I've recently installed SteamOS on my secondary hard drive to give it a shot. Installation process was a bit confusing, but installing the .iso on a DVD was the easiest method (like always for installing OS'). The Interface that greeted me was modern, fast, responsive and deqy to navigate. The SteamOS frontend is pretty foolproof.
Out of the box, 9 out of 14 of the games in my Steam library were listed as compatible for installation. How far gaming on Linux has come :). I then enabled the desktop and was greeted with the standard Gnome 3 interface and that's where trouble began.
Iceweasel (a variant of Firefox) was installed by default en when opening it, the top Browser bar was huge and text was zoomed in way too close by default. Still looking for a way to permanently fix this. The amount of programs installed by default is quite small and this might seem good, but there is a bit of a problem installing more programs on SteamOS.
The standard package manager only lists packages listed for SteamOS Brewmaster (the current release) and the number of packages is quite small. Mind you, they use the standard package manager, which is quite irritating to navigate. I'm looking into getting Gnome Software installed, which is a much better GUI package installer which features program logos and descriptions.
After messing in the config files somewhat, I managed to add the regular Debian dependencies to the OS so I could install regular programs for Debian as well (which opens a LOT of options). Valve disencourages it since Debian uses an older Long Term Support Linux Kernel then SteamOS (they need the newer Kernels for things like Vulkan and the AMDGPU driver (more on that later)). However, you can in the config files prioritise Brewmaster versions of packages and programs over Debian ones so that SteamOS packages won't get broken by older ones. I've so far just installed Banshee, which is a music and video player for Linux (they also have a Mac and Windows version) because managing you music library in VLC is a pain (might install it for videos though).
I also tried installing Playonlinux to remedy the shortage of some games, but it plainly didn't work that well.
Going back to the gaming side, I fired up Borderlands 2, cranked the settings to high with 2x Anisotropic Filtering and 2x FXAA. The game lagged somewhat, so I turned of V-sync. After turning off V-Sync, I got around 40-60 fps (my system has an Athlon 860k and a R7 265, so nothing too fancy). I didn't notice any screen tearing and the game ran smooth from there, so it seems the newer AMD Linux drivers are catching up somewhat (the later AMDGPU PRO version should help even more when it's added in Brewmaster 2.80).
So, conclusion time. The frontend is really good, gaming performance has gotten acceptable, Valve needs to push devs harder to release games on Linux (looking at you Bethesda) and some games they promised really need to come out (looking at you The Witcher III). But most important of all, Valve needs to accept the fact that SteamOS is also a GNU/Linux OS and they fall a bit short here.
Having a Linux distro that is optimized for gaming is nice, but fixing the GNU/Linux side of things will only help them gain traction. With the availability of powerful tools like GIMP, Kdenlive and Blender, Valve needs to stress that SteamOS can ALSO be your ONLY OS. I hope they'll take notice of that fact.
I'll be following the development of this platform further into the future.
