You don't need to wait for Valve to get this experience today. The HTPC build of Bazzite [1] brings an experience identical to SteamOS to all computers with an AMD or Intel GPU from the past 8 years or so.
It works amazingly well and I can't imagine going back to Windows for a PC that is built only for video games. I use it on my "Gaming HTPC" (Ryzen 3600, Radeon RX6600, Fractal Design Node 202) and it brings a great console experience to my TV, with access to my PC game library, without being locked into a console ecoystem, and without the enormous cruft and user hostility that Windows has you manage these days.
I'm a pretty casual and patient gamer, and for that use case this Steam machine experience is unmatched - despite being built on desktop Linux, it works out of the box and requires zero manual maintenance. For dedicated gaming boxes this Linux user experience is significantly better and easier to use than Windows - we're truly living in the future.
[2]: It's built on top of Fedora and Universal Blue, so under the hood it's different from SteamOS which is built on a custom immutable version of Arch Linux. However, that implementation detail is actually almost totally irrelevant if you want to play games since all software is managed by Steam and Flatpak on both systems.
I have both a Steam Deck and a (Windows) gaming PC.
While the "happy path" in SteamOS is truly amazing, there are dark corners where it falls down. Third party launchers (like EA's garbage) are extremely janky. Hardware support in Linux/SteamOS is questionable for exotic peripherals (I have a TrackIR which never worked right, a MS XBox USB controller dongle that requires third party kernel modules, and a HP Reverb G2 which has only preliminary support through third party software). And some types of multiplayer anti-cheat are completely unavailable.
Some of this is solvable, some probably isn't. But there's a reason I still keep Windows on the gaming PC - sadly.
I've been wondering what the limiting factors are for migrating gamers and I think the larger software ecosystem and cumulative effect of paper-cut issues will cause people to bounce off.
Linux and running games under steam/wine/proton is great in the broad strokes, but users will have built up their own collection of tools or ways of doing things they will seek out equivalents for and judge the linux experience as a whole on whether they can do that. Many of the windows applications are very mature compared to linux because that's the ecosystem and audience its had for decades, there's nothing touching Foobar2000 for example (and the UI glitches in wine). Now add in all the other things gamers regularly expect to do, what's needed to accomplish them and how well they do it, overlays, screen recording, using modding tools, etc.
It also strikes me with the win10 end of life there's going to be a huge variety of hardware configurations people want to 'just work', in terms of age and which model someone chose in a particular generation. For example support for fan control on my Z270 board doesn't exist, presumably because of the way ASUS made that model.
I can appreciate Valve and their direct partners picking their battles on what to support as it's a huge gauntlet to pick up, but I really doubt the needle is going to move large distances and saying "bye bye windows gaming"
If you are demanding or particular about your gaming experience, then Linux isn't there yet. Compatibility with the very latest AAA titles can sometimes trail behind Windows, anticheat for competitive multiplayer often blocks out Linux compatibility, and you need to adapt to different tools for customizing and surrounding your gaming experience if you're so inclined.
What I'm highlighting if you just want to sit down to play some damn games already in your library, especially on a dedicated "console" like a handheld or HTPC, then the Linux experience is superior to Windows. And I expect that there's a sizable audience for that.
> cumulative effect of paper-cut issues will cause people to bounce off
I disagree, PC gaming has always been rife with papercuts, especially relative to console gaming.
The real moat that Windows has is that anonymous-matchmade competitive multiplayer games are decreasingly going to want to run on hardware that supports user freedom. Which for me personally is fine, because I find anonymous-matchmade competitive multiplayer games to be dogwater that I ain't missing, but for a lot of people that's a non-starter.
(Disclaimer: proud owner of a Steam Deck which has also served double duty as my desktop machine while I wait for a replacement power supply for my laptop.)
They mean "cloud native" in the sense that it adopts atomic system updates and containerized application installs, which has been common in "the cloud" for years but is much less commonplace in personal Linux installations. Working in this way is a large part of why Bazzite "just works". It is also actually exactly how SteamOS works (with some implementation differences under the hood), so SteamOS is "cloud native" in the same sense.
I do think this marketing is unnecessarily confusing. The dayjob of the original master mind behind Bazzite and Universal Blue is working with cloud systems IIUC, so they find it an important thing to highlight.
I tried this a while back, when going 6700 XT HDMI 2.1 to LG Oled C2 HDMI 2.1 with proper cable i could not get RGB 444 with 'correct' colordepth in Bazzite (or any distro)
Windows 10 or 11 does not have this problem. Apparently it's an issue with the HDMI board and proprietary drivers for linux.
The full SteamOS experience is pretty tied up in Linux' open source graphics stack, moreso than regular Linux desktop environments because Valve built it for high performance on the Steam Deck's AMD GPU. Nvidia's proprietary driver has traditionally done its own thing and has been quite incompatible with things targeting the open source stack. So it's hard to replicate the Steam Deck experience on Nvidia, no matter the distro.
That said, over recent years Nvidia has made some efforts to improve compatibility. Just a few days ago Bazzite announced a Steam Deck beta image for Turing and later Nvidia cards [1]. It's too early to run though if you want the seamless experience you get on Intel and AMD, and progress mostly depends on Nvidia and Valve, but I hope they get there.
It works amazingly well and I can't imagine going back to Windows for a PC that is built only for video games. I use it on my "Gaming HTPC" (Ryzen 3600, Radeon RX6600, Fractal Design Node 202) and it brings a great console experience to my TV, with access to my PC game library, without being locked into a console ecoystem, and without the enormous cruft and user hostility that Windows has you manage these days.
I'm a pretty casual and patient gamer, and for that use case this Steam machine experience is unmatched - despite being built on desktop Linux, it works out of the box and requires zero manual maintenance. For dedicated gaming boxes this Linux user experience is significantly better and easier to use than Windows - we're truly living in the future.
[1]: https://bazzite.gg
[2]: It's built on top of Fedora and Universal Blue, so under the hood it's different from SteamOS which is built on a custom immutable version of Arch Linux. However, that implementation detail is actually almost totally irrelevant if you want to play games since all software is managed by Steam and Flatpak on both systems.