Desktop Linux distros similar to Steam OS?
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wrote on last edited by [email protected]
To be clear, this question is for general PC use, and not only gaming.
Desktop mode on my Deck has easily become my favorite PC experience in a very long long time, and I use it more docked as a PC than for gaming. I've used Windows and Apple my entire life before now, so I have zero experience with Linux, other than the Steam Deck, but the OS is incrediby friendly to newcomers, and I'd say it's essentially a modern and polished version of Windows 95.
So what would you recommend as a similar experience for desktop?
Edit: I should probably add that I'm an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff, and maybe even some game dev at some point. So Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be superfantastic.
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To be clear, this question is for general PC use, and not only gaming.
Desktop mode on my Deck has easily become my favorite PC experience in a very long long time, and I use it more docked as a PC than for gaming. I've used Windows and Apple my entire life before now, so I have zero experience with Linux, other than the Steam Deck, but the OS is incrediby friendly to newcomers, and I'd say it's essentially a modern and polished version of Windows 95.
So what would you recommend as a similar experience for desktop?
Edit: I should probably add that I'm an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff, and maybe even some game dev at some point. So Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be superfantastic.
Bazzite, I guess.
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To be clear, this question is for general PC use, and not only gaming.
Desktop mode on my Deck has easily become my favorite PC experience in a very long long time, and I use it more docked as a PC than for gaming. I've used Windows and Apple my entire life before now, so I have zero experience with Linux, other than the Steam Deck, but the OS is incrediby friendly to newcomers, and I'd say it's essentially a modern and polished version of Windows 95.
So what would you recommend as a similar experience for desktop?
Edit: I should probably add that I'm an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff, and maybe even some game dev at some point. So Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be superfantastic.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Desktop mode on the Steam Deck is using KDE Plasma. You can use that on the vast majority of Linux distros.
Here is a few the spring to mind:
- Bazzite - A good place to start, their project goal is to basically be SteamOS like experience you can put on any machine.
- Fedora Workstation with KDE - Bazzite is based off of this project, it's a more general experiance, lots of people enjoy it.
- Kubuntu - Ubuntu is very popular distro, this is their KDE version.
- OpenSuse Tumbleweed - For folks who want the most up to date software possible.
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To be clear, this question is for general PC use, and not only gaming.
Desktop mode on my Deck has easily become my favorite PC experience in a very long long time, and I use it more docked as a PC than for gaming. I've used Windows and Apple my entire life before now, so I have zero experience with Linux, other than the Steam Deck, but the OS is incrediby friendly to newcomers, and I'd say it's essentially a modern and polished version of Windows 95.
So what would you recommend as a similar experience for desktop?
Edit: I should probably add that I'm an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff, and maybe even some game dev at some point. So Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be superfantastic.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]The closest thing to SteamOS is ChimeraOS. Though it sounds like you're mostly referring to Plasma, which is the desktop environment (DE) AKA the graphical user interface (GUI), and can be installed with just about any distro. ChimeraOS looks like it only comes with GNOME, which I personally prefer anyway.
It is very friendly until you need to do something other than very basic things, at which point you'd better be prepared to become very familiar with the terminal.
Bazzite is the new hotness though, and it's what I use, because it comes with a variety of customizations out of the box, and the ujust commands can greatly simplify a lot of common tasks that are otherwise far more complicated. Only downside of that is that it mostly only supports flatpaks and appimages, .deb and .rpm are the most common package formats and those have to be installed in containers, which comes with all the fun complications of containerization and sandboxing.
You might give GNOME a try though if you want to play around with something different. I much prefer it from an aesthetic perspective. Plasma is essentially made to look like Windows and GNOME more resembles MacOS.
Be aware that when using these distros that some games will recognize your device as a Steam Deck and apply some fucked up graphics tweaks that severely limit performance. You can undo them with a simple launch argument but it's super frustrating until you figure that out. Protondb is your friend there.
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To be clear, this question is for general PC use, and not only gaming.
Desktop mode on my Deck has easily become my favorite PC experience in a very long long time, and I use it more docked as a PC than for gaming. I've used Windows and Apple my entire life before now, so I have zero experience with Linux, other than the Steam Deck, but the OS is incrediby friendly to newcomers, and I'd say it's essentially a modern and polished version of Windows 95.
