Steam (Officially) Comes To Chrome OS 24
An anonymous reader shares a report: This may feel like deja vu because Google itself mistakenly leaked this announcement a few days ago, but the company today officially announced the launch of Steam OS on Chrome OS. Before you run off to install it, there are a few caveats: This is still an alpha release and only available on the more experimental and unstable Chrome OS Dev channel. The number of supported devices is also still limited since it'll need at least 8GB of memory, an 11th-generation Intel Core i5 or i7 processor and Intel Iris Xe Graphics. That's a relatively high-end configuration for what are generally meant to be highly affordable devices and somewhat ironically means that you can now play games on Chrome OS devices that are mostly meant for business users. The list of supported games is also still limited but includes the likes of Portal 2, Skyrim, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Half-Life 2, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Stellaris, Civilization V, Fallout 4, Dico Elysium and Untitled Goose Game.
I think it's cool (Score:2)
Still, with Win 11 looking worse every day I'm really hoping for some viable alternatives. Macs are dead for gaming (and have been for a long time). Yeah, there's games you can play, but you're extremely limited (and they start at $700 for an entry level model where the equivalent PC is $600 and has better graphics and way more games available).
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I have a rather nice Dell XPS I got off ebay for a steal.
I have xubuntu on it, and have been playing elden ring through lutris + proton.
Is that sufficiently viable for you?
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More and more games work properly on Linux these days. And Linux is more likely to work properly on an older, cheaper, used laptop. There's really no solution for current AAA gaming but Windows, though. If you expect to play the games, you have to go where the games are.
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There's really no solution for current AAA gaming but Windows, though.
It's easier to find AA-powered devices [wikipedia.org].
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Mine all run on lipos, though the controllers run on AAs... except for the quads, their controller runs on a lipo too
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No irony there (Score:2)
ironically means that you can now play games on Chrome OS devices that are mostly meant for business users
Ever wondered why expensive business machines targeted at overpaid execs have gobs of power you'd expect to find on the machine running SolidWorks used by the mechanical engineer paid 10x less? Hint: it's not to run PowerPoint.
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Maybe it's changed since the days I had to help them with their devices. As those jobs start skewing to the next generation I could totally see execs worried about their FPS for Fortnite or Elden Ring. It'd be just as productive as the porn they currently watch.
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Putting the most pissed off machine possible in the hands of the execs means never having to tell them their computer won't run some software. Sometimes they want the slimmest or something instead, though. I've seen that.
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but they don't have the GPU to be good or drivers (Score:2)
but they don't have the GPU to be good or drivers for something like NVIDIA or ati in Chrome OS Flex
Disco Elysium (Score:2)
and a great game if you haven't played it.
artificially high reqs (Score:4, Interesting)
I feel those reqs are artificially high. I have a really old chromebook celes. (Samsung chromebook 3) It is currently loaded with xubuntu, but it totally can install and run steam just fine.
Note, this is the older, 2gb model.
The thing with those older chromebooks (assuming they are x86 based and not arm) is that the older intel integrated video just is not up to the task for anything besides real weak casual games, or VERY OLD 3D games from the early 2000s.
Prior to running straight linux on it, I used crouton to get a real linux userspace inside chromeos, and could run quite a lot of things with bog standard wine.
These days, Google is giving a limited linux userspace sandbox, which would be sufficient to install and run the linux version of Steam. One could then designate proton as the default for all windows games, and off they go.
The thing with real old chromebooks is really the often purposefully crippled internal storage, and the "No, we WILL NOT let you persistently mount the SDCard as storage!!" mantra Google has about wanting to force people into the google docs ecosystem, and into using google's cloud storage services.
It's real hard to install basically anything interesting into the teeny tiny 32gb eMMC storage in most low-end chromebooks.
(when I fully linuxed my chromebook, I used the full 32gb eMMC as /, then set the SDCard up as /home, which let me put a nice beefy 512gb sdcard in there, and keep all that user stuff on that. You just have to be aware of the fact that sdcard is very cheap (as in low quality) flash memory and it burns out surprisingly fast if you are not real aggressive on mitigation strategies. (which would be a whole other post.))
Anyway-- the specs that Google has given are way over-ambitious. Steam will run on WAY less than that.
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I wonder if the high minimum spec requirements are to account for it being alpha quality and/or unoptimized?
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It's probably because Iris Xe graphics are 2x as fast as 620UHD that was in previous gen. Look at the titles they're listing, those aren't new, but they did require real GPUs.
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Civilization V?
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I wonder if the high minimum spec requirements are to account for it being alpha quality and/or unoptimized?
I think it is because they are initially only supporting GPUs with Vulkan drivers.
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There is "incomplete" vulcan support for CherryView based intel graphics. I have a Samsung ATIV 9 with such garbage in it, and it can do proton, barely. (with some artifacts).
I dunno about the garbage in my celes.. Never tried DXVK or proton on that beast. I suppose I could dust it off and give it a whirl.
Just, if you look in the logs, the vulcan drivers complain mightily that they are incomplete when they initialize. Intel does not officially support those chips, but the community seems to have done a "
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I used to have a 16GB SATA M.2 SSD on my motherboard as it was cheap and I could have enough Linux on it to recover if Windows asplode, which it in fact came in handy for on a couple of occasions. It was a pull from a Chromebook quite some years ago. So at least some Chromebooks with little storage were upgradable.
Now I have a 512GB NVMe SSD which was a pull from a regular cheap laptop, which is 0-100% faster than my old 512GB SATA SSD (Samsung Evo 850) depending on the operation. I just couldn't justify sp
I don't have any love for google but anything that (Score:2)