SteamOS 3.7.0 Preview brings the 'beginnings of support for non-Steam Deck handhelds'
SteamOS 3.7.0 Preview brings the 'beginnings of support for non-Steam Deck handhelds'
I genuinely can’t wait for the day I can finally drop Windows altogether and boot directly in to steam os on my gaming pc’s / laptops and handhelds.
Windows becomes more of a bloated mess every update. Literally the only thing I use it for these days is launch games.
Bring it on Steam !
I think that if you’re looking for a Linux distribution that is as polished as the Steam Deck, then SteamOS on desktop might not be the right play. SteamOS will probably (rightfully) be developed solely for handheld, low-power devices, and won’t work unless you’re using the specific APUs that they’ll include drivers for.
If that sort of streamlined experience interests you, Bazzite has very similar goals to SteamOS (good OOTB gaming experience, safe updates etc.), except that they also target wide hardware compatibility. Other gaming distros exist, but I’m probably just not aware of them.
You can… currently.
I’m running bazzite on both my handheld and my PC…
Other than a mild annoyance at having to manually changing the resolution on my PC to get remote play to work properly, it’s been great.
Check out sunshine/moonlight. It takes some tinkering but it runs better than remote play and can be configured to auto change your resolution on connect and disconnect. There's also a plug-in for decky as well.
Honest question: what's stopping you currently? For me, I kept Windows around purely for playing certain VR games that didn't run well on Linux. The last Windows update fucked up my video config, so I reluctantly decided to try SteamVR on Linux again.
I'll admit my hopes weren't particular high given me last shot at it but holy shit pretty much every VR game I tried worked as well as they had in Windows (Angry Birds develop a weird controller jitter after about 30 minutes but I've had that in Windows too).
The only extra steps I had to do to get stuff working was install "SteamVR experimental" and one of the Linux utilities to set my GPU to always run in performance mode when gaming (not necessary for everything but jealous with some).
For non-VR, most AAA titles also work great. The main issue I've seen is certain DRM for non-Steam multiplayer games can be a bit finicky, but that's getting better too and it's been awhile since I've run afoul of those.
Looks like nothing at all…. I know when I looked back a year or so ago people deterred me due to Nvidia drivers not being well supported.
Had a read up on Bazzite last night and it looks just the ticket ! :)
Thanks for the reply (and thanks to everyone that responded). Going to install on my desktop, laptop and handhelds as of tomorrow :)
You can still drop windows and boot to KDE (the desktop is based on it for the steam deck) :)
Apparently SteamOS doesn't have plans for large scale desktop support. I've been using cachyos for the last 4 months while playing games on my NTFS Windows steam libraries and it has been fine. On Nvidia even.
Hopefully it'll get big enough they peripheral makes will finally make Linux native apps for their stuff. It's one of the biggest hurdles to me moving completely to Linux
Yes! My body is ready!
