this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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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:

Link to our Matrix Space

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Source is this video:

Windows Was The Problem All Along - Dave2D

We could obviously compare performance between windows and steamOS before on the steam deck, or between windows and Bazzite on other handhelds. But this is the first time we have had official windows and SteamOS builds for the same hardware.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (4 children)

I've tested out Manjaro, KDE Neon, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian, Mint, and Fedora - across two desktops and a laptop.

Problems have been all over the spectrum. Not being to install at all, trouble getting it to dual boot after installing (despite following a guide), getting NAS drives to be writeable, hardware compatibility, finding alternatives to proprietary software which may or may not do everything the original did, and more.

I'm semi enjoying the tinkering for now, and I'm not regretting trying to de-Windows as much as possible, but I think people who say Linux is ready for mainstream are out of touch with the average person's computer literacy.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

dual booting anything with windows (including another copy of windows) is an insufferable nightmare caused by windows.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Not all instances were dual booting, nor are all of the problems I've encountered or described above related with dual booting.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

👍 completely valid. just pointing out windows is a malicious cohabitant on a drive

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

Even among that I've varied. In one installation I have Windows sharing a drive, separate partition for Linux. In another computer they're on completely different drives.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

If you want gaming you should try the nobara distro, great stuff

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I do a lot of things other than gaming.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Oh ok very interesting. Thanks for the insight.

And good luck :D

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Imagine the hardware compatibility issues you'd have trying to install MacOS on your machine. Probably a nightmare. Better to just buy hardware that is compatible with the OS you want to run.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Well it's not a very compelling sales pitch to tell me to ditch the multiple thousands of dollars of hardware and just buy new stuff. If the goal is to get people to switch to Linux from Windows, I hope you're not the one leading the charge.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

I think setting expectations appropriately is a reasonable expectation of new users. Microsoft expects it of Windows users. Apple expects it of MacOS users. For Linux, nope, we must have a different standard. If we don't, Linux isn't ready for the average user. Got news for you, average users don't install Windows, they don't install MacOS, and they don't install Linux or any other OS. They buy pre-built machines where everything is taken care of. Average users buying pre-built machines do not experience the woes of a tech nerd.