The Steam Deck has revolutionized the gaming handheld market. With the Linux-based immutable SteamOS, Valve has fostered an active community developing mods and alternative systems for this platform. Other manufacturers distribute Windows-based mobile consoles. However, time and time again it has been shown that they lag behind Linux in terms of software support.
But how easy is it to bring a Linux distribution, say openSUSE, to the Steam Deck?
In this talk, a prototype based on openSUSE’s open technologies and infrastructure will be presented, which is already (almost) fully functional on the Steam Deck and many other devices.
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My Grandpa used to say “Every farmer praises his pond.”
It is true. I’d praise Fedora currently. I have praised Arch when I used it. For all the issues I had with its outdated software, I praised Debian for that month I’ve used it. I had praise NixOS’ rollbacks, while sparing the details on the learning curve and immense difficulty of setup and weird, obscure issues I had with it.
Ultimately, every distro without exception has some issues for different people. That’s a fact. It’s all about what you can and cannot live with, what fits and what doesn’t fit your purposes.
I want the latest software after some good testing and on a static release if possible, with all the software available, a fast package manager, and NOT Arch, as I was done with it for various reasons. Got pissed at NixOS, OpenSUSE’s zypper is the worst package manager bar none (because it’s slower than the older dnf, and doesn’t even have parallel downloads, and doesn’t have many mirrors either). So Fedora it is. And I’ll stay here for a while, seeing as there isn’t anything better for me.
And I’ll praise Fedora for what it does right, while casually avoiding the fact that the first thing I did after install was to install and set up dnf5, and not mentioning I had mirror issues twice in the last month (I had none in the months prior, but twice in the span of 2-3 weeks?).
Anyways, that’s just me ranting about Linux distros, because as much as everyone claims they’re the same (and they are when it comes to usage), they are very different when it comes to package managers, package availability, package versions, and release cycles, and those are the main differences between them all.
Do you mind elaborating on why you’re done with arch?
I don’t want a rolling release if I can avoid it. I don’t want a from-scratch distro where I’m suddenly in trouble because I forgot to install some crucial package that I wouldn’t have had to install on other distros. But I also don’t want a distro that’s forcing all sorts of software on me because that’s what it comes with (this point is about Arch-based distros: something that only ArcoLinux got right). I don’t want to wait to compile COSMIC every time there’s an update. I don’t want to compile from source all the time because that’s what the AUR is. And as powerful as the AUR is, it always feels janky, even with paru or yay.
I don’t want to worry that if I haven’t updated in a few weeks, I might get issues with the archlinux-keyring. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve used Arch long enough.
And after being an Arch Tester for a while and seeing how brittle package testing is (there are barely any testers, and that’s a massive concern), I decided I don’t trust the stability of Arch. So I left.
Bazzite, but whatever… Variety is good.
Setting up a WM and installing a ton of software you might need on Bazzite is a long and painful process. The best way seems to be to just create a custom Ublue image, and I’ve been trying to do that and have failed miserably on multiple occasions.
And on top of all that, there are a bunch of useless configurations, like the shell, and whatever they did with ld, breaking my Neovim in the process, which I’d prefer not to have.
While it is very good for a Steam Deck OS, it still has issues like every other distro out there.
Yeah, but as someone who had both bazzite and Opensuse MicroOS (Kalpa), it is even more of a long and painful process on that platform lol.
Immutable OS’s are literally for people who specifically don’t want to tinker. Everything via flatpack except a few system-level apps layered on the base image.
(Also they are for people who don’t need document digital signing as Firefox and libre office can’t access the modules via flatpak)
If people want specific apps and don’t want to build them or use user space apps then it definitely isn’t their best option. Just a different option.
I have very much enjoyed never even having to think about updating my system for months
I don’t tinker anymore. No time.
BUT
I have a very specific setup with COSMIC, Hyprland, and specific apps I use. That’s just my chosen way of using my computer.
If I could get all this properly working on Bazzite, I’d have been there already.
What’s wrong with just plain Arch? It works well enough for my desktop and for Valve to build SteamOS. When gaming having the latest packages are a huge advantage.
