ChimeraOS: Instantly turn any PC into a gaming console | Hacker News Reader

ChimeraOS: Instantly turn any PC into a gaming console

chimeraos.org

181 pointskosasbest95 comments

This project would benefit greatly from some screenshots or videos on any of the pages linked in the header. Also maybe it makes more sense on mobile but the hardware screen is painful to read on desktop.

It's not at all clear to me what this brings to the table over the default Steam Deck software (I know that's only 1 of many devices it supports). I'm pretty freaking happy with the default OS plus EmuDeck on my Steam Deck. I know there are launchers for Epic/Blizzard/GoG which I'll probably setup eventually but so far I haven't needed or cared about anything from those sources.

I assume this is really for Steam Deck clones or desktop computers.

Here is a video of the UI I found (not endorsing anything, just the first video I found that showed the UI): https://youtu.be/E2NIGPpz_vY?t=19 - It looks very similar to the Steam Deck UI which I find very nice to use.

> It looks very similar to the Steam Deck UI

It is the Steam Deck UI. See the repo description on: https://github.com/ChimeraOS/chimeraos

There might be some differences outside of Steam's UI. In this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2NIGPpz_vY) it looks like the desktop mode switches to Gnome, whereas I'm pretty sure the Steam Deck uses Plasma. Maybe that's configurable.

> This project would benefit greatly from some screenshots

I can’t think of any project that wouldn’t benefit from screenshots.

I keep seeing project that seem really cool, but their creators do their absolute best to NOT show what it looks like, or what it does. This is a mystery to me.

> This is a mystery to me.

It doesn’t surprise me. The skillset to maintain/build/etc this project and the marketing skillset rarely overlap. Personally I hate working on the public-facing aspect of my side business even though I know it’s probably just as important if not more so than the technical aspect. Doesn’t matter how good something is if people don’t know about it.

Open source regularly suffers from this and I’m always very impressed when I see a project with good technical _and_ marketing chops.

> over the default Steam Deck software

Alternatively, I would claim auto login/boot to Steam's Big Screen is an alternative, with much better hardware support.

I had to watch several videos on youtube to answer this question for myself. The advantages to using ChimeraOS over big picture mode seem to be tied to Valve's gamescope compositor, which gives you access to a nice UI for limiting framerates, applying mangohud, and choosing upscaling settings. ChimeraOS also has compatibility with Steam Deck plugins.

I know nothing about the plugins. You can definitely do all the other things outside of gamescope's UI, but... it actually is a pretty nice compact UI.

This statement

> Instantly turn any PC into a gaming console

doesn’t quite fit the limitations stated on the download page

> * AMD Radeon RX 400 series or newer GPU required > * Nvidia and Intel GPUs are not supported > * hybrid graphics are not supported > * virtual machines are not supported

I imagine that not supported doesn’t mean “won’t work”, but rather means “we won’t burn time helping you if it doesn’t work”.

Which is reasonable tbh, nvidia and it’s drivers are such a big stupid pain.

Nvidia makes sense (still a bit wonky, even with the new open kernel driver) but Intel?

Definitely a reasonable question. Personally I would answer that by asking, “who uses intel for gaming”? Currently, very few, even less than AMD (lmao). Meaning the devs likely just don’t have one and can’t make any promises. I bet if someone bought them one they’d appreciate it ;)

I haven’t been following the arc cards very closely, but my loose impression was the drivers were heavily in flux until recently, and I’ve seen complications pop up in regards to mixtures of bios/uefi options, such as resizable bar being crucial for performance and some virtualization options causing incompatibility or performance issues. Basically the dust is still settling.

As such it’s hard to say “yeah this should work”.

I do think they should list the reasons why certain things are “not supported*, what “not supported” actually means, and not bury these surprises. Otherwise it guarantees confusion and (my wild but good faith) speculation.

The Arc cards are pretty good for DX12/Vulkan games, but pretty bad at DX9/11 games.

