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:
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[Help] - A request for help or support.
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[PSA] - Sharing important information.
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[Update] - An update to a previous post.
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Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.

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Follow the rules of Sopuli
Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
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This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
Have fun.

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

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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?

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[–] [email protected] 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 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.

[–] [email protected] 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.