this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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Huh. I never even considered the possibility of putting SteamOS on a laptop/desktop... I have a spare engineering laptop sitting around, might try it.
I completely advocate for it. It costs you nothing but time and disk space. You can still run games from other sources with only slight tinkering.
Open source is so beneficial for humanity and for gaming there aren't really downsides for tons and tons of games.
You lose all the spyware from microsoft, the incessant mandatory patching and upgrade notifications and loads of other things that provide no value.
Nothing stops you from being able to dual boot windows or run it in a VM either.
AFAIK, VM gaming is still a pain in the ass. You need to jump through a lot of hoops for any kind of GPU passthrough.
Think they meant run Windows in a VM if you need it
Lots of/some soft doesn't support it, like photoshop and 3dstudio, but it might work if you're lucky!
As an artist i quit photoshop a while ago cause it was just terrible for anything but indepth photo editing. And now irs terrible for anything since it just steals your art and you pay increasing yearly for it. Without the ability to cancel.
Afaik SteamOS still only supports very limited hardware configurations similar to the steam deck, for example only AMD GPU are supported (Nvidia is in beta support as of recently, I think?).
I thought that was still not officially available, only forks or rebuilds of sorts?
They have to publish kernel edits,
As far as I am aware it’s just Arch with gamescope though so you aren’t gaining anything from using SteamOS 3 compared to a typical Linux build
What would be the advantage of installing it on a laptop? Can't you just run steam on Ubuntu or whatever and use Big Picture mode?
Personally I can't run steam and a game on a my laptops. They're good enough to run games like subnautica and stalker on wine but steam requires like 1gb of RAM and runs like shit.
Edit: on older Ubuntu lts versions, not 24
Hm so SteamOS uses less resources that the steam app? I assumed SteamOS was just a streamlined way to run Steam?
SteamOS 3 is Steam big picture mode inside of gamescope (a standalone wayland mini compositor), without your KDE desktop running in the background. You still have bluetooth, wifi and whatever other background processes running, but if you want to use a video editor, use your terminal or something else not on Steam then you have the option to boot out of gamescope session and into desktop mode from the 'Power' menu option. In game mode you still have to deal with Steam being a webapp but with no other desktop programs running, aside from the game you're playing.
OK, so the comment above mine is misleading. The difference in resources would be small as my DE and Compositor use negligible resources.
Wouldn't it be the opposite if SteamOS is lighter? I'm already running things like i3 but having even more stripped out sounds like it might be something. Maybe I'm misunderstanding
You should check out bazzite