Alternate account: @woelkchen@piefed.world

  • 98 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’ve seen a lot of folks waiting for this to make the switch, it’s silly but having a familiar name attached to it gives them a sense of comfort, and SteamOS is solid for what it is.

    And should they be not native English speakers, they’ll wonder why the desktop is only in English, why they can’t even check the spelling of their native language. Or why playback of WebM videos glitches.

    I really like my Steam Deck and actually use it as desktop PC from time to time but you can tell desktop mode is an afterthought. Traditional Linux distributions are actually a better choice for regular users. Valve luckily open sources and upstreams everything of SteamOS other than the actual Steam client, so it’s not like SteamOS has some special sauce nobody else gets.


  • I have to rely on scalpers or stores who sell it for triple it’s value. I want the controller

    The 8bitdo Ultimate 2 series of controllers are fine pieces of hardware. Yes, they don’t have the trackpads but they have TMR sticks (probably the very same model as Steam Controller 2) and they are even compatible game consoles.

    The biggest problem is that there are four very similarly named controllers (“Bluetooth” is the highest end and compatible with all BT devices even phones) but that’s it. No need to throw money at scalpers if good alternatives exist.

    PS: If it behaves like Steam Deck’s controller, it’ll be useless without Steam running and merely acting as mouse.








  • imo ubuntu is a good recommendation.

    The reality is that SteamOS shaped the majority of developments for home users.

    They expect to just get the stuff that’s on Flathub even if they don’t even know what Flathub is. Facts are:

    • Out of the box Flatpak support has been banned by Canonical.
    • Ubuntu 25.10 shipped with broken Flatpak support. That was known before release but Flapak is in the unsupported Universe repository and bugs in Universe software are not release blocking.
    • Juggling PPAs is complicated.

    Fact is also: Because software in Universe is not supported, whether or not a community member backports bugfixes is a coin toss. Mint, pop_OS, Zorin, etc. are just as affected by this and as such software used may contain severe security issues.


  • Rules of thumb I use:

    • Good upstream support, so not a hobby distribution by guy or two
    • No reliance on add-on repositories that can mess the OS up like RPMFusion, PackMan, EPEL,…
    • App store-like software management. Users shouldn’t have to see traditional package management if they don’t explicitly look for it. Default repo and Flathub is enough for the vast majority of people.
    • Good internationalization. Languages other than English shouldn’t be an afterthought (even SteamOS falls into this trap in desktop mode)
    • Plasma Desktop because that’s what regular users are most likely to know or at least heard of or seen in videos about SteamOS
    • No Ubuntu or derivatives (bad support by Canonical and derivatives fighting an uphill battle)

    Currently that means Fedora KDE. I did not yet try Kinoite or Bazzite myself but I do like the download assistant on the Bazzite website that guides users through picking the correct ISO.