I really hope they drop a full steam OS release again soon. I’d love to build a gaming tower around it. Might settle for bazzite but I’d like to do steam OS tbh
I honestly don’t want to be tinkering all the time. The steamdeck is pretty much my limit for tinkering with gaming these days. Kids do that to you lol
I imagine it is great but I just don’t want to have to troubleshoot my operating system, games, and hardware. It is probably reasonable to assume that a stable steam OS will be more consistent for me. Maybe I’m underestimating bazzite but in my experience regular Linux users (I have some experience but hardly an expert/daily user) underestimate how frequently one has to tinker with their OS’s.
I use Linux every day and I never have to tinker with it, nor did it need any tinkering to install. An extremely tinker-free experience especially compared to modern Windows.
I feel your anecdotes are at best outdated. Desktop Linux has come along way.
I get people bristle when someone says linux has a little friction, but as someone who does use Elementary and Mint from time to time I just don't get how people can say my view is "outdated" when all one has to do is pick up a console or Mac to see the difference. How many times have we seen folks troubleshooting wifi card drivers on forums? It is not some massive gap, using Linux is not some herculean feat, but surely we can agree that most people would never call it plug and play.
Linux is a great experience these days but you do have to tinker sometimes. You have to mess with drivers and settings and command line. It may be minimal for people comfortable with computers but it's not as friction-less as you're claiming.
I think you're both kind of wrong and right on this. Contemporary linux distributions really don't require tinkering anymore for most cases, yet it's also true that sometimes there is tinkering required. The reason why this is true, yet I don't blame Linux for it, is because it is hardware dependent.
If you buy hardware that is compatible with Linux, then you won't really have to tinker (at least, any more than you would with any other OS, for example, tweaking resolutions, etc). Unfortunately, it's newer hardware that typically requires the tinkering. If you don't want to tinker, I would recommend going with generation n -1 or even n -2. If you go with the latest and greatest, expect to have some tinkering required.
Distro choice does of course matter a great deal. I've been using Fedora as primary OS now for many years and absolutely love it, and it's what I recommend to most people. Ubuntu and derivatives are good of course, though the older kernels do often decrement the generation of hardware. For example, Fedora on n-1 is going to be pretty good. Ubuntu might still lack some support at that age, so should go with n-2 or n-3 to be safe.
The plan is to build a modern PC and the fact that people have to adjust their hardware decisions in such a way (downgrading/using older components) to accommodate linux kind of reiterates my point IMO. If I was installing windows this wouldn’t remotely be a consideration. Though I certainly don’t want windows, it is a notable difference.
As someone that has gamed an equal amount on Windows 10 and Linux, I think you're blowing things a little out of proportion. Windows is a tinker timesink too if you want to uninstall Candy Crush and Xbox Game Bar, disable all telemetry and ads, or even just get a good version of Java installed for Minecraft. Windows can "just work" for some games, but for others it's a nightmare to get running. Another good example is the Fallout games, which have a decades-old bug that crashes the game if you alt-tab away from it. On WINE this bug can be fixed by simply running the game fullscreen in a virtual window. The flexibility is excellent and saves me from trying to inject a DLL file just to get proper borderless fullscreen to work the way it should.
My big takeaway is this; if you are comfortable using the Steam Deck to play games and install software, you will not struggle to get Linux to run games. Pretty much anything that isn't a gaming laptop is going to have some form of support, and even the famously crappy Nvidia drivers were recently updated to support Wayland and other new Linux protocols. Now more than ever before, using Linux to game is probably easier than getting the equivalent experience on Windows.
You compared Linux to Mac a few comments back -- how is that anything but choosing specific hardware to accommodate your OS?
by this standard Mac OS is still a hobby OS because it can't be installed on random hardware.
No, it isn't too much to ask that you make sure the hardware you buy works with the OS you intend to run. If you find Linux fiddly in the modern era it's solely because of this.
You only have to avoid the newer hardware if you don't want to check for compatibility. It's just a rule of thumb to increase your odds of success because most people don't want to investigate every component. If you check for compatibility and it's supported, then you can use the newer hardware. I would have thought that was obvious, but clearly not.
It also matters how far along in the product life cycle it is. If it came out last week, it may not be supported yet. If we're nearing the refresh point then it may be supported.
> When I buy a Mac or a windows machine I don’t have to purposely avoid newer hardware to ensure it works.
But you are also comparing apples and oranges (pun incidental) and shifting the goal posts. If you buy a Mac, then you aren't building a gaming PC, which is what the rule of thumb pertains to. You're buying a complete system that has been integrated and tested. You can do the same thing with a Linux machine from various vendors (Lenovo, Dell, Framework, among others), in which case you don't have to do any investigatory work because (just like with the Mac) it's been done for you by the manufacturer.
Bazzite is atomic and image-based, so it is designed to play your games out-of-the-box without any additional configuration, and instead of package updates you are pulling the new image that's built and tested by Bazzite. From a design perspective it's extremely similar to SteamOS.
Yeah same. I didn't want to install all of those i386 library versions either. But I've found the flatpak steam client to be wonderfully easy and maintenance free, which let's me use my computer for other things, too.
