Alt text: Trojan Horse meme, Steam Deck bringing Linux to Windows gamers
Opinion: Games that have “linux support” but explicitly check for Steam Deck hardware should have a disclaimer on the store page or even have their Steam Deck verified status revoked.
You know some games that do that?
There’s a post every so often on !linux_gaming@lemmy.world
😮
This is actually how it happened for me.
Oh my god! I thought I bought a gaming handheld but i bought… communism!
Excusme sir, the word is now wokeness/wokeism.
Fuck, if it’s easy to mod games and run script extenders, I’ll be in-Stalin it this week.
I replied one too deep. Fuck.
I replied one too deep. Fuck.
I’m collectivising this comment, this is now our mistake, comrade. 😉
I don’t understand the comparisons people make between OSS and comunism. Comunism is a flavor of old-world authoritarianism, based upon the idea that mankind is incapable of choosing the right thing, so the right choice is instead mandated by law. OSS’s emhasis on freedom, choice, and the lack of any kind of governing authrorty or social dogma, as well as the inherent trust in the majority public to choose the right (to donate or contribute) has a lot more in common with liberalism than comunism.
I don’t understand the comparisons people make between OSS and comunism.
It shows.
heads up, neither USSR nor China were ever communist
Your understanding of communist ideas are on a par on your spelling of it.
Just a heads up, you were lied to about what communism means.
Who lied?
People richer than you and their useful idiots.
Society broadly. 🤷
The oligarchs in particular paid the propagandists to brainwash everyone
Well that’s rather indeterminate.
Mostly because it’s dependent on who told you “Comunism is a flavor of old-world authoritarianism, based upon the idea that mankind is incapable of choosing the right thing, so the right choice is instead mandated by law.”
A good working definition of the ideas of communism is democracy of the work place and the economy. As it stands work places are dictatorships run by bosses that effectively have unilateral control over all choices of the company. Socialism and communism are built on the idea since workers are the ones actually doing the work that make the money and bare the brunt of the choices, they should be the ones making the choices.
Really it’s actually capitalism that supposes people are too dumb to make their own choices or know how a business is run, and thus shouldn’t have say over company choices.
Really it’s actually capitalism that supposes people are too dumb to make their own choices or know how a business is run, and thus shouldn’t have say over company choices.
Really it’s actually that businesses with that structure tend to perform better in a market economy, because no one forces businesses to be started as “dictatorships run by bosses that effectively have unilateral control over all choices of the company” other than the people starting that business themselves. You can literally start a business organized as a co-op (which by your definitions is fundamentally a socialist or communist entity) - there’s nothing preventing that from being the organizing structure. The complaint instead tends to be that no one is forcing existing successful businesses to change their structure and that a new co-op has to compete in a market where non-co-op businesses also operate.
If co-ops were a generally more effective model, you’d expect them to be more numerous and more influential. And they do alright for themselves in some spaces. For example in the US many of the biggest co-ops are agricultural.
Comunism is a flavor of old-world authoritarianism, based upon the idea that mankind is incapable of choosing the right thing, so the right choice is instead mandated by law.
You know capitalist nations also have laws, right…?
It’s a joke because Bill Gates once called it that. Nobody actually thinks that other than some tech bros that are high from huffing their own farts.
There is a vast difference between communism the theory and communism the real world application as it occured in 20th century.
If a theory and every attempt at real world application of a theory yield wildly different results, shouldn’t that suggest something in the theory is deeply flawed?
Seems I alerted the hoard, lol
Communism is a classless stateless moneyless society based on the principle of “from each according to ability, to each according to need”
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id recommend AMD GPU not just because its drivers are open source but they usually have a bit more VRAM which actually matters.
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gigachad
Doesn’t it run on Arch? Crazy to think there’s a bunch of Arch users that don’t say they use arch btw
It is but it’s a Valve managed version of Arch. It will get recent packages but not as cutting edge as upstream Arch.
It isn’t true Arch though, so the Arch forums would never accept them. They would have to go install from scratch to be able to get “I use arch btw” badge.
I use endeavouros btw.
True Arch: you write the image to the usb stick yourself, boot it on bare hardware, and don’t use archinstall. This is the minimum requirement BTW. If you use archinstall you can only use “btw” in lowercase. /s
I use Stearch btw
I eat starch btw
I’ve loved using Linux on my steamdeck to game, but sadly I cant really switch because of lossless scaling. LSFG is too good to stop using, and there’s no Linux equivalent. not even afmf2 works on linux
Use whatever you want
Don’t let the Linux fans try to tell you that Linux is this amazing thing that can fix all your problems.
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And it CAN fix all your problems. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to fix the problems yourself.
Which is often more than I can deal with. Thankfully - so far at least - all my problems are problems other people have encountered and have documented (and - in many cases - contributed to various projects to get the fix to more people)
Linux is, in general far better than windows in my experience. its just that certain must-have applications are only available on windows
You are allowed to use both
allowed, yes. but switching between multiple operating systems on the same device is simply a pain in the ass.
