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this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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SteamOS is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting. I reckon there are quite a few people who are waiting for its release before trying Linux.
Does SteamOS even have functional desktop, or is it just Steam big picture wrapper thing?
It uses KDE for that
Yep. What I was meaning, will SteamOS boot right into KDE and be a computer operating system first, or boot into big picture mode and be a gaming system first.
@PetulantBandicoot @bdonvr It's more advanced than a "Steam Big Picture Wrapper thing". When you're in gaming mode it runs it's own gamescope window manager, etc. In desktop mode it's full plasma with KWin. I'd expect it would boot into gaming mode first, with desktop as something you can switch to.
Yes, on the Steam Deck you can restart into KDE.
Yes, but it is also set up as an OS image.
I think there is a process for persistence, but without some effort, changes are lost for OS updates.
Changes aren't lost on update. If you enable a sudo user/password, and make changes to the system that way, those changes can be lost when applying the new system image.
Its an immutable Arch-based distro and you have full readwrite to your home directory and all config, settings, and files within persist.
Even the stuff in the "immutable" section isn't necessarily wiped, it's more that there is a strong chance changes may be overwritten. I'd definitely make no guarantees to anything stored on the immutable sections of SteamOS.
I always recommend against it people wanting a gaming linux desktop
SteamOS being an immutable operating system works a bit different to most well known operating systems
albeit this also makes any breackage almost impossible
I am pretty sure even LTT Linus said he was waiting for a SteamOS release before trying again. I was thinking, like damn dude, if you can't use PopOS, how will this be any different for you.
Maybe, just maybe, this will stop people like him from catastrophically uninstalling their entire desktop environment.
It boots into Game scope (as others said, it's not "big picture mode" it's a compositor stack tailored for high gaming performance) but it's nothing more than an immutable arch distribution (and immutability can be disabled for tweaking) so you could definitely swap the defaults if someone has documented how.
Would be a nice feature to have once SteamOS becomes independent of the deck.
Unlike Windows, yes. It does.