Valve's plan to bring SteamOS to more devices is a promising sign if you want to stop gaming on Windows

https://lemm.ee/post/50052390

Valve's plan to bring SteamOS to more devices is a promising sign if you want to stop gaming on Windows - lemm.ee

Even gamers nexus’ Steve today said that they’re about to start doing Linux games performance testing soon. It’s happening, y’all, the year of the Linux desktop is upon us. ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ

To anyone reading this thinking “once SteamOS comes out, I’ll switch”, you should know:

Gaming on Linux is already here. Pick a distro and game. You can take advantage of Proton right now. You don’t need to wait for one specific distro.

I’ve personally been gaming on Linux exclusively for about 3 years. Windows games, not Linux games.

“Pick a distro” is why they’re waiting for steamos, presumably.
I think that is perfectly valid and I’ll happily recommend steamos to newcomers. I’m only a little worried about it being locked to flatpaks by default though. Hopefully that will change, but for most users it will be a good start.
Locked to flatpaks? aren’t they worried about the disk space?
One flatpak uses a lot of extra disk space, but for each additional flatpak you add to a system the disk space difference is much smaller because they share dependencies. When it’s system-wide for all user-installed packages, the difference is quite small.
I was under the impression the didn’t shared dependencies thus eating space.
They don’t share dependencies with the base system, but they do share dependencies with each other, so long as those dependencies are at the same version, which most of them are because flatpaks generally stay quite up to date.

It’s actually surprising how easy it is to use.

My wife was playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on her windows laptop (GOG version, DRM free) and I just wanted to see if I can run it on my Linux laptop.

Just copied the game folder from her laptop to my external SSD, plugged it into my laptop, ran through proton. Everything works without any issues. Simple as that.

I was pleasantly surprised. We could even join via LAN and had some co-op fun. After trying it out I think I’m buying the game.

I haven’t used Windows for more than a decade, and I am genuinely surprised reading your post that the game works in this manner even if with proton/wine layer.

I can’t help but think that this is an exception, and would attribute this behaviour to how the game is made. I wonder what other software function this way.