Valve announce Linux based gaming OS for 2014

[blindbox]

AMD drivers works quite well, tho i have not tried 'em for gaming

I tried linux myself. Drivers work pretty well, don't see any bugs, I tried stepmania but I need to try more games. AMD driver problems are honestly the least of the issue in linux. There was some sort of tearing when moving windows around, unlike Window's impressive DWM which is silky smooth but I think this is the desktop manager's problem rather than the drivers themselves.

Here are the problems that Valve needs fixing in linux. I used Crunchbang for testing. I admit that this is not the most widely used linux distro, so I'll try Ubuntu next, as that's the majority.

1) Audio is a pain in the ass to switch (an understatement, it's a lot worse). I had to restart a few times and go into a few command lines, cfg files and a lot of googling. A normal user would've been clueless. Nice thing is though, they support native audio duplication, meaning you can play the same audio on multiple sound cards at once.
2) Multimonitor is a bloody NIGHTMARE. If you switch between single and double monitor frequently (i.e. laptops).. don't.. just.. don't. No auto-fallback that windows does. Nothing whatsoever. Though, this might be desktop manager dependent. This is not driver dependent.
3) Plug and play-ability. This is related to 1). Plugged my USB DAC in, no way to switch.. had to go into some command lines and cfg files, and restart linux.
4) Linux not giving the game the maximum performance, as mentioned, my OpenGL performance on a weak laptop was not as good as in Windows on the same laptop. The next hardest thing I found to do in linux is running a game in full screen. Pretty annoying. Game I tested with is Stepmania btw, and they run in OpenGL
5) Lack of fallback. This is related to 2). I managed to kill my linux installation by switching between two and one monitor back and forth. Now the desktop is rendering for two screens although I have only one screen plugged in (the laptop screen). What does that mean? It means I can't see the freaking login screen and can't log in.
6) Permission problems. IDK if this is related to an app permission or what but apparently a user-run application can't seem to edit files in the ~/.whateversettings folder. It reads settings from there, but it tries to write in a read-only superuser-only folder apparently. This might be application specific but Windows seems to handle all this legacy better.
7) Buggy file manager. Again, this is app related but if Valve really want this to go well, they have to ensure that their QC team is very, very detailed. I can't even drag and drop copy. Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V didn't work either. Right click copy, right click paste didn't work either! (options are there)

I'm going to try out Ubuntu next and report my results I understand Crunchbang is somewhat a minority, hence take this with a grain of salt. This time, I'll take a majority and post my test results. Though, you see, this is why I use Windows despite myself being a power user, and very, very capable of running linux.

That ends my experience with linux for 8 hours straight. Again, going to try ubuntu next, so I'll have a lot more hours of experience with desktop linux (I only deal with linux in Android, servers or compilation VMs).

If Valve could fix all this with SteamOS, I'm in. Funny thing is, I wasn't bothered about the inability of using windows app. I was more bothered by the fact that a lot of standard stuff is pretty damn broken. My list of problems probably won't matter for Steam Machines because they're more like consoles rather than a real computer.