Is it really that bad, though? Compared to spending hours fighting with 3rd party drivers or wine or etc. every time there’s a change to the software in question, restarting to a different partition is pretty trivial. Configure both OSs to mirror non-sys files to network storage or a shared partition (and there’s plenty of ready-made utilities for this) and it’s honestly a pretty easy solution to being stuck with “iNdUsTrY sTaNdArD” software.
I get where you’re coming from, I do. The only reason I’m saying this is because the difficulty in dual booting is often brought up when discussing switching, and it really discourages people that are curious about trying linux (but are still tied to the apple/M$ world) from making the switch when they’re constantly told how hard it is to use both.
I wouldn’t have any actual problems doing the dual boot itself, its just that I don’t want to deal with not having my data synced between operating systems
I use virtualization to make it seemless. You can even use automatic provisioning tools to deploy VMs with stuff preinstalled.
Gamescope is technically lossless scaling without the framegen. Technically it should be possible to add to gamescope.
yes, but lossless scaling is closed source and the developer has decided not to try adding Linux support. supposedly its because of it’s reliance on windows capture apis
Gnu manifesto + linux
It’s working, I know people who don’t even own a steam deck who are considering swapping to SteamOS once it’s available for desktops.
I’ve told them they don’t need to wait and can get a similar or better experience with distros that are already available, but steam’s name is gold for a lot of people and it seems like the only option they’re really interested in.
Knowing that with Steams’ support of Linux through proton means a vast amount of games just work out of the box was enough for me to switch to EndeavourOS.
I’ve been on it for a week, and I’m so sold.
Same. (Are you me?)
Yeah, I had mostly stayed away from arch based distros after having a really bad time with Manjaro. But hearing the Steam Deck’s version of SteamOS was switching to an Arch base got me to try Endeavour on my desktop, and I’ve been using it ever since.
While this would be great, it’s also a little unfortunate, since the general desktop experience on Steam Deck is IIRC currently a bit below other comparable distros, and I’d hate for people to get an incomplete picture of what the Linux desktop experience can be like. Hopefully the time that’s led up to the wider release of SteamOS has been spent on getting that desktop experience up to snuff.
Desktop experience is just KDE, only part that I’m worried will trip people up is it being immutable. Usually that’s fine, but occasionally you run into an issue where something doesn’t work because of flatpak sandboxing, and it can be confusing how to overcome it.
I discovered if you go down the rabbit hole of nix you can install and use anything you want through nix and it just installs works and is permanent unlike someways of using pacman
Distrobox is also a good option for installing stuff without flatpak.
And there’s stuff that just can’t be made into a Flatpak. Someone mentioned in another thread that they wanted to use Waydroid on their deck, Bazzite has it built in but Steam OS doesn’t - maybe there’s a way to layer it on SteamOS but that’s sort of tricky to do (idk I don’t have a Steam Deck but I run Bazzite on my laptop).
https://github.com/ryanrudolfoba/SteamOS-Waydroid-Installer
Not disagreeing with your point, but at least for waydroid there’s a specific SteamOS installer available.
Linux is the crab of the digital world, eventually everything turns into it.
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Why would it be?
Linux, BSD, macOS, iOS, Android, QNX and so on are all Unix-like operating systems. Windows is the only widely used OS that’s not Unix-like.
They were posix certified at some point.
No idea why, but microsoft did go through the hoops to get that.
In practice posix functionality did not work. But they did have a paper saying it generally should.deleted by creator
Ah I figured the monolithic kernel would make it opposite to the unix philosophy.
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Firstly: I feel seen.
Secondly: it’s working, SteamOS is so nice. I haven’t been this interested in Linux since the XP to 7 transfer. And I think imma’ actually do it this time.
Same. I didn’t realise it at the time but the steam deck led to the media PC, which led to the laptop and finally the gaming rig fell. I dual booted but haven’t gone back in so long i am now eyeing up the windows disks to get more space.
Today I found Organic Maps, which seems a nice FOSS alternative to Google. Freedom feels good.
I’m in the same boat. I am really not interested in Windows 11 at all, especially after using it at work. My primary hesitation has been video game playability in the past but the steam deck has really expanded how many games are playable on Linux and I also play a lot more games on consoles than I did a few years ago
I was you. I installed Mint and the only issue I had was with a hard drive that was being shared by both systems (dual booting) that had all my games on it. It was a symlink issue.
Bite the bullet. The startup time alone is worth it.
I’m probably going to do a trial run of Bazzite on my secondary computer to see how much does and doesn’t work and make my decision based on that
Steam deck gave me the courage to dump Windows 10 for Endeavour OS. Very happy so far.
Fellow EOS user, glad to hear you’re enjoying yourself. Just make sure to check the news on the Arch website before updating, sometimes an extra step gets thrown in and you don’t wanna bork your system. I’d say use Informant, but it’s been giving me shit
Where are those? There isn’t much on the main page.
When I used Manjaro, there were threads for each major update. Known issues, known issues from past updates (if you didn’t get those yet), poll to see the update quality and a discussion thread.
E.g. the most recent one: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/stable-update-2025-04-12-kernels-plasma-systemd-mesa-grub-wine/176877
Steam deck was the main draw of moving away from windows after the security updates for 10 end in october
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Well, I feel like the Steam Deck has partially positioned itself as just a convenience device. I imagine quite some folks have it in addition to their (Windows) gaming PC and just use it on the couch or when travelling.
In particular, the genre most likely to cause problems are competitive games (because anti-cheat freaks out when it notices slight differences compared to real Windows). And it wouldn’t be my first thought to buy a Steam Deck to play those, simply because the screen is small and the primary controls aren’t mouse+keyboard (even though you can of course dock the Steam Deck)
I got both. Of it doesn’t run wel on the deck, I just stream it from the PC.
I used my deck as my main computer when I was traveling earlier this year (I don’t have a laptop). I brought a small keyboard, no mouse, was able to do everything I needed. It’s convinced me I can easily make the switch I’m just waiting to move now and get a laptop when I’m out of tarrif-land
For new users that were otherwise scared of changing their daily driver, it does provide a nice little path for them.
Flip it into Desktop mode some times to get a feel for how different the DE is, play around with some command line stuff. Easy to factory reset, so mess it up if you want.
Then install something like CachyOS Handheld edition after a while to get a less restricted Linux experience, while maintaining game mode et all.
Hell, for the price, it’s a great device to use as a dev machine if you do Cachy or similar. I use mine as my daily use “laptop” since my other laptop died, and was less powerful any way.
Woah, Cachy sounds sick! How does the gaming mode perform in your experience? Is it effectively the same as the deck’s vanilla game mode? 🤔 very tempted to give it a shot myself!
Admittedly, I don’t use game mode as often as most. I do gamedev on this, so it’s almost always in Desktop mode, even when I’m actually playing games.
Having said that, the handful of times I have used it on Cachy felt no different at all to SteamOS. The UI is identical. They did a great job recreating the Valve-specific parts of SteamOS that aren’t just part of KDE or Arch.
The only downside, and it’s just a minor inconvenience for me, is that Cachy doesn’t have the option to boot into Desktop mode by default (yet). It always boots up into game mode first.
EDIT: I was wrong, the game mode on CachyOS is actually one in the same as SteamOS game mode. That is something built into a special release of the Steam client for Steam Decks, and Cachy just uses that instead of reinventing the wheel. It should be a direct 1:1 experience when it comes to game mode.
Wow that is way sick! Thanks!
SteamOS desktop mode is just KDE, so you could just make a Live USB of Kubuntu or whatever to try it out on your actual desktop or laptop PC.
I use mine as my daily use “laptop” since my other laptop died, and was less powerful any way.
I just wish it had better IO. Either 2 USB C ports, or even better USB 4 and I’d own one by now.
Just get a small USBC dock, I got one with an HDMI, USBC and USB connection so I can connect it to a monitor, its power cord and a wireless keyboard/mouse dongle… It’s super compact so it doesn’t bother me at all.
Dear god, yes. One more USB C would solve a lot of problems.
What advantages does Cachy have?
They give you a lot more control over the system in terms of the filesystem, its structure and format, use of pacman without being wiped on update, etc. It’s more of a true Arch Linux experience, plus it isn’t controlled by Valve.
Cachy also has their own Proton versions that seem to run a couple of games marginally better so far. Still, you have all the options when it comes to how you want to install and run games or anything else.
ETA: I think BazziteOS also has a handheld version that is tailored for the Deck’s hardware that gives a similar experience
I haven’t run into any limitations of the file system and I hardly even know what pacman is. And I haven’t felt ‘controlled’ by Valve, certainly not to the extent of a console or even Windows/Mac. I can sudo whatever I want. I’m sure you have a use case, but I’m still just not seeing it.
Are their proton versions just proton GE? To what extent does it actually run better?
If you get into Linux more, you will start using something like pacman (short for Package Manager), which is where you install libraries and apps natively. Then with Arch, there’s also the AURs (community repository).
The way you do it on SteamOS is usually through Discover Store (aka flatpak). That’s all fine and good, but there are nuances to how it sandboxes the apps that may not be desirable for everything you install and do. Secondly, when you update to a new SteamOS version, anything installed via pacman or AUR gets wiped. Only your home directory remains untouched (i.e., game installs and saves, Discover apps). Some tools just aren’t offered on flatpak, and some times what is there is behind a version or two.
For the average user, no real advantage. For developers and tinkerers, it opens all the doors. If you just want to have the same Steam Deck experience, but make sure everything that phones home is gone, then CachyOS also has something for you.
And I haven’t felt ‘controlled’ by Valve
That’s not what I mean. What I mean is that Valve controls and makes all the decisions on how the OS is designed. Some of it open source, some is not at all (telemetry stuffs, for example). Again, depends on how you use it whether or not it’s an issue for you.
Are their proton versions just proton GE? To what extent does it actually run better?
No, they are separately maintained Cachy Proton versions, based on GE. I haven’t looked deep into it, but I gather they run better because they are tweaked to fit into how Cachy has things setup. And again, only marginally better. I just notice less stutters in some heftier games where I would see a bunch before, that kind of thing.
ETA: there was one game, don’t remember which, that I couldn’t get to run in Proton, GE or otherwise. It does run in Cachy’s Proton, though
