Being a tech journalist, hell, even simply being a PC gamer in 2025, implies that it’s important to settle for that each time you hear from a {hardware} firm about some new product they’re releasing, or function they’re including, it’ll nearly solely be one thing to do with AI. Whether or not immediately, not directly, tangentially, or simply plain pointlessly.
So, thanks Valve, for providing up three new items of Steam {hardware} this week that made not one point out of the initialism de jour: AI.
It is not even prefer it’s simply been this 12 months, both. Ever since ChatGPT grabbed individuals’s collective basal ganglia on the tail finish of 2022, the swell of AI-ness being added to every thing attainable (and infrequently irrelevant) in tech has exponentially elevated. Each occasion, each launch, each present has been tailor-made round simply what stage of AI-ification the corporate in query has been in a position to jam (or faux it has) into no matter it’s they’re displaying off.
CES and Computex ever since have been ‘dropped at you…’ or ‘powered by…’ AI. And each sales space with out finish has needed to plaster these two letters throughout them. Graphics playing cards and CPUs at the moment are being bought to us on the advantages they will carry to all of the AI issues we do daily (are you able to title one outdoors of upscaling and body gen?), and Home windows has determined that it is now an agentic working system.
I am not saying I do not ever use AI; I really like me some DLSS and Body Technology, Photoshop has develop into simpler than ever for my job, and Gemini’s been making me HTML desk code on the common. I simply do not need to have it jammed down my throat at each flip.
So it is immensely refreshing that the Steam Controller has no AI button to name up some little cutesy G-Man inside SteamOS to ask ‘Would you want assist with that?’ The Steam Machine, with its 16 GB RAM and eight GB VRAM quotient, is not going to be housing the most recent native LLMs out of the field, and the Steam Body is not filling your eyeballs with AI slop as a default setting.
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If Microsoft actually goes to be pursuing the present trajectory to make Home windows 11 an AI-forward OS, then I am glad we have got Valve making PC gaming on Linux genuinely viable.
I am not saying I need to soar ship to SteamOS proper now—I truly had a greater time taking part in with Bazzite in desktop mode on the Framework Desktop than attempting to jam SteamOS on handhelds that actually ought to be suitable by now—however the work it is put in with Proton (and now with FEX) is breaking PC gaming away from Home windows extra successfully than ever earlier than.
In equity, Microsoft is beholden to shareholders, and for those who’re in tech proper now, you are going to be underneath immense strain to ship a slice of the billions being spent on AI again to your traders or face stern questions as to why not. Does not imply we’ve got to love it as an end-user, although.
So, in order for you an working system and a PC only for gaming, and perhaps for work, AND DEFINITELY NOT FOR ANY AI SHENANIGANS, then a easy Linux distro goes to swimsuit you and I a complete lot higher.
The considerably inevitable caveat to all that is you’re nonetheless going to be locked out of a few of the largest video games with Linux. Fortnite, CoD, and Battlefield 6 aren’t going to work on Linux—perhaps ever—as a result of Epic has no want to profit Steam by fixing up its anticheat software program, and Activision and EA must make its personal one as strong as attainable.
Nobody likes cheats, and no developer or writer desires to see their on-line sport get murdered by cheaters driving legit avid gamers out, so kernel-level anti-cheat software program goes to be right here till somebody finds a greater manner that may embody Linux distros.
However, screw it, I am notoriously anti-social, so multiplayer gaming isn’t any promote for me in any respect. Not having to listen to one other firm exec. extol the virtues of no matter AI MacGuffin they’ve jammed into their new factor, nonetheless, is a very huge promote.