So what would you recommend as a similar experience for desktop?
Edit: I should probably add that I'm an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff, and maybe even some game dev at some point. So Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be superfantastic.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Welcome to the world of Linux. Check out Fedora Kinoite. Here's how they're similar:
It's immutable -- core OS files are read only. Just like the SteamDeck, this is more stable and secure. Updates happen all at once and the entire system can be rolled back to a working configuration ("snapshot") if it all goes south. Applications are containerized and installed via a software store. Flatpak via Flathub is my personal preference, here. It uses the KDE Plasma desktop environment. In Linux there are a handful of DEs to choose from. The SD uses KDE and so does Kinoite. This is probably where you'll see most similarities (that Windows '95 feel). Fedora's community, like the SD, is large. Got a problem? There's probably someone on the forums who had the same issue and can provide a solution.I've been running it exclusively for two years now. As a self proclaimed distro-hopper, that's really remarkable.
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Welcome to the world of Linux. Check out Fedora Kinoite. Here's how they're similar:
It's immutable -- core OS files are read only. Just like the SteamDeck, this is more stable and secure. Updates happen all at once and the entire system can be rolled back to a working configuration ("snapshot") if it all goes south. Applications are containerized and installed via a software store. Flatpak via Flathub is my personal preference, here. It uses the KDE Plasma desktop environment. In Linux there are a handful of DEs to choose from. The SD uses KDE and so does Kinoite. This is probably where you'll see most similarities (that Windows '95 feel). Fedora's community, like the SD, is large. Got a problem? There's probably someone on the forums who had the same issue and can provide a solution.I've been running it exclusively for two years now. As a self proclaimed distro-hopper, that's really remarkable.
I realize I sound AI AF.
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To be clear, this question is for general PC use, and not only gaming.
Desktop mode on my Deck has easily become my favorite PC experience in a very long long time, and I use it more docked as a PC than for gaming. I've used Windows and Apple my entire life before now, so I have zero experience with Linux, other than the Steam Deck, but the OS is incrediby friendly to newcomers, and I'd say it's essentially a modern and polished version of Windows 95.
So what would you recommend as a similar experience for desktop?
Edit: I should probably add that I'm an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff, and maybe even some game dev at some point. So Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be superfantastic.
I generally think the most important thing when you're not yet very experienced with Linux is to just pick a distro that is relatively popular, since these are usually very googleable.
My personal favorite is probably still Fedora. Pick Fedora Workstation Gnome if you want something that has the most online support and Fedora KDE if you want something with a similar workflow as Windows.
I also generally think that using a normal Linux Distro is a better choice if you don't want to do only gaming and nothing else, since Steam OS actually makes some things a lot more difficult (you cannot easily install many programs due to its immutable nature, it only has AMD GPU support, doesn't include even basic things like print functionality, the installation process is not the easiest, ...) These things will be pretty big hurdles to overcome for a newcomer. The only real thing that is probably easier on Steam OS is that Steam is already pre-installed, but considering that you can literally install Steam on Fedora without using the terminal probably less than 10 mouse clicks, I wouldn't consider this a very big advantage.
If you do end up going for a normal distro (like Fedora), I would btw highly recommend installing Steam not as a flatpak but as a "normal" application. This is not very difficult and will provide a much more stable experience than if you just use the Flatpak (which may be the first thing you come across in the software store). There are short tutorials available for: Fedora, Ubuntu, ...
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To be clear, this question is for general PC use, and not only gaming.
Desktop mode on my Deck has easily become my favorite PC experience in a very long long time, and I use it more docked as a PC than for gaming. I've used Windows and Apple my entire life before now, so I have zero experience with Linux, other than the Steam Deck, but the OS is incrediby friendly to newcomers, and I'd say it's essentially a modern and polished version of Windows 95.
So what would you recommend as a similar experience for desktop?
Edit: I should probably add that I'm an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff, and maybe even some game dev at some point. So Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be superfantastic.
I vouch for Kubuntu. It uses KDE Plasma, which is the exact same UI as SreamOS desktop mode. It's based on Ubuntu, which is a very popular distro, so there's a lot of support and apps that are packaged for it
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Desktop mode on the Steam Deck is using KDE Plasma. You can use that on the vast majority of Linux distros.
