

By normal console standards, success is anything over 30 million units. But Valve's goal is simply to get more people gaming on Linux. So even if the Deck only gets a million people gaming on Linux, that's still success in my opinion. As that represents a major boost to our 'population'. Especially when it seems many of the new Linux gamers are people coming from outside of the Linux space, people who are in many cases even console gamers. Not the usual Linux experts who know Linux inside-out. Which is great, we need more of that kind of casual user in our ranks.

I wouldn't be surprised if Valve hit 1 million units, I wouldn't be surprised if they hit 2 or 3 even once they open up worldwide, or hit even 5 million once they start selling in physical stores.

With those kinds of numbers, we can be certain that game compatibility and third party support for Linux will only continue to improve across the board. It's not like the Switch, ensuring game compatibility with Linux is much easier for developers, in many cases it even happens by accident thanks to Proton. And a few million Linux gamers would be more than enough incentive for most developers to ensure the compatibility is there.

It really is the year of Linux gaming. As the legends foretold.

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Quoting: toojaysLooking forward to the day the existing market is saturated enough for Valve to start selling to Australia.

I'm already importing mine from the US but as soon as one is available in Australia to buy, I'm buying one as a gift for someone.

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: mtOnline Game Selling Store does improvements to Offline mode and Free Game Claiming in one swoop.
What's going on here?!? :P

It's as if they care about their customers :O

Is that even legal??

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Mint team do excellent work, another great update.

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Hopefully eventually companies like Razor do support Linux officially.

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So weird to see a developer answering 'Will it work on Linux?' in the actual announcement for adding EAC to a game. Like we didn't even have to chase them up, they just knew it was important enough to specify at the start, and knew it was important enough to check and verify the game will still work fine on Linux/Deck.

Really is the year of Linux gaming!

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