24h ago

Linux as the true Trojan!

Alt text: Trojan Horse meme, Steam Deck bringing Linux to Windows gamers

Source

131 comments

It's working, I know people who don't even own a steam deck who are considering swapping to SteamOS once it's available for desktops.
I've told them they don't need to wait and can get a similar or better experience with distros that are already available, but steam's name is gold for a lot of people and it seems like the only option they're really interested in.
- Knowing that with Steams' support of Linux through proton means a vast amount of games just work out of the box was enough for me to switch to EndeavourOS.
  I've been on it for a week, and I'm so sold.
  
  Yeah, I had mostly stayed away from arch based distros after having a really bad time with Manjaro. But hearing the Steam Deck's version of SteamOS was switching to an Arch base got me to try Endeavour on my desktop, and I've been using it ever since.
  
  Manjaro has been one of the worst Arch-based distros I have used so far. It broke constantly, where normal Arch wouldn't. Also, it's just not a good look when their website certificate runs out and they tell users to turn back the clock a few days until they fix it (archive link, changed to this). Also it expired again a year later (archive)
  
  Same. (Are you me?)
  
  I am indeed you. You, or rather we, are having a mental breakdown due to the tumultuous journey of installing and using an Arch based Linux distro.
  Jk, I just hit install and it worked. Pretty nifty. Don't forget to eos-update!
- While this would be great, it's also a little unfortunate, since the general desktop experience on Steam Deck is IIRC currently a bit below other comparable distros, and I'd hate for people to get an incomplete picture of what the Linux desktop experience can be like. Hopefully the time that's led up to the wider release of SteamOS has been spent on getting that desktop experience up to snuff.
  
  Desktop experience is just KDE, only part that I'm worried will trip people up is it being immutable. Usually that's fine, but occasionally you run into an issue where something doesn't work because of flatpak sandboxing, and it can be confusing how to overcome it.
  
  I discovered if you go down the rabbit hole of nix you can install and use anything you want through nix and it just installs works and is permanent unlike someways of using pacman
  
  Distrobox is also a good option for installing stuff without flatpak.
  
  And there's stuff that just can't be made into a Flatpak. Someone mentioned in another thread that they wanted to use Waydroid on their deck, Bazzite has it built in but Steam OS doesn't - maybe there's a way to layer it on SteamOS but that's sort of tricky to do (idk I don't have a Steam Deck but I run Bazzite on my laptop).
  
  https://github.com/ryanrudolfoba/SteamOS-Waydroid-Installer
  Not disagreeing with your point, but at least for waydroid there's a specific SteamOS installer available.

131 comments