The link you referenced just says that the Debian packages are irrelevant to the current codebase, as used on the Steam Deck. It doesn't say anything about the Steam Deck being the only hardware that will ever run it.
Some of the recent SteamOS release notes have included references to Asus's handheld, which has reinforced the community expectation that it will eventually be available as a distribution you can install on 3rd party hardware. If you go read interviews from Valve employees (Lawrence Yang comes to mind), I believe they've publicly stated that after the OLED shipped, they wanted to start focusing on porting to other devices.
> If you go read interviews from Valve employees (Lawrence Yang comes to mind), I believe they've publicly stated that after the OLED shipped, they wanted to start focusing on porting to other devices.
If so, it is kind of bizarre they haven't reached out to the Bazzite maintainers at all.
In general, it seems like it would save them a tonne of effort if they'd switch from a bespoke Arch-immutable spin to making a spin of Silverblue, something that has been meant to be immutable from the beginning.
They already have a system that works exactly how they want it. They already rebased from Debian to Arch to get it there. They have enough Linux staff on contract to build and maintain that system.
Maybe Bazzite is closer to their goals; maybe it's not. It's certainly not a slam dunk that the best thing they could do is throw away the thing they've been building for years to join a community project on GitHub that's trying to clone that thing.
Upstream Kde is now making an arch based immutable distro too. As steamOS is already using kde and arch, maybe once the kde distro is release, steam will rebase on that instead. Also Valve is now funding Archlinux so they are commited to arch.
But I haven't heard anything one way or the other in a while. But as it stands, they have stated that they plan to do a general release. Unless there is another source where they say they changed their mind?
ChimeraOS is a clone or fork or something of SteamOS. Works great on AMD tiny PC hardware. can't really comment past that. I found the keyboard and mouse setup kinda jarring and just threw windows back on...for now.
As noted in a sibling comment, Valve has released an open-source compositor (`gamescope`), which is what presents Steam as a console-esque UI on the Steam Deck. Using gamescope to present Steam, you can make an arbitrary Linux feel indistinguishable from a Deck.
There are many gaming distributions (e.g. Bazzite, Jovian/NixOS, Nobara, Chimera…) that take this approach.
They're usually just standard desktop distributions (Fedora or NixOS) with gaming packages configured. There is a Russian teenager who's trying to cobble together a SteamOS clone using as many Valve packages as possible. His project is called HoloISO.
No, he's talking about the compositor which has several gaming related features which then runs the Big Picture version of Steam for UI to select and manage games.
They're right that the compositor is gamescope, it's made by Valve and it has game-related features, but the person 3 comment-levels above me did seem to be conflating gamescope with the Big Picture UI. You can absolutely use gamescope and not use Big Picture mode at all, lots of people using Wayland do so by wrapping their games in a call to gamescope.
Same. I have been toying with an idea that I want to turn into a business. I know there are 3rd party attempts to replicate Valve’s stuff, but I would rather use something sanctioned by Valve.
There's a lot more to SteamOS than "it ran `apt install steam -y` for you". Even just having things like Gamescope running out of the box (which is more than just `apt install gamescope`) is a huge amount of headache set aside. Plus the guarantee when it doesn't work it's because of a bug rather than something you did or some incompatibility with your exact distro setup.
>guarantee when it doesn't work it's because of a bug rather than something you did or some incompatibility with your exact distro setup.
Flatpak fixes this problem. You don't need gamescope unless for stuff like scaling. The only few times you need to fiddle with anything on desktop is changing proton version or adding a launch variable from protondb.com (just like on steamdeck)
Gamescope does a lot more than scaling. HDR, better framerate limiting, non-rgb gamut handling, isolating "fullscreen" games, shader effect loading, and probably more I'm forgetting. Flatpak let's you run the Steam app itself correctly, nothing more. These "you only need to fiddle when" are exactly what add up and create frustration between users on different systems just wanting to play a game instead of read a manual/guide to find which "few tweaks" they each need to do to get the same experience as SteamOS would give them.
HDR will work soon work everywhere on Wayland by default.
You seem to think steam on Desktop Linux is somehow different from steam on steamdeck Linux. Like I said in my previous post, the only "fiddling" you need to do is copy pasting launch commands and choosing a different Proton version from a drop down _just_like_on_steamdeck.
Bazzite has gamescope running out of the box, and other distributions probably have it too.
It's also an immutable distribution, like SteamOS (except it's based on Fedora Silverblue instead of Arch) so there is no "incompatibility with your exact distro setup": you have the exact same distro setup as every single Bazzite user.
I like console gaming because it just works. I sit down on my couch, I turn on my controller, and I’m back in my game in under 10 seconds. The series S has honestly been a fantastic purchase for me despite the many drawbacks.
PC gaming is very enticing but we all know that’s simply not how it goes down. I would love to build a PC that is literally just discord and Steam. I want to run it in big picture mode for the most part and treat it more or less like a console.
I have really enjoyed my steam deck and it has fit that desired role pretty well. But obviously it is just not that powerful. It’s impressive for what it is, but for me it’s basically a great indie game machine with the occasional AAA option that is tolerable. A well-built machine with that kind of UX (minus the known idiosyncrasies of the deck) would be fantastic.
To answer your question more directly:
Most Linux distros do not offer this either. Bazzite is the closest I’ve seen.
