Steam has now officially stopped supporting Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.::95.57 percent of surveyed Steam users are already on Windows 10 and 11, with nearly 2 percent of the remainder on Linux and 1.5 percent on Mac — so we may be talking about fewer than 1 percent of users on these older Windows builds. Older versions of MacOS will also lose support on February 15th, just a month and a half from now. Correction: It’s macOS 10.13 and 10.14 that are losing support. Not macOS period.
Especially if you’re not gonna play stuff that the anticheat locks you out from, the experience is great. As other commenters have said, ProtonDB.com has resources for how well games on steam run under Proton / On Linux.
Although, I would recommend Nobara Linux over Chimera OS due to a lack of experience with Proton and other gaming-related tools (as in, Chimera developers’ lack of experience). Nobara Linux comes from the same developer as Proton-GE (GloriousEggroll). Proton is the tool that Valve developed to run Windows games pretty much seemlessly, and Proton-GE adds extra features and patches on-top of it that can help support more games or get the slightest extra bit of performance out of Proton. Nobara Linux extends this concept to the entire OS, with a stable Fedora base that gets a major update every ~6 months.
Nobara also consitently outperforms other Linux Distributions and even Windows regularly.
(This doesn’t mean that you don’t get updates for 6 months, just that major releases, e.g from 39 to 40 happen every ~6 months)
Ooh, I’ll look into that! I was interested in Chimera because of some articles and videos I’ve seen which were praising its similarities to Steam OS. I liked booting up into Steam directly via the controller like it’s just another console, but having the freedom to use it as a PC. And it seemed popular enough that if I hit a snag I could probably find somebody out there who had the same issue and already found and posted a fix. Plus continuing support, which is something I learned is not the case for HoloISO. I guess I was looking for the closest thing to Steam OS which is Arch based, so I thought I had to run an Arch Linux to have a good console-like UI/UX.