Solus is now a gaming platform as well, after the developers managed to finally make Steam work on their platform.
You might think that adding Steam to the repositories of a Linux distribution might be a simple task and you would be right. The problems appear when you try running a 32-bit Steam application on a 64-bit operating system.
The developers have been working on this problem for the better part of last week, and they finally managed to get Steam running. Now, if they could only do some work instead of playing games on their newly discovered passion.
Almost all of the modern Linux distributions now support Steam, and it would have been a weird launch for Solus, an operating system that didn't allow users to play their favorite games.
It's also a testament for the importance of Steam in today's world. Who would have believed just five years ago that Linux devs and maintainers will have to put in extra time so that users get access to a free app that offers other paid applications? At the end of the day, games are mostly proprietary apps and running them on Linux systems has been frowned upon for a long time. That's not the case anymore.
Linux is becoming a gaming platform
The transformation of the Linux systems into a gaming platform is a slow process, but it's happening. It might not be all that obvious now, but if we take a look at the past three years since Steam was released, we can see that it's a really different landscape.
Launching a new operating system without Steam support is no longer conceivable right now, and the Solus developers had to take care of this requirement before the official launch, which is still planned before Christmas.
You can download the latest Solus build and give it a spin. Make sure to upgrade if you want the latest packages and features.