For very long years I was forced to actually use Windows 7 to play some of my favorite games like Left4dead2 and Metro Last light. Recently, after having upgraded our rigs using SSD Disks for the OS, and making a plain new Win7 installation and fine-tuned for gaming which actually does not permit any anti-virus to be installed, I thought I had very fast systems for the games.
Alas, as for many windows games, I rarely pass 3 hours without a crash in high complex environment. It simply just crashes.
Doing some research, it averred that some drivers do not work together. On my wife's rig by example, Bioshock and Metro wouldn't run because of an incompatibility of the Audio-board drivers. After buying her a Creative 100 Euro audio card, these games became playable but still crashed. What is it, that under windows, and ENTERPRISE supposed to be OS, you spend hours fine-tuning, updating, scanning the system to get rid of one bug that makes a game crash ? Fed up ...

As I said, the rig's are upgraded with an SSD, and this time I split the disks to also have SteamOS installed on them. i5 2.7GHz QCore CPU's, 8GB of Ram, GTC660Ti Graphic boards, 250GB SSD for the OS, and 2x1TB HD for each OS's data-storage.
Steam OS boots in a matter of 10secs max. and is ready for selecting the game. After configuring the audio (which is at max-level by default), you start the game (like Metro last light or recently Metro 2033 Redux) and you're in awwwww... the game just runs. There are no visible differences to the Windows version (except for the occasional usual game crash). I spent last week-end on a 8 hours session. Not even one crash. Not one time only did the system had to load the data (which under Windows results in the typical waiting/stuttering especially in fierce battle moments where one can't afford it). Loading time between maps is practically non existing...


In fact, if I put it down as it is now - SteamOS not only accelerates all load-times of the game, is rock solid, does not harass you with all the updates that take ages, does not ask you to do a security scan of the disks etc. It just runs, fast and nice ! Thank you Valve ! for bringing out this OS. Now - all we need are some more AAA titles so I can dump my windows partition completely (which I must admit is a waste of good storage-space)!