Check out Bazzite. Works pretty well on Desktop in my opinion.
At this moment in time, Bazzite is just straight up a better experience than SteamOS. Fedora backend with rpm-ostree is way better than what Valve has going on. And for Steam Deck, GNOME just makes more sense for touch interfaces.
Yeah, I was puzzled why Valve chose KDE to be the default desktop for a touchscreen device. Ultimately though I figured they just wanted a Linux desktop that would be more familiar to Windows users.
I was puzzled why Valve chose KDE to be the default desktop for a touchscreen device.
The default software selection, especially when SteamOS 3.0 had launched, clearly showed that they picked a setup they wanted to use for themselves (my setup is heavily customized by now but I clearly remember VIM having been set as default text editor). If Valve was interested in Desktop Mode being primarily for touch use, they could go with Plasma Mobile instead of Plasma Desktop. Plain Gnome without any extension is not good to use as either desktop or handheld. The Gnome developers can’t even make up their mind which shell to use for touch devices because they literally have two competing ones (Phosh and Gnome Shell Mobile).
Bazzite is just straight up a better experience than SteamOS. Fedora backend with rpm-ostree is way better than what Valve has going on. And for Steam Deck, GNOME just makes more sense for touch interfaces.
Bazzite defaults to Plasma for Desktop Mode just as SteamOS. According to https://universal-blue.org/images/bazzite/installation/ Gnome is only the 4th installer choice.
I’ve been loving it on desktop, personally
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So what comes first: SteamOS for desktop or Half Life 3?
The temerity to repeat ‘soon’ for well over a year is one of Valve’s worst traits. One wonders if reflexively lying to customers is intentionally baked into their culture.
This right here is why they do like one interview a year, lmao.
What he actually said was “We’re hoping [it will be] soon”, but for whatever reason people’s reading comprehension skills go out the window whenever there is a Valve interview.
The reading of his intention is plain; regardless my curiosity stems from a similar interview that was issued before the Deck launched and not this particular conversation.
Back then advising “not anytime soon” would have set a fair expectation but Valve chose to serve pablum and continues to do so regardless of the number of interviews/communications that have been released in the past year alone.
I spent a few minutes going over old interviews and didn’t find anything insinuating that would be “soon”. Most I could find was:
We actually want to work with them to make sure that, if they want to use SteamOS or offer a SteamOS based alternative, that can be done
Once it’s widely available, not only are we excited to see other manufacturers making their own handheld PC gaming devices, we’re excited to see people make their own SteamOS machines which could include small PCs that they put next to their TV
I think it’s pretty silly to expect Valve to release SteamOS when it doesn’t even have a (immutable) package manager, among many other missing features.
Two years ago Valve advised it would be generally available shortly after launch. I find it less silly to expect a company to shoot straight with the consumer than it is to apologize on their behalf (parasocial creatures though we may be.)
Valve advised it would be generally available shortly after launch
Again… I can’t find where they said that, maybe post the quote?
I think Valve has good intentions and wants a lot of things done soon, but they just don’t have enough people on their Steam Deck team to get things done at the speed they want.
Yeah, and that’s probably why development for 3.5 has also been this slow. They were busy with the OLED model
Your guess has the right feel for me too. A lot of people were hungry for OLED and this is the trade off.
I’m just ready for Linux to grow. Maybe it is naive to think that one distro will carry us much further but with the proper solution I can easily imagine a lot of people dual booting their PCs soon.
