this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Being a Steam Deck owner myself, it also exposes more people to the underlying OS. I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding that people who use a Steam Deck only ever use it in Game Mode, and that's simply untrue.
I was convinced to buy one, because a user said they bought one for each of their kids as a stand-in for a laptop, and they would do their homework on it (in addition to playing games).
And now, because of my personal exposure, I have Bazzite running full time on a laptop, and I'm testing a few other Linux distros to eventually replace my Win 11 Pro install on my main desktop machine.
Those people should leave the purity tests and gatekeeping to the religious fundies.
I've never touched a steam deck nor its OS. How much of the underlying OS is exposed to the user? Is it easy to bring up a terminal emulator?
It's surprisingly straightforward! There's a menu option in the UI that can switch you to desktop mode, which is KDE Plasma. You can open up a terminal emulator from the K menu there.
Alright, good to know.
Also, the gate is open come in. There seems to be some elitism regarding the choice of distro, but don't pay any attention to that. "Mint and Ubuntu are noob distros, I use arch btw" is only partially a meme.
I'm a linux user of 20+ years, and I run Mint on my desktop. Arch users are the linux equivalent of the car guys who spend ages tuning engine performance and gear ratios in their car. I just want something that works well and that does what I need it to do in a reliable way. Plus, the Mint user base is so large that it's relatively easy to find a workaround/fix for whatever strategy nge issue you might run into.
I hear good things about Pop OS, but I have no firat hand experience with it, so I can't comment on that.
Use Pop!_OS myself. Its "grand" / "fine".
I'd recommend it to a new user. If however you are an existing user who's happy I'd say not to bother.
Pop!_OS and Fedora are my usual choices for a desktop OS, unless I have reasons not to.
Ubuntu is not controversial because it is a "noob distro", it is controversial because the company behind it (Canonical) is turning almost as bad as Micro$oft.
While maybe not quite the hyperbole of turning into MS, it's not entirely wrong either. That's why LMDE was created - in case they go completely off the rails. And that's why I run LMDE - I support the move.
One thing to note though is that SteamOS is immutable, i.e.
/is blocked for writes by default, you can only write to/home, so you need to install things via flatpaks not via package manager. So not ideal for a power user, but should be enough for most people.I disagree that Arch guys are the guy who tunes up everything, I think that would be Gentoo. I think Arch guys are the equivalent of the guy that built his own PC, it's not an impressive feat (even though some act as if they were superiors for doing it) and probably lots of the people who buy prebuilts can do it, they chose not to bother assembling things if they can get someone to do it for them. The reason I think this is because I use Arch for the same reason I built my PC, i.e. I'm lazy and want something that might be a slight hoccup to setup but will be a breeze to maintain, it might be a Frankenstein, but it's the Frankenstein I built and know.
I switched my gaming PC to Nobara after seeing all my games run on the Deck. I may need to dual boot for a few but I haven't bothered setting the Windows install back up. Haven't missed VR enough yet.
VR will probably catch up, too, as bigger devs start to realize they're leaving money on the table by ignoring a growing market.
I been hearing that it shouldn't be too far away, but I'm not holding my breath on it.
I don't think we'll see meaningful changes until it at least has wider market adoption on Windows. It's still mostly a novelty at this point, even with the arrival of tech like the Apple Ski Goggles.
"that's simply untrue"
Until proven with actual usage stats I continue to believe it's an extremely small minority that uses the Linux part.
Okay. I never made the assertion that it was a majority. But asserting that it's an "extremely small" minority is a positive claim you should back up with evidence, or else you're just appealing to your own confirmation bias.
You made the original claim so the onus of proof is on you :)
This was my claim. To put it a different way, "All people who use a Steam Deck only ever use it in Game Mode." I am a person. The parent and children from the anecdote I shared are people. We all use Desktop Mode. Therefore, it is not true that all Steam Deck owners only use it in Game Mode.
I never made any other claims. Burden of proof met.
It is not my burden of proof to demonstrate the positive claim that an "extremely small" minority is using Desktop Mode. That's your claim, and the burden is upon you to prove it.