Alt text: Trojan Horse meme, Steam Deck bringing Linux to Windows gamers
Oh my god! I thought I bought a gaming handheld but i bought… communism!
Fuck, if it’s easy to mod games and run script extenders, I’ll be in-Stalin it this week.
I replied one too deep. Fuck.
I don’t understand the comparisons people make between OSS and comunism. Comunism is a flavor of old-world authoritarianism, based upon the idea that mankind is incapable of choosing the right thing, so the right choice is instead mandated by law. OSS’s emhasis on freedom, choice, and the lack of any kind of governing authrorty or social dogma, as well as the inherent trust in the majority public to choose the right (to donate or contribute) has a lot more in common with liberalism than comunism.
It’s a joke because Bill Gates once called it that. Nobody actually thinks that other than some tech bros that are high from huffing their own farts.
Firstly: I feel seen.
Secondly: it’s working, SteamOS is so nice. I haven’t been this interested in Linux since the XP to 7 transfer. And I think imma’ actually do it this time.
It’s almost like an OS that wants to be useful is a better experience than an OS that wants to push you ads and steal everything you produce to feed into llm slop-generation.
This is a lie! Nobody should read his comment, instead they should check out Raid Shadow Legends the epic, turn-based RPG that’s taken the mobile gaming world by storm!
I haven’t actually seen a raid ad in years at this point. (Except your hopefully ironic comment, so good job unironically promoting them)
I don’t know if it’s just my sponsorblock + adblock combo or if their gorilla advertising has fallen off, and at this point I’m too afraid to ask
I’m in the same boat. I am really not interested in Windows 11 at all, especially after using it at work. My primary hesitation has been video game playability in the past but the steam deck has really expanded how many games are playable on Linux and I also play a lot more games on consoles than I did a few years ago
I was you. I installed Mint and the only issue I had was with a hard drive that was being shared by both systems (dual booting) that had all my games on it. It was a symlink issue.
Bite the bullet. The startup time alone is worth it.
A good UI/UX is what Linux needs most to get people to switch. Valve has the money to pour into actually making something people want to use. Now I just hope the desktop release gets the same polish.
It needs a decent UX, but most importantly it needs binary compatibility. No pleb will compile from source.
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)
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.
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).
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
Linux is the crab of the digital world, eventually everything turns into it.
Linux, BSD, macOS, iOS, Android, QNX and so on are all Unix-like operating systems. Windows is the only widely used OS that’s not Unix-like.
Steam deck gave me the courage to dump Windows 10 for Endeavour OS. Very happy so far.
Fellow EOS user, glad to hear you’re enjoying yourself. Just make sure to check the news on the Arch website before updating, sometimes an extra step gets thrown in and you don’t wanna bork your system. I’d say use Informant, but it’s been giving me shit
Where are those? There isn’t much on the main page.
When I used Manjaro, there were threads for each major update. Known issues, known issues from past updates (if you didn’t get those yet), poll to see the update quality and a discussion thread.
E.g. the most recent one: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/stable-update-2025-04-12-kernels-plasma-systemd-mesa-grub-wine/176877
