Steam Deck

14892 readers

52 users here now

A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.

Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.

As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title

The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.

Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.

These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.

Rules:

Follow the rules of Sopuli
Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
No piracy, there are other communities for that.
Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
Have fun.

Link to our Matrix Space

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

Moxvallix@sopuli.xyz

codus@leby.dev

timi@lemmy.world

RolAIDS05@lemmy.world

Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz

RolAIDS05@sopuli.xyz

Why install other Linux ISOs on Steam Deck? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 6 months ago by overload@sopuli.xyz to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Seen a few times bazzite has been mentioned, but just have seen another user say they have OpenSUSE installed.

I'm not sure what the benefits of these options are, especially non-steamOS ISOs?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Assuming you meant read only (How would a write only OS or software work lol), you can actually disable the read only nature of the OS and install pacman and then your own packages.

That being said, yeah, it is a bit of a mess as all of that can be wiped out or thrown into dependency conflict hell following an SteamOS update.

That being said: As someone who is using my SteamOS as my main PC was fucking stolen...

I am both trying to get into game dev and also just far more used to Debian and Debian based OSs.

Trying to get a game engine other than Godot to work on Arch has been an insanity inducing experience, and I've found Godot 4 to be insufficient.

Unreal and Unity and 03DE work on debian. They release debian variants.

Sure, there are AUR repos or whatever, but theyre based on many alternative libs that cause things to bug out, and they don't even actually list all the dependencies, you just have to spend hours and hours googling errors when you try to build, figure out what you are missing, then find the Arch version of that lib, or the AUR version, in which case oh fun more unfully listed dependencies and compatibility errors.

So... yeah basically an actual reason to install another linux OS on the Deck would be if you wanted to do software dev in Linux and don't want to deal with the tangled rats nest of basically everything that actually works on a debian distro either resulting in you having to rely on slapdash AUR bullshit, or massively space wasting containerized packages.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

In SteamOS you can also make use of the Nix package manager, which has official support from Valve https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/7173. /nix is included in default installation I think, but I never used it. Then there is also Distrobox, which lets you install any package from any distribution. I also never used this and apparently it works on Steam Deck too? https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/steamdeck_guide.md

Depending on how complicated or limiting these alternative options are, they may be enough. If you want develop a game and only have a Steam Deck, then maybe for testing it would be a good idea to keep SteamOS. I don't know how viable it is to have dual boot, but that could be an option too? I guess a builtin SSD would be a requirement for this.

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I will have to look into nix more. I remember when it came out, thought it might be neat if it caught on and got developed and supported well, maybe that's the case these days?

And yeah I would want to keep SteamOS as yeah the whole steam deck control interface, as far as I know, only works on SteamOS, it'd be good for testing and I do like playing games on the thing.

I've got the Terabyte OLED version, so I could probably dual boot on that alone fairly fine, but having an SD and an external drive would probably be good ideas too.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 2 points 6 months ago

I will have to look into nix more. I remember when it came out, thought it might be neat if it caught on and got developed and supported well, maybe that’s the case these days?

It's still a niche off course. And the packages from the Nix package/repository in the end is just installing an application like from any other repository. But its usable on any distribution. That's the point here, because it can be used on the Steam Deck without root privileges (as far as I know) and packages should stay after an update. I wasn't much talking about the distribution itself.