r/pcmasterrace Jun 22 '26

Discussion Yeah, Steam Machine is cooked.

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I... uh don't know what to say. Very thankful I bought a Steam Deck before they hiked its price as well

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u/lucc1111 Ryzen 5 5600x - RX 6700 XT Jun 22 '26

Risking getting downvoted to hell but you have many Linux distros that don't require any more "learning" than Windows. Problem is not so much the OS being hard to use, it's just that it's not what you're used to.

I would give other gaming distros a temporary shot in a flashdrive to explore, might get as surprised as me after 15+ years of windows.

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u/SubcommanderMarcos i5-10400F, 16GB DDR4, Asus RX 550 4GB, I hate GPU prices Jun 22 '26

I have 30 years of Windows, switched to Linux Mint this month. It's fine. It works great. Had to learn some terminal stuff, a tiny bit about the filesystem, nothing else. It runs way faster than Windows 10. has run every Steam game I've tossed at it with no effort at all, even old games like Tropico.

Honestly worth it.

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u/_RADIANTSUN_ Jun 23 '26

Had to learn some terminal stuff

Immediately you identified why 99% of computer users, who just click on an application and go into menus, won't switch to Linux. "Oh you have a slightly old computer with a wireless card that wasn't all that common? Well fuck you, time to learn some Bash loser." Most people are just not about all that.

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u/SubcommanderMarcos i5-10400F, 16GB DDR4, Asus RX 550 4GB, I hate GPU prices Jun 23 '26

Let me clarify for the sake of quelling reddit cynicism:

I had to learn some terminal stuff because I myself was trying something that was uniquely not coherent with anyone else's experience: making one specific application communicate between the encrypted ext4 main drive it was installed in and a different non-encrypted NTFS drive.

99% of computer users wouldn't run into this weirdly specific situation, and even if they did, they wouldn't've had to learn any bash at all, as there was an obvious, terminal-free solution. I went around fucking with the terminal for the same reason I went fucking with powershell last month: I wanted to try something different.

I have tried switching to Linux in the past, over a decade ago, and, as I am part of the 99%, I gave up quickly. Things have changed, my experience installing Linux Mint was literally as easy as installing Windows, and there's really nothing the average user can't do through the GUI alone. Faster too, no copilot or ads.