Steam OS

So I just played Lost Coast natively on Steam OS.

It was a not-so-good experience. I'd say it was chugging along at 15 or less FPS the whole time. Felt like shit.

 

I played it on Windows on the same machine and it was as good as could be, so hardware is out.

Was this all on Steam OS? Are there optimization errors? Are most of the X hundred or so games for Linux on Steam like this? If so, that's pretty disappointing.

Could have been drivers.

It was a 7850K APU. I kinda just figured Linux took care of my driver needs for me.

Is that not the case?

There are a lot of factors that can cause that:

1. It's not a native game, but a game ported with a wrapper. That pretty much kills performance, mostly because the wrappers are not open source, but proprietary, because of DRM and stuff... That's easily solved, just install the Windows version in wine, and it will work much better. The problem with SteamOS is that it's not representative of a real linux install, it's a contraption based on linux by Valve to serve Valve's interests, not to serve the users' interests. SteamOS is just a software console like Windows, it's much better to just install the steam client for linux on a bleeding edge standard linux distro like Manjaro, Sabayon or OpenSuSE.

2. Valve has nerfed the game. This is something that Valve does when it sees that the linux version of a game runs better than the Windows version. A big example is CS:GO, but there are other examples. Sometimes, it's also nerfed by the studio that has developed it if that isn't Valve.

3. If you have relatively recent hardware, DO NOT USE STEAMOS, period!!!! It's based on Debian Stable, and it has a really old kernel that simply cannot make any hardware that has been released in the last 2 years or so work like it should. It's as simple as that. It's much better to install the Steam client for linux (preferably in an unprivileged lxc, because it's not nice software, it's spyware just like all other commercial software) in a standard bleeding edge linux install. It's also faster to install Steam on linux that way, because you don't have the problemsolving and the slow install, a standard linux distro installs and updates really fast, and community repos have the latest version of the Steam client, that works better than SteamOS, which hasn't been updated in a while.

It's AMD drivers. They have caused problems in the latest build.

SteamOS is waaaaaay too old of a kernel to work with AMD APU's!!!

It will just never work as it should, you'll never get good performance. The bloody SteamOS kernel is more than two years old! Even if you install proprietary GPU drivers (which SteamOS does), your APU itself is not properly supported by the very old Debian Stable base.

Install Manjaro or OpenSuSE, then install the Steam Client. You can still run it like SteamOS in Big Picture mode, but you don't have to, you'll also have access to all the other functionality, unlike SteamOS, and it will work much better and much faster.

Latest steam build has kernel from October included with it. Sure it's not the latest but it's not super old like you make it out to be. Now if they would include an option to not include their own run time versions when steam updates so I can use the ones from arch would be awesome.

So the 7850K APU uses the Radeon R7 graphics. Its comes under the sea islands set of cards. drivers development for these set of cards is (relatively) recent and changing.

Im not sure how steam os does updates but if it based on Debian stable, it may not be up to date. Its potentially at least 1 kernel version behind.

But the kernel isnt the only important part for graphics. Mesa is as well, based on the last release assuming it had up to date mesa at the time, its now 6 versions behind, that include a large set of changes.

If its actually running the right drivers you should be able to run the following commands (as root) and get similar results:

https://gist.github.com/Eden744/52dbc85531a131376e38

(this forum sucks for formatting :/ )

I agree with Zoltan on this, for a steam box, your best bet is to run a normal, more up to date OS (like openSUSE), and install steam. Steam OS is just Debian with steam anyway. 

Why would you want to do that?

Just install the Steam client on Arch! Keep it simple, just stay away from anything downloaded from some site, including from Valve lolz... do you really trust Valve to be even remotely capable of properly maintaining an open source style repository? Lolz... they are Windows devs, they have no clue about linux! The only guy at Valve that I would even trust to maintain linux targeted software, was fired in 2013...

The alternative for him would be to exit the SteamOS big picture mode to return to the Debian desktop and install a newer kernel. no harm, no foul. I did that when one of my wireless adapters did not work with that older kernel. Hopefully when SteamOS launches it will be with an updated kernel. Also, make sure to install the AMD omega drivers. Word is that AMD drivers are now beating the Nvidia Crap ones on Linux. If you dont like Debian stable, why not install the dreaded ubuntu 14.04 or Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 which does use the newer kernels? Then install Steam on top of that. Unless you are experienced, stay away from Arch since Arch is much more bleeding edge than one of the more stable distros.

It looks like Steam OS actually uses an older kernel that Debian Stable ... why! 3.10 as far as i can tell, its not wonder people have problems with it.

To update the kernel, they would need to add the Debian repos, (debian testing if you wanted to be reasonably up to date). At the end of the day a better distro would be the better option in my opinion.

The free software drivers are very good, but yeah, if theres still problems you could try the catalyst drivers. These are going to be replaced eventually though.

This is just due to the current "in development cycle" with SteamOS. As it's still in beta, Griffais' kernel commits aren't important and valve has been focusing more on plug'n'play hardware (controllers and such). Which are working great btw

You can bet a more recent kernel with audio, OpenGL, GPU, patchsets etc etc, will be added to the Alchemist repository on RC.

Until then I wouldn't bother with SteamOS.

 

I've never before had a thread on Tek Syndicate forums be so responsive. You guys are great.

I'm sort of -extremely new- to Linux. Hell, installing SteamOS was an accomplishment to me.

Gonna try the various things posted here and see what happens.

As a side question, what software do you use to mount ISOs to USB drives? I've never had success installing a distro over USB and just burn a DVD. I feel like a luddite.

If you are doing it in Linux use the dd command. 

In Windows use win32diskimager or Rufus.

> I feel like a luddite.

Don't. Using windows to do those kind of things is always a little bit of a pain. if you have steam os installed already use dd. 

(download the iso you want to use, and insert your usb)

Open the CLI.  type: sudo fdisk -l

This will list all the disks and partitions installed, the usb is usually the last on on the list (if you only have one disk, it would be /dev/sdb)

Then use dd to copy the iso to the usb like this: sudo dd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M && sync

(assuming your disk is sdb, change /dev/sdb to whatever your usb is)

fdisk: is a file system utility, to learn more you can type: man fdisk

dd: copys a file at a low level basicaly (a file can by anything, disk, file, part of a file, partition, etc). man dd for more info

(use q to exit a man page)

Why on earth would Valve ever nerf one of their own games? What do they have to gain from that? And also, isn't the source engine itself ported to linux? If so, wouldn't HL2 be running natively?

     ..."what software do you use to mount ISOs to USB drives?"

This usually depends on the purpose.

If I just need a simple bootable EFI flash drive then I use 7zip to mount and extract the ISO to USB.

Then I add a "boot" flag with Gparted or whatever and viola - a few clicks and you're done :P