Unfortunately I can not watch the video right now
Edit: So he just made an atomic openSUSE distro for handhelds. I like that it has BTRFS snapshots, I use it on my desktop as well. Nice for people that prefer openSUSE I guess but I will stick to Arch.
openSUSE propaganda
I personally found it kinda jank. Mint feels best for a laymans gaming distro ime
good if they’re gaming on old hardware I am sure. Mint lacks modern feature enablement and it baffles me that people keep recommending it
Can you elaborate, please?
Mint is a long term support distro using an in house custom desktop environment. LTS distros don’t receive kernel or mesa updates as often so game performance can be lacking especially for newer games and/or newer hardware. Cinnamon also lags behind on modern desktop features compared to GNOME or KDE Plasma.
Is 5600x 6700xt considered old? Worked fantastic out of the box for all of my friends and family.
It’s gotta be a bunch of laptop users or some shit
Nah, I’m on latest hardware (4080) and did a bunch of tests recently. Mint was the best along with PopOS. A lot of distros like CachyOs or Bazzite have a lot of great enhancements but they break so often without easy rollbacks that a layman shouldnt use them. Mint has a driver manager and can install KDE if you want with no breakage. Bazzite and CachyOS couldnt even run many major titles due to driver breakage and not having an easy way for a layman to rollback. (I could do it, though a layman would hate it). Whereas PopOS and Mint both ran major titles without any configuration.
I don’t know of any ‘bleeding edge’ distros with driver managers, I might ask about that though.
What about nobara? I’m currently using Mint but considering Popos. Any advice? I just want whichever distro works out of the box with no tweaking. I’m the type to just wanna turn on and play. I have to reinstall my mint due to tweaking which I did myself. Advice?
Have you considered Bazzite? Similar to Nobara, but it’s immutable. You can treat it like an appliance and even updates itself
Thanks. I actually played around on bazzite. I really like KDE and its the one thing I wish mint had, because it seems if you go tweaking too much icons and extensions in mint it gets buggy and shit stops working as smooth. But I got aggravated when I needed to create a bootable USB and couldn’t figure out how in bazzite. In mint you simply right click the file and click make bootable USB or whatever it says. I love mint. I reinstalled mint on a family members PC because they had my tweaked till I broke it copy. It just works out the box for all our games. Programs are easy to find and labelled so you know what they are unlike bazzite. Its much more refined and polished. Simple. LM for the win! Not knocking bazzite but it seems like a too new unrefined distro. IMO.
My notes said I tried nobara but they werent very detailed, I assume it wasnt great? Manjaro is one of the ones I didnt test, along with Garuda. I tried Fedora base and Arch base and they didnt work out of the box with most games.
My wallpaper and lock screens reset every time I restart. It borked my dual boot and now when I boot in the boot menu I have Fedora and Bazzite. No more windows. I still see it in the partition so I guess I just got to recover my windows. The install was a pain in the ass getting an error every time. So far on install I had to remove my old Linux mint EFI and rewrite a new one for bazzite. Gaming has worked no issues but its not been the smoothest transition. I kept getting an error code fatal error message. Had to terminal in to fix it before it would install. Had I known it was gonna be this much of an issue id have reinstalled mint which is a breeze just plug and click.
openSUSE is the best os in general, in my experience. I’ve kept coming back to it time and again for decades.
Why?
Zypper is by far the best package manager available, providing atomic and reversible updates, and their open build service makes reproducible builds. Those two are by far the best things about openSUSE. It’s not without its faults, which is why I have switched away at times, but I always come back after using the crap available in other distros.
Agree with this. Also they extensively use OpenQA CI and testing framework and it is what makes the rolling release openSUSE Tumbleweed the most stable rolling release distribution I have used since they can quickly catch an updated package that would cause problems and halt it being introduced. And even if something problematic would get through they really have excellent integration of BTRFS snapshoting with zypper and GRUB and system in general so you can easily boot from the last known working snapshot before the problematic update. And I would also say they have the best integration of KDE Plasma and KDE software of any distro out there. so yeah for these reasons I also consider openSUSE the bets GNU/Linux distribution out there.
The only distro I’ve never been able to successfully install without problems with the installer, over several versions and on several computers. Last time I gave up and haven’t thought about it since.
Deck runs arch, btw. It doesn’t need Suse.
Unrelated but does anyone kniws if there’s a mobile OS community? I remember finding one, but I can’t find it…
Supposedly CachyOS works amazing on handhelds. Arch based, too.
