Sounds like buying a steam deck with extra steps for the person who wrote this article haha
I do love how bazzite makes other gamefronts easily available on SD, though
Playing Windows only games from the epic store on a steam deck running Linux is a weird but pretty awesome flex. Emulating Nintendo games on it is the ultimate fuck you to Nintendo.
This is useful for countries where the Steam Deck is unavailable but other handhelds aren’t. Here in Australia, Steam Decks are only available as grey imports, and that makes warranty issues a potential headache, but you can walk into most electronic retailers and buy a ROG Ally off the shelf.
That said, I personally wouldn’t buy a handheld that didn’t have touchpads, so I bought a grey import and have had no issues.
Sounds like buying a steam deck with extra steps for the person who wrote this article haha
Steam Deck is not available in all regions and grey imports can be a hassle, for some people this is the safer road
Not that I care but clearly a lot of people appreciate the increased performance and resolution that other handhelds offer. And the vast majority of games don’t need touchpads.
I’m just happy that all the sources are made available by Valve to make this possible. Even though I wish they would upstream them much quicker. But at least it has enabled me to run a normal Linux distribution on my Deck and enhance it as I saw fit.
What are you running?
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Hardest part was getting full disk encryption working with an on-screen keyboard to enter a passphrase at boot. I used unl0kr for that which wasn’t (probably still isn’t) in the OpenSUSE packages.
Missing built-in FDE is one of my main gripes with SteamOS. It’s why I don’t really do anything besides gaming on the Deck. It’s a portable device that could easily be stolen or lost, so this seems like a major oversight.
And hows the gaming part of things? How seamless is going to/from steam’s big picture mode?
I very rarely use big picture mode. I’m mostly on a KDE desktop. I’ve set up a shortcut to open Steam through gamescope in Big Picture mode for the rare occasion that I need it. In that case KDE’s wayland session keeps running in the background.
I have also set up gamescope with Steam as a separate login session but I can’t remember if I ever felt the need to use that.
Usually I just have Steam running in desktop mode in the background for the controller settings and the mostly superior on screen keyboard. I never noticed any slowdowns in games. I even managed to get Cities Skylines to run more stable than on SteamOS. But that might be due to zram.
I’ve been really happy with Bazzite on my laptop the last few months, although I seldom game these days.
My wife’s Windows laptop stopped working recently and I haven’t been able to repair it, so she’s been gaming on my laptop in the meantime. So far it’s been able to play everything she’s thrown at it without issue.
I’m sad that I haven’t been able to fix her laptop, but I’m kinda happy cause it means there’s no longer any Windows machines in the entire house, lol.
On my (all AMD) computer it dropped the display signal as soon a there was load on the GPU when running Bazzite, so I went with Mint instead where I had to fuck around to make my wifi antenna work 🤷 Too bad because Bazzite looked awesome…
Report it on the discourse site, the bazzite devs respond really quick and are super helpful.
I don’t see why valve doesn’t make a linux box, or distribute steam OS. The infrastructure is already there. It’ll be great for linux and gamers alike.
I’m sure both are on the to-do list