Here is a few the spring to mind:
- Bazzite - A good place to start, their project goal is to basically be SteamOS like experience you can put on any machine.
- Fedora Workstation with KDE - Bazzite is based off of this project, it's a more general experiance, lots of people enjoy it.
- Kubuntu - Ubuntu is very popular distro, this is their KDE version.
- OpenSuse Tumbleweed - For folks who want the most up to date software possible.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I had seen Bazzite, and yes it does sound exactly like what I asked, but then on their website, every single feature/selling point is about games or performance. I don't see one word about general usability, or applications, support, or anything, and I'm not sure who builds a PC used solely for gaming.
I'm an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff. Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be fantastic.
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I had seen Bazzite, and yes it does sound exactly like what I asked, but then on their website, every single feature/selling point is about games or performance. I don't see one word about general usability, or applications, support, or anything, and I'm not sure who builds a PC used solely for gaming.
I'm an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff. Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be fantastic.
Apologies, I don't understand. Is any modern Linux distro lacking "general usability" or applications? Anyway, for Bazzite, there's a bunch of ways to install software. (Though I haven't used it myself.) I'm also not sure what you're looking for when you're saying "support". Good documentation? A helpful community? Continued active development?
Just because there's a strong focus on gaming doesn't mean the distro would suddenly do bad at everything else, especially.. general home/office use. Linux is good with that across the board. I hope I didn't misunderstand. Please explain.
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I realize I sound AI AF.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Lol, I will choose to trust this reply isn't an elaborate AI ploy. I'll definitely consider that, and you've already taught me a couple things
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I had seen Bazzite, and yes it does sound exactly like what I asked, but then on their website, every single feature/selling point is about games or performance. I don't see one word about general usability, or applications, support, or anything, and I'm not sure who builds a PC used solely for gaming.
I'm an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff. Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be fantastic.
The same folks who made Bazzite also have Aurora and Bluefin. Those are general purpose distros with the same ideas as Bazzite, just less gaming stuff bundled in. The difference between the two is just the desktop environment (gnome for bluefin, kde for aurora).
But even though Bazzite is focused on gaming, it is still a pretty good distro for general use too. The same stuff that enables windows games to run on it also help run any windows program just as well, so it might be a good pick if you use any software that only runs on windows.
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I generally think the most important thing when you're not yet very experienced with Linux is to just pick a distro that is relatively popular, since these are usually very googleable.
My personal favorite is probably still Fedora. Pick Fedora Workstation Gnome if you want something that has the most online support and Fedora KDE if you want something with a similar workflow as Windows.
I also generally think that using a normal Linux Distro is a better choice if you don't want to do only gaming and nothing else, since Steam OS actually makes some things a lot more difficult (you cannot easily install many programs due to its immutable nature, it only has AMD GPU support, doesn't include even basic things like print functionality, the installation process is not the easiest, ...) These things will be pretty big hurdles to overcome for a newcomer. The only real thing that is probably easier on Steam OS is that Steam is already pre-installed, but considering that you can literally install Steam on Fedora without using the terminal probably less than 10 mouse clicks, I wouldn't consider this a very big advantage.
If you do end up going for a normal distro (like Fedora), I would btw highly recommend installing Steam not as a flatpak but as a "normal" application. This is not very difficult and will provide a much more stable experience than if you just use the Flatpak (which may be the first thing you come across in the software store). There are short tutorials available for: Fedora, Ubuntu, ...
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Cool, that is very helpful, and yes one main reason for this is I can't install Adobe, and Blender3D has no GPU rendering support. I have yet to come across the lack of printing, lol. But what I like is just everyday usability, and also the lack of bullshit from Microsoft, Apple, and also Android that gives me literal anxiety at this point. I dont know, it just feels like the zen garden of the computer world for some reason, but yeah more support would be grand, as well as playing Cyberpunk with mods and 60fps ultra.
This and Kubuntu are sounding good, and probably better than Bazzite for everyday and art stuff.
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To be clear, this question is for general PC use, and not only gaming.