Luckily, the most popular Linux translation layers translate DX9/11 games into Vulkan. In fact, Intel is using such a translation layer on Windows and has significantly improved its performance that way.

Going by these graphs: https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-10p-faster/2 Cyberpunk plays quite well. Double digit percentage gains are reported every few months or so as the driver keeps developing.

The biggest issue still standing seems to be the lack of sparse resources support, but the Intel driver seems to be faking support to prevent games that don't actually use it from crashing in an upcoming update, fixing games like Elden Ring.

I think it's not a bad choice for an affordable Linux gaming rig depending on the games you play. Perhaps it's better to wait for Battlemage first, though. There's still a lot of tooling centered around AMD and Nvidia cards and the Intel drivers still aren't where they need to be if you need to play certain games.

Yeah just I noticed a few recent benchmarks and was kinda surprised. I definitely need to give them a better look.

That said, my own use case is a hilariously overcomplicated VM setup. I archive stuff for myself and help with other archival projects as a hobby, I realized the epyc machine I got for the PCIe lanes is basically perfect for sticking my “desktop” on a numa node and passing an AMD rx 6700xt. Host is currently proxmox, eventually moving to NixOS.

As such an important factor for me is good VFIO compatibility. AMD was supposed to be “it”, but they still have bizarre reset bugs show up in some of their latest models and have gone radio silent on the issue. My own reference card works fortunately, but there’s little telling if another kind will or not. And nvidia has all the typical out of kernel problems while the new drivers mature, but doesn’t have reset issues. Also I dislike Nvidia somewhat more than intel.

When I’m back on the market in a few years that will be the deciding factor. I’m definitely not a typical target market though.

Arc drivers on Linux still don't support all the features needed by VKD3D which is required to get a lot of DirectX 12 games up and running.

> Personally I would answer that by asking, “who uses intel for gaming”?

9% of Steam users.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Yes but that also includes iGPUs not just Arc gpus.

The new Intel GPUs supposedly deliver pretty good value for money, they're around a geforce 1080 in performance or something? So that number might be increasing.

You can play a lot of indie games perfectly fine on integrated hardware

Ok, nVidia and it’s drivers - quite quirky, I know. I happen to have an AMD laptop nowadays but most of my life I had Intel (which felt very good although not powerful) and this sounds wild to me it wouldn't be sufficient to play a NES game.

Seems odd too. I'm not sure why it wouldn't support Nvidia cards. The open-source Nouveau drivers for Nvidia cards has been in the mainline kernel for years now. Most Nvidia cards just work out of the box now in Linux.

You’re not going to want to do much gaming with the nouveau driver vs the proprietary driver, and nouveau’s support for newer nvidia GPUs is limited.

This is changing! NVIDIA has started modifying their driver architecture to support open-sourcing their drivers, much like AMD did years ago. As part of this process, they've released updates firmwares for newer cards which support re-clocking, which could finally allow Nouveau to run newer NVIDIA GPUs at full speed.

For AMD, lots of people game on the community open-source drivers in Mesa. Presumably the same could be true for NVIDIA in the future.

See: https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Turing-Firmware-2023

It's definitely not up for AAA gaming but it's not horrible either. But why restrict Nvidia cards altogether when nouveau already supported by the kernel? Obviously it would be a stop-gap solution until proper support for the proprietary drivers is integrated but people like me can't run Chimera right now. I wouldn't mind trying it but I can't.

> It's definitely not up for AAA gaming but it's not horrible either.

Granted I don't have a recent GPU (1050Ti), but nouveau has been unable to run plasma with compositing enabled reliably for more than about 10 days straight on that system. Sometimes I can clear up the issues by forcing a mode-switch, othertimes it requires I restart Xorg, othertimes a reboot is needed. I should note I gave up on it in late 2021, so things may have improved in that time.

