this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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Steam Deck

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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:

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[–] twinnie@feddit.uk 18 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

I’m out of the loop and I don’t own a deck but didn’t Valve have a Linux OS years ago?

[–] BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one 31 points 2 weeks ago

They silently switched from Debian to Arch under the hood for the Deck and never released it to the public for download.

[–] amelore@slrpnk.net 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

They didn't maintain it, let it die, and made a new one.

[–] neshura@bookwormstory.social 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

tbf back then they picked possibly the worst base for a gaming distro, a problem that has been remedied with the new SteamOS

[–] icogniito@lemmy.zip 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That is not why it failed.

It failed because the market of Linux native games was minimal and at that time compatibility tools like proton didn’t exist and wine was nowhere near sophisticated enough and required too much fiddling to get to work, especially for the layman which steamos very much was and is targeted towards.

[–] neshura@bookwormstory.social 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

A thing can fail for multiple reasons at the same time

[–] icogniito@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 weeks ago

Being based on Debian is not one of them, and any others are honestly made irrelevant by the gave that a gaming centric OS couldn’t run 99% of the games out there

[–] bobby@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

tbf back then they picked possibly the worst base for a gaming distro, a problem that has been remedied with the new SteamOS

The actual runtime the games run on is still based on Debian, though.

[–] neshura@bookwormstory.social 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

that's fine and all but the problem with the debian based SteamOS were the horribly outdated GPU drivers. The runtime was fine but the OS lacked support for bleeding edge hardware (which is somewhat important for a gaming OS)

[–] bobby@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 weeks ago

that’s fine and all but the problem with the debian based SteamOS were the horribly outdated GPU drivers.

SteamOS doesn't use plain upstream GPU drivers. Back when SteamOS 3 was announced, Valve employees said in interviews that switching to an Arch base would allow them to more frequently update the OS, yes, but now with SteamOS 3 being out since quite some time it became clear that this is simply not the case. Big Arch package syncs are a rare occurrence, kernel and Mesa are maintained in their own downstream branches.

[–] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 10 points 2 weeks ago

As someone else mentioned, that one was based on a different distribution of Linux, and had a lot of differences in function/setup to the current version of SteamOS on the steam deck. The steam deck's version is steam deck exclusive right now, and people have to use other options like Bazzite and HoloOS if they want a Steam Deck-like experience on another device.

This implies that Valve is finally ready to let other vendors use SteamOS, which is great news.

[–] DannyBoy@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

SteamOS 2 came out almost 10 years ago (!) with the release of Steam Machines in 2015. That one was public but it seems Valve has pulled the links to download it. SteamOS 3 is what is on the Steamdeck which isn't publicly available yet.

[–] pogodem0n@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

While SteamOS is open-source and everyone can build one for themselves, it is only officially supported on Steam Deck. They promised to release a generic version of it targeting more devices in the past, and this post hints that that day is closer.

[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago

They promised to release a generic version of it targeting more devices in the past, and this post hints that that day is closer.

This post says that Valve is talking about hardware by Valve partners with SteamOS developed in collaboration with these partners. It says nothing about it being generic.