Desktop mode on my Deck has easily become my favorite PC experience in a very long long time, and I use it more docked as a PC than for gaming. I've used Windows and Apple my entire life before now, so I have zero experience with Linux, other than the Steam Deck, but the OS is incrediby friendly to newcomers, and I'd say it's essentially a modern and polished version of Windows 95.
So what would you recommend as a similar experience for desktop?
Edit: I should probably add that I'm an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff, and maybe even some game dev at some point. So Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be superfantastic.
I just put steam in big picture mode in an workspace in hyprland and it works wonders. Same thing basically as my deck.
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To be clear, this question is for general PC use, and not only gaming.
Desktop mode on my Deck has easily become my favorite PC experience in a very long long time, and I use it more docked as a PC than for gaming. I've used Windows and Apple my entire life before now, so I have zero experience with Linux, other than the Steam Deck, but the OS is incrediby friendly to newcomers, and I'd say it's essentially a modern and polished version of Windows 95.
So what would you recommend as a similar experience for desktop?
Edit: I should probably add that I'm an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff, and maybe even some game dev at some point. So Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be superfantastic.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]~~Heads up if you're eyeing Fedora or its progeny like Bazzite, Nobara: https://news.itsfoss.com/fedora-32-bit-support/~~
Proposal withdrawn according to @[email protected]
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~~Heads up if you're eyeing Fedora or its progeny like Bazzite, Nobara: https://news.itsfoss.com/fedora-32-bit-support/~~
Proposal withdrawn according to @[email protected]
The proposal has been dropped
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The proposal has been dropped
The proposal has been dropped
That was fast! Will update, suh.
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The proposal has been dropped
That was fast! Will update, suh.
Unsurprisingly so. The feedback has been overwhelmingly negative.
That being said, it's still a matter of time until it happens
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To be clear, this question is for general PC use, and not only gaming.
Desktop mode on my Deck has easily become my favorite PC experience in a very long long time, and I use it more docked as a PC than for gaming. I've used Windows and Apple my entire life before now, so I have zero experience with Linux, other than the Steam Deck, but the OS is incrediby friendly to newcomers, and I'd say it's essentially a modern and polished version of Windows 95.
So what would you recommend as a similar experience for desktop?
Edit: I should probably add that I'm an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff, and maybe even some game dev at some point. So Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be superfantastic.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]For some reason CachyOS hasn't been mentioned. Like others said basically any distro can do what you're describing, and this one is also one of those "with gaming in mind" distros. Didn't mean you can't do anything else on them, but anything making should "just work".
They also have a dedicated image/installer for "handheld" PCs like the steam deck that come preconfigured for that interface combination (but don't use this special image on a normal PC/desktop).Like SteamOS, it's based on Arch, but unlike SteamOS or Bazzite it isn't immutable. That's a matter of preference. Being a rolling release means frequent and direct updates of new releases of any kind (kernel, software, everything, ...). KDE is the default install option, like on the steam deck, but of course basically all other options are also available is you want (additionally or instead of kde).
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To be clear, this question is for general PC use, and not only gaming.
Desktop mode on my Deck has easily become my favorite PC experience in a very long long time, and I use it more docked as a PC than for gaming. I've used Windows and Apple my entire life before now, so I have zero experience with Linux, other than the Steam Deck, but the OS is incrediby friendly to newcomers, and I'd say it's essentially a modern and polished version of Windows 95.
So what would you recommend as a similar experience for desktop?
Edit: I should probably add that I'm an artist and designer, and play around with Blender and 3D modeling stuff, and maybe even some game dev at some point. So Adobe support, and GPU Blender support would be superfantastic.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]One thing to be aware of in Linux is the fragmentation of where packages can be installed from.
Default package manager? Differs across distro-bases: rpm, apt, pacman, apk and more. Cross-distro? Flatpak, snap, appImage. Install on "wrong" distro? Distrobox and others.
Oftentimes one package is packed up for multiple managers and you'll see a giant list of red and green in their github showing where you can and can't find it, but it's still worth being aware of it.
There are frontends that unify a handful of these but I wish there was a better option. Also inb4 standards.xkcd
With that said, getting started in Linux I recommend immutable images, only because you can't tweak it so hard it borks. And afaik updates will always "just work". I quite liked bazzite for that.