ChimeraOS carried nvidia drivers for years. The issue is that Valve's Gamescope, which is now a requirement for Steam doesn't run well on the nvidia drivers, and old big picture mode got retired.

i feel like this is very intentionally buried

I think GeForce NOW is better equipped to make that statement.

*A gaming console with the most restrictive library around because we played our cards wrong and advertised it as running these games and not just mostly any game on steam so some game publishers and developers got really upset they weren't asked.

I am afraid that if NVidia really fought it in court, the publishers would just turn to DRM with activation limits.

Shadow gets away with it just fine (still do not recommend, Haswell CPUs in 2023 for that monthly price are a joke they only tell you about afterwards). NVIDIA made the mistake of advertising games as "working on GeForce Now" and restricting what runs in their cloud in the first place - probably out of fear someone would run a miner instead of games.

Activation limits were extremely unpopular during their time 10-15 years ago and have mostly been removed from old games. I don't think that's coming back. They really have no reason to object to their game being run from Stream/Epic either. The main complainant back then was from Hinterland (who make The Long Dark) who was more morally outraged than concerned with lost revenue or such.

I can see how it's a moral grey area to namedrop games in an advertisement like that too. Imagine NVIDIA printing some game's art on a GPU box. They should've just logged you into Steam/Epic/GOG and let you do your thing.

Tying into game streaming services would be nice. A low end PC can run Geforce Now or Gamepass more easily than some of these games.

Geforce Now arbitrarily restricts their games by platform at the request of the publisher. E.g. you can't play Genshin in a browser, only the Android and Windows native apps.

What about computer with AMD processor and Nvidia card installed? Can it just ignore the Nvidia card?

Funny because AMD probably has the lowest share of the three if we include all PCs including office ones (and we should since the website says "any PC")

Actually, we have very relevant data in https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

> PC VIDEO CARD USAGE BY MFG during FEBRUARY 2022 - JULY 2023

> 15.93% AMD

> 74.69% Nvidia

And that's only for people who run Steam, who are likely to have high-end cards. This is, it does not include PCs for office workloads or most laptops. Intel is at 9% right now in that Steam survey so the real number is much, much higher than AMD (and perhaps nvidia too). This makes AMD the third one in user share.

If we're counting integrated graphics in this, then AMD probably ain't anywhere close to being in 3rd. Between AMD and Intel, AMD's at around 35-40% of the CPU market (per https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-int...), and most of those are probably going to be APUs or otherwise have an integrated GPU.

I can't find any solid numbers on the percentage of PCs with dedicated GPUs, but I'd be very surprised if it was anywhere near that figure.

> Funny because AMD probably has the lowest share of the three if we include all PCs including office ones (and we should since the website says "any PC").

Steam says that users in Linux have a overwhelming majority of AMD and Intel GPUs [1]:

- number 1 GPU is AMD VANGOGH Steam Deck APU with 42.05% by itself;

- top 10 Nvidia GPUs have only 9.54%;

- top 10 "not Steam Deck APU, not Nvidia" GPUs are 26.64% of the market, so almost outnumber them 2.8-to-1;

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=linux

I have 7 PCs in my house and (technically) none of them have AMD GPUs. I've only ever loaded steam on one of them:

1 nvidia discrete GPU

1 ATI discrete GPU (it almost certainly isn't supported as it's too old to work with the open-source AMD drivers)

5 different intel iGPUs (1 NUC, one mITX, and 3 laptops, because WTF do I need a discrete GPU in a laptop for).

I wonder what these 7 PCs have in common that none of them would have AMD GPUs?

- 5 of them have no need for discrete graphics; of those 3 are laptops, which (for many years) were basically going to be intel CPUs unless you go out of your way to buy AMD. One other is a NUC (I wanted the Pulse8 CEC module which is available internally only for NUCs), and the last one is used largely as a server; the only low-power mITX board I could find that supported ECC was a Xeon-D.

