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- Hacker News
- It's always great to hear about linux in gaming.
It's sad that they decide to increase the price for steam deck (even if I have one already). Hope it doesn't mean steam machine will cost 1000+.
by lanycrost - "decide" feels like a particularly choice word for a supply chain issue hitting many consumer facing companies.by tehbeard
- I imagine it's for the upcoming hardware.by utopiah
- It's the second point in the release notesby jay_kyburz
- i’d love to see blackmagic jump in with steamos as their main distro. i think they build for rockyos currently but…
if they jump to building davinci resolve (and its new lightroom style photo editing) on steamos rather than rocky.. this would be pretty powerful combine the insane wonders steamos is doing for gaming on linux and add davinci, that would really open up the linux landscape for a ton more people.
i’m currently daily driving linux for work, gaming, and personal pc. unfortunately i’m still pulling out my macbook for video editing and for lightroom.
come on blackmagic, read this and take the leap. valve has done fucking amazing with linux. just choose steamos to build against rather than rocky. its going to have significantly higher number of people already using it for other stuff.
by toofy - davinci resolve is available on the aurby la_oveja
- This might make sense once SteamBox is a large percentage of Linux Desktop installs.
Right now, it would be insanity. Just the situation with running SteamOS on hardware with NVIDIA cards would be a showstopper. And a whole lot of consumer PCs ship with NVIDIA chips...
by pbmonster - I believe the tools like Resolve are built around VFX reference platform specs. I doubt anyone will standardise on the basis of a rolling distro where you can’t pin glibc version. https://vfxplatform.comby scott01
- Realistically, what should be expected if I run this in my desktop with AMD 9000x CPU and a NVIDIA RTX 5000x GPU?by mbmbn
- I don't think it works with NVIDIA.by koolala
- You can expect it to not work. SteamOS is not designed or meant for installation as a generic OS. It is only designed to run on the specific supported hardware devices that it comes preinstalled on.
No matter how many times you see LTT install it on a system they have assembled, its not supposed to be used that way and not supported.
by Arrowmaster - Use CachyOS or Bazzite instead.by gabegm
- Can it be used without logging in online to Steam?
- You can run your OS of choice.
Here's NixOS on the steam deck: https://github.com/Jovian-Experiments/Jovian-NixOS
by farfatched - Yes. They recently made it extra easy to do too.by koolala
- From my experience with the steam deck:
If you're already logged in, you can use it online. But if it decides to log you out, and you're offline, then you're out of luck.
Older versions allowed you to switch to desktop mode without logging in (with broken on screen keyboard, since that's only available once you log into steam), but that option is missing in newer versions.
by CodesInChaos - That line about update arch base means it is shipping only a year old packages and not 1.5 year old ones.by TiredOfLife
- When you maintain systems long enough you realize that's a feature rather than a bugby bandrami
- So, depending where you look, more current than $FAVORITE_LTS... with a distribution found on mass-market gaming devices intended for precisely three wrappers. Why do you, presumably a normal user, even care about the packages? Eesh.
As long as Valve provides more snapshot updates in the next six months, I don't see the problem. The ~~TiVo~~ toy is maintaining currency.
I'll concede this might be annoying for the subset that chooses to use a Steam Machine as a server or development workspace, once the product releases. My condolences to this imaginary and small group. They'll be shocked to find immutability, too.
- I hope the Bluetooth audio latency issue I've been having is fixed. I have two Bluetooth pairs of headphones, one open-ear and one noise-cancelling, and they both have either a half-second or one-second latency between what happens on screen and the audio feedback.
Luckily wired headsets work perfectly fine.
by twoquestions - Trip report: FFXIV does great, but both Hades and Hollow Knight have atrocious lag. I don't know why different games are different for Bluetooth lag performance, when they're all great on my Windows machine.by twoquestions
- Do they work without noticable latency on other devices? I've always found the BT technology wasn't designed for gaming, it even has a feature to delay streamed video until the sound catches up in order to reduce latency for video+sound playback.by rpigab
- I've had this issue with a different Linux distros. If I recall correctly, it was becauserthe headphones were using some proprietary codec to push more bits over an older Bluetooth standard.
If you boot into desktop mode, you can check if switching to plain old A2DP works. That solved the issue on Ubuntu (and Windows) for me. I think audiophiles will lament the loss of audio quality, but lower latencies are much more important for gaming.
by jeroenhd - Very cool. As a Linux Mint user, I'm starting to get interested in SteamOS. So maybe someone with experience can answer my question:
How good is SteamOS as a general distro for a desktop machine? What are the Pros and Cons?
- I mean it literally is not meant to be used as a general distro for a desktop machine so I'm guessing not very good.by altmanaltman
- it makes no sense, just use bazzite or something
- It's good if you use Distrobox and it comes with it.by koolala
- SteamOS is not designed or meant for installation as a generic OS. It is only designed to run on the specific supported hardware devices that it comes preinstalled on.
No matter how many times you see LTT install it on a system they have assembled, its not supposed to be used that way and not supported.
by Arrowmaster - I found it very annoying and restricting. Most significantly being restricted to flatpak. For example I failed at installing whonix and couldn't get rust and vscode to work together.
If I didn't plan to get rid of by steam deck, I'd install a different distro in it. I definitely wouldn't install it on a desktop, support for the deck's keyboardless form factor is the only reason I might choose SteamOS over a normal distro.
Though I didn't know about distrobox then, perhaps that works better.
by CodesInChaos - I tried installing SteamOS on a couple machines last week. One pain point is that their install scripts are just that - non interactive scripts that are designed for gaming handhelds such as the steam deck. The main issue being it expects to be the only OS installed, it will clobber your entire physical volume with its new partition layout and file systems. Not a big deal for a dedicated gaming machine but not what I want for my laptop.
Sadly, the main gaming specific competitor distro- bazzite, has a similar issue. You can install it to a partition (with limited options) but it has some compatibility issue with other EFI bootloaders, the quick fix for me was to install refit and use that to boot while I tested it
Manually installing steamos is on my might todo list, but I feel like someone, maybe Valve, will release an interactive installer soon as the momentum grows. I understand the reasoning, most gamers are not Linux power users, most of these desktop installs are probably gamers recycling old PCs not compatible with Windows’s latest requirements. Still, it would be nice to have some properly labeled footguns on the install media for those of us that want to participate in the testing and now rapidly growing community.
Steam, the app, its protondb/wine compatibility tools, etc all still work fine on my Mint setup, so there’s not much need for me to pursue this but I am curious about how their distro feels, and how well it would work as even a daily driver distro
by hilsdev