If Steam OS becomes a viable desktop gaming OS that plays most, if not all games, I'll drop Windows in a heartbeat.

There are over 1,900 games on Steam that run in Linux.

https://steamdb.info/linux/

Many of the games I have in my library do not run at all unfortunately.

Sometimes I like to go back and play old stuff too.

Many Steam games work great under WINE, both on Linux and OS X desktops!

Wine is always a viable option, especially for older games. With DirectX 11 support coming later this year, almost every Windoze only game should hopefully work.

What about the games that have no entry in the WINE database? Are they just untested or do they not work at all?

it's still slower mostly. Mostly since they don't have any specification at all.

It is? I've personally seen better performance with Wine + Linux than with Windows.

Now, this isn't to say that Wine is totally up to par with Windows in terms of compatibility, but performance hasn't been a significant issue for quite some time.

I searched for a few games I'm playing now and have played recently and out of 10 there were 4 that had no entry on the WINE database.

This might be enough of a barrier to stop me using it right now.

That happens, particularly on really new (or really obscure) software. Really, though, that ought to be an encouragement; sure, you're left in the dark, but it means that those games could use some test coverage. Your contributions to the AppDB could help quite a few others.

Parent's post has so many qualifiers, it says nothing at all.

I do not see a performance penalty at all with WINE. Most games that work play at speeds matching or better than windows. WoW is usually a big example of that, as are emulators.

WoW and emulators are both fairly trivial for a modern system to run well. There is definitely a significant performance hit if you are running something in WINE that nearly maxes your performance in windows

someone's never used Higan before. I've made Stunt Race FX and Yoshi's Island peg a Core i7. Running Tekken 4 on MAME is just as intensive.

Running either in wine is a fine benchmark on performance.

I updated to Windows 10 and found it to be so painfully slow that I switched to Ubuntu 14.04 for gaming. I've honestly had a pretty good experience playing everything from low-fi indie titles (like Terraria) to AAA releases (like Shadow of Mordor). Try it out!

> I updated to Windows 10 and found it to be so painfully slow

I initially had that problem, but it seemed to be the fact that (on top of some phoning-home options that I missed disabling originally, which seemed to play some role in the slowness -- disabling them helped) the Windows 10 update from Windows 8.1 also, for some unknown reason, rolled WLAN drivers back to the versions that were several years old (pre-Win8.1 at least) and fairly broken and couldn't automatically locate new ones; redownloading the latest (for Win8.1 -- no Win 10 specific drivers were available for the hardware in question) drivers (which is what had been installed prior to the update) resolved the slowness problems.

I can't say I've had any issues with performance on Win10. Some games seem to actually run a bit better for me.

Will games that run on Steam OS be compatible with regular linux ?

Yes. If you look at the Steam search you'll see that Linux is paired with SteamOS.[1]

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/search/?os=linux

Same. I would really like it to accommodate old Windows games as well, but that's too much to ask for right now.

Steam is owned by Valve and Valve is a US company. Using steam will not change anything since it is the US laws allowing/requiring companies to comply with the NSA.

The difference being that I want to use Windows only for games without all this other cloud integration crap that comes with it.

Steam OS is a Linux-based OS designed primarily for gaming. Any and all cloud-integration will be specifically gaming-focused.

Can you not see the difference between that and a general purpose OS like Windows harvesting data everything you do on your system?

I won't be using Steam OS to do anything very sensitive like sending or receiving personal e-mails, editing word documents or spreadsheets, or browsing the internet for whatever reason.

Unless you consider firing up a shooter or a city-building sim sensitive.

The two OS's have very different purposes and use-cases.

> Using steam will not change anything since it is the US laws allowing/requiring companies to comply with the NSA.

There's a big difference between 'allowing' and 'requiring'.

Telemetry is clearly not a legal requirement. It's only data stored on steam servers (including chat logs) which you have to worry about.

Partition your system: Linux for browsing, typing, etc. swindows for gaming and being raped...

Parent post is willing to sacrifice his liberty and privacy because not doing so will cut him off from games.

Can we all just be honest with each other and call this behavior an addiction already?