With the successful launch of the Steam Deck, SteamOS 3 has quickly become the most popular distro among linux gamers. Steam Hardware & Software Survey
With the upcoming launch of the desktop version ISO, it will only gain more popularity with linux desktop users, with it’s versatility as a normal desktop and having a gaming focus.
I assume that from the Unity game developers subset that use linux, most are also gamers and interested in SteamOS 3.
As SteamOS 3 is not a hobbyist distro, but a distro developed and supported by Valve, one of the largest entities in the gaming industry, I believe they could provide support for developing Unity for their platform.
As supporting SteamOS 3 would likely mean using flatpack as the packaging format, it could ease the Unity in-house developers burdens as they would be decoupled from the base OS packages for dependencies and users wouldn’t need workarounds like with Ubuntu 2204 for example. Flatpack has already become or is quickly becoming the de-facto modern packaging format for linux as it makes things easier for developers and users alike.
Please Unity, reach out to Valve about targeting SteamOS 3 as a supported platform.
My personal situation is that I have tried developing with Unity on linux using the unsupported distro that I prefer for gaming, but it results in frequent system crashes. So recently I started dual booting into Windows just for Unity development. Switching between OS’ for different activities is a chore and has definitely cut down my motivation and time used for game dev.
I will be switching to SteamOS 3 when Valve releases the ISO for desktop users and I hope I could start developing with Unity there.
I’m developing on a supported distro ubuntu 2020.04 and never have any issues, currently porting a game to the steam deck. I make Linux builds that I can play locally or upload to steam for testing on the deck…works really well.
It great that the supported systems work, but that distribution is two years old and as such I don’t want to run it as my daily driver, and I don’t like booting up another OS just for one App.
I’m advocating that they would also support SteamOS when it ships to desktops, because that distro will have propably the largest user base in the near future, active development and could be used for both daily driving and development work by many.
But it also makes sense to decouple your application dependencies from the OS as much as possible. It would give the developers more freedom to develop their app in their own pace.
Definitely makes sense if it becomes a thing, it has a good chance of becoming the number linux gaming distro as you say…
For now I would be happy with a “Build and Run” on steam deck option… =D
On Mac OS I always lag a year with their updates to avoid problems and ubuntu 2022 LTS is only about half a year old now… so it would be the fastest OS upgrade I’ve ever done if support for it would arrive all of a sudden
