this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Now if Valve can just give us an up-to-date version of SteamOS for desktops...!
Valve won't directly support your desktop. I recommend trying out Universal Blue distributions like Bazzite-nvidia or ChimeraOS if you're on AMD graphics. This has worked well enough for me (Nvidia drivers still suck on most Linux distros).
I'm on Debian + GNOME right now, which works fine for me, but I plan on trying out Pop! OS in the next couple weeks. I've put off a long time because it's downstream of Ubuntu and I'm no longer a fan of Canonical's direction.
Probably have to wait till they have the official general version of steam os out first.
Depending on what the next product is, development might speed up.
Imo the largest thing holding back a desktop (or consolized) steam os is that a majority of the console space wants to be able to play multiplayer games, and the most popular ones have anti-cheat, which imo is the biggest hurdle valve must beat if they want the device to actually sell.
The big anti-cheat tools (BattleEye and EAC) are already compatible. The only remaining problems are a small number of developers that intentionally announced that they will be proactively blocking linux... like Bungie.
Not saying that its all in valves hands, but its a problem valve and the said companies need to discuss in the back room in order to get the ball rolling, regardless.
vr on linux needs to have better support as well, right now its just a huge yikes
its also sort of two faced as AMD's encoders specifically for wireless vr gameplay is typically less performant in terms of latency and quality compared to Nvidias. Given though valve does wired headsets, it's less of a problem as being wired fixes both problems, but still not be ideal for those using a quest on an AMD based linux system.
they should work reliably before we even look at wireless vr, which they are not rn
Why? Just install Steam and set it to run Big Picture Mode and you're done. I personally don't want a locked-down OS by Valve as my daily driver...
SteamOS is locked down?
Not really, you can run
sudo steamos-readonly disableto make it writeable, but that's not really advised.The way you're supposed to install software is through the Discover store, which puts it in the writeable portion of the filesystem (only system files are read-only). That's a bit of a different way of the system than most desktop Linux distributions.
Also, you get whatever updates Valve supplies, whereas desktop Linux distributions will generally provide more packages and often more frequent updates. So your selection of system packages (the stuff that would go in that read-only filesystem) would be more limited than with a regular desktop distribution. Valve is probably only going to supply drivers for their products and whatnot, so you're going to be stuck with whatever Valve chooses to support.
But there's really nothing special about SteamOS. All of the important stuff is either packaged with Steam on desktop or submitted upstream (e.g. kernel and driver improvements), so you'll be getting that with any reasonably up-to-date distro. Save yourself the headache and just pick a mainstream distro and auto start Big Picture Mode on boot. Then you can use it for whatever you want and not be limited by whatever Valve wants to support.