The Steam Deck has revolutionized the gaming handheld market. With the Linux-based immutable SteamOS, Valve has fostered an active community developing mods and alternative systems for this platform. Other manufacturers distribute Windows-based mobile consoles. However, time and time again it has been shown that they lag behind Linux in terms of software support.
But how easy is it to bring a Linux distribution, say openSUSE, to the Steam Deck?
In this talk, a prototype based on openSUSE’s open technologies and infrastructure will be presented, which is already (almost) fully functional on the Steam Deck and many other devices.
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openSUSE propaganda
The only distro I’ve never been able to successfully install without problems with the installer, over several versions and on several computers. Last time I gave up and haven’t thought about it since.
Deck runs arch, btw. It doesn’t need Suse.
What’s wrong with just plain Arch? It works well enough for my desktop and for Valve to build SteamOS. When gaming having the latest packages are a huge advantage.
Unfortunately I can not watch the video right now
Edit: So he just made an atomic openSUSE distro for handhelds. I like that it has BTRFS snapshots, I use it on my desktop as well. Nice for people that prefer openSUSE I guess but I will stick to Arch.
My Grandpa used to say “Every farmer praises his pond.”
It is true. I’d praise Fedora currently. I have praised Arch when I used it. For all the issues I had with its outdated software, I praised Debian for that month I’ve used it. I had praise NixOS’ rollbacks, while sparing the details on the learning curve and immense difficulty of setup and weird, obscure issues I had with it.
Ultimately, every distro without exception has some issues for different people. That’s a fact. It’s all about what you can and cannot live with, what fits and what doesn’t fit your purposes.
I want the latest software after some good testing and on a static release if possible, with all the software available, a fast package manager, and NOT Arch, as I was done with it for various reasons. Got pissed at NixOS, OpenSUSE’s zypper is the worst package manager bar none (because it’s slower than the older dnf, and doesn’t even have parallel downloads, and doesn’t have many mirrors either). So Fedora it is. And I’ll stay here for a while, seeing as there isn’t anything better for me.
And I’ll praise Fedora for what it does right, while casually avoiding the fact that the first thing I did after install was to install and set up dnf5, and not mentioning I had mirror issues twice in the last month (I had none in the months prior, but twice in the span of 2-3 weeks?).
Anyways, that’s just me ranting about Linux distros, because as much as everyone claims they’re the same (and they are when it comes to usage), they are very different when it comes to package managers, package availability, package versions, and release cycles, and those are the main differences between them all.
Bazzite, but whatever… Variety is good.
Setting up a WM and installing a ton of software you might need on Bazzite is a long and painful process. The best way seems to be to just create a custom Ublue image, and I’ve been trying to do that and have failed miserably on multiple occasions.
And on top of all that, there are a bunch of useless configurations, like the shell, and whatever they did with ld, breaking my Neovim in the process, which I’d prefer not to have.
While it is very good for a Steam Deck OS, it still has issues like every other distro out there.
Supposedly CachyOS works amazing on handhelds. Arch based, too.
openSUSE is the best os in general, in my experience. I’ve kept coming back to it time and again for decades.
Why?
Zypper is by far the best package manager available, providing atomic and reversible updates, and their open build service makes reproducible builds. Those two are by far the best things about openSUSE. It’s not without its faults, which is why I have switched away at times, but I always come back after using the crap available in other distros.
I personally found it kinda jank. Mint feels best for a laymans gaming distro ime
good if they’re gaming on old hardware I am sure. Mint lacks modern feature enablement and it baffles me that people keep recommending it
Is 5600x 6700xt considered old? Worked fantastic out of the box for all of my friends and family.
Nah, I’m on latest hardware (4080) and did a bunch of tests recently. Mint was the best along with PopOS. A lot of distros like CachyOs or Bazzite have a lot of great enhancements but they break so often without easy rollbacks that a layman shouldnt use them. Mint has a driver manager and can install KDE if you want with no breakage. Bazzite and CachyOS couldnt even run many major titles due to driver breakage and not having an easy way for a layman to rollback. (I could do it, though a layman would hate it). Whereas PopOS and Mint both ran major titles without any configuration.
I don’t know of any ‘bleeding edge’ distros with driver managers, I might ask about that though.
Can you elaborate, please?
Mint is a long term support distro using an in house custom desktop environment. LTS distros don’t receive kernel or mesa updates as often so game performance can be lacking especially for newer games and/or newer hardware. Cinnamon also lags behind on modern desktop features compared to GNOME or KDE Plasma.
It’s gotta be a bunch of laptop users or some shit
