Desktop Linux distros similar to Steam OS?
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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.
If you haven't looked at Garuda yet, it's the system I switched to after Bazzite. It's Arch based and user friendly.
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A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Cinnamon supports fractional scaling, mixed dpi, pretty sure it handles mixed refresh rates, and wayland support was added in mint 21.3 as experimental. I feel like you havent touched mint in 5+ years.
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Except substance painter and designer, weirdly enough
And not via adobes suite, but via steam
It's the only way to get an official Linux version of those tools
Are these tools being bought buy Adobe more recently ? That could be an explaination why, but that's good to know thanks for sharing.
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Are these tools being bought buy Adobe more recently ? That could be an explaination why, but that's good to know thanks for sharing.
A couple years ago from allegorithmic. But a Linux version was never around
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A couple years ago from allegorithmic. But a Linux version was never around
Wine/Proton's magic
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Wine/Proton's magic
Nope. Native Linux. And wine/proton didn't work very well before
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Nope. Native Linux. And wine/proton didn't work very well before
Oh woaw that is... interesting
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I agree, really anything with KDE Plasma will feel basically the same because the Steam Deck's desktop is basically stock kde.
really anything with KDE Plasma
Op might like the stability broihght by immutability
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Cinnamon supports fractional scaling, mixed dpi, pretty sure it handles mixed refresh rates, and wayland support was added in mint 21.3 as experimental. I feel like you havent touched mint in 5+ years.
This is not actually true, mint supports x.org hacks for those things, not natively and properly, for example, the way mixed refresh rates work is like this: lets say you have a 60fps and 120fps monitor, both will actually run at 120, but half will be culled on the 60, meaning much worse performance and battery life... this becomes exceptionally bad if they are not clean multiples, say a 144hz and 60.
fractional scaling works in a similarly hacky way, it renders at 2x and then downscales, as does mixed dpi, meaning you're paying the full rendering cost.
they kinda work, but these are terribly hacky workarounds that are impossible to avoid due to the fundamental nature of x.org. This is not something they can fix without wayland support, which will take forever to mature into usability because their dev speed is so slow.
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The problem with using Bazzite as the solution to new users bricking their Linux installs is I've had Bazzite's update utility break itself 3 times now. I couldn't possibly recommend this distro to someone after that. I literally switched my desktop back to Arch for reliability reasons. Ridiculous.
There are stories like this for every distro, unfortunately.
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Ah, so Adobe?? Say Adobe and I'm there.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Not Adobe. Only extremely old, no longer for sale versions of Adobe products can run on Linux.
There are better--- by which I mean worse but free--- alternatives that you should replace them with if you want to abandon Windows.
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I like the em dash and am very upset that AI has stolen it.
It hasn't stolen anything, lol. You can and should still use it — it's at code point 2014, just where it always was.
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There are stories like this for every distro, unfortunately.
Yeah but in Bazzite's case one of those issues (the one from about a year ago) hit over 99% of their users. I really think that all these people talking about how great Bazzite is either haven't been using it for long enough for the devs to have fucked up or they just haven't noticed that their system hasn't been updating for the past year.
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It hasn't stolen anything, lol. You can and should still use it — it's at code point 2014, just where it always was.
I already have some issues with my public tone sounding... Too official. Using the em-dash just makes it seem like I might be a bot. I'm not going to bother with that.