- One was built before AMD sold GPUs.

- One was built in a time in which AMD GPUs ran much hotter than Nvidia GPUs at the same performance level, so I would have only bought one if I was more price sensitive.

This is one of those cases where the website would benefit from a video or screenshots above the fold. I want to know what it looks like, how the UI flows from thing to thing, etc.

ChimeraOS was previously called GamerOS and when SteamOS stagnated it was basically an attempt at a new Linux big picture SteamOS with evergreen distro but with versioned upgrades (it was SteamOS but better at the time). It also uses Arch kernel but with a sort of immutable update approach that I’m certain was the inspiration for the current SteamOS.

Very cool project, could do with screenshots and things, and the rename made it more cryptic but it is genuinely excellent and earlier in the project it was a clear lifeline for abandoned (by valve not releasing new versions) SteamOS devices.

One of the better examples of the extremely talented developer who does not understand customers/new users.

Show us a screenshot or a video before putting an install button in front of us.

Was about to leave a comment saying the exact same thing. I don't understand how someone makes it this far in a project, and just completely drops the ball when showing the work off to the world. You don't even need to naturally be good at marketing - just literally copy what any somewhat-known brand / project does.

> You don't even need to naturally be good at marketing - just literally copy what any somewhat-known brand / project does.

If I had a nickel for every "somewhat-known brand / project" that (like in this case) fails to include any sort of screenshot or demo on the homepage, I'd be rich enough to buy a social network, run it into the ground, and rename it to some letter of the alphabet.

Point being: good, informative homepages are by far the exception rather than the norm.

Why people who are into retrogames dont need to be advertised to

Its not about the games. Its about how much effort it takes to play the games using ChimeraOS. Kinda nice to have an idea what you are in for before you spend some time installing and testing a new OS build.

Previously known as GamerOS, it's basically arch-based clone of SteamOS 2, which came around between Steam Machines becoming irrelevant, and the Steam Deck showing up.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WkIGUuVLrn8

Thanks. I was wondering what it was based on and couldn't tell based on the website.

> arch-based clone of SteamOS 2

So SteamOS 3?

It definitely made me wonder if SteamOS 3 was a clone of ChimeraOS!

I've been running Chimera for a few months now on a all-AMD PC hooked up to my living room TV, and I've been pleased. I had previously set up Windows to launch big picture mode on startup but there was always a delay where I would see the Windows desktop which shattered the whole illusion. Plus, Windows.

Chimera really boots directly into big picture and has worked flawlessly for the use case of playing Steam games. Beyond that, it falls a little flat. I thought that gamepad input for mouse control would be supported in desktop mode but as far as I can tell it's not, at least not out of the box.

There is a nifty phone client you can use to download games from the Epic Store, retro games, etc. to be added to the non-Steam games section in BPM, but I wish you could do it from the desktop. A more or less fully-featured, gamepad-controlled OS would be the holy grail.

A similar project is Ludo [1] which is part of the libretro family. More for emulation but really a clean UI (it actually has screenshots)

[1]: https://ludo.libretro.com/#about

Oh, I installed Ludo (the program, not the LibreELEC based LudoOS) on my Debian laptop a couple days ago. I don't have the time, knowledge or patience to fiddle and try to optimize Retroarch. For Android, I use Lemuroid, which has a similar premise of simplicity.

Back on topic, there's also Lakka as a LibreELEC with full Retroarch. I think there are other similar projects around, like EmulationStation.

Ugh. I really tried to like Lakka but it was such a mess. I'll never install a non-raspbian OS on a rasppi again.

I like the naked Retroarch UI so much better than emulation station so I thought that part was much better than retropie, but the amount of fiddling I had to do with the OS on a system that really didn't want me to do that ruined it for me.

Yet more evidence that XMB is the greatest console UI ever created, and I'm glad more projects are using it in some way.

Seems like a good project but this is a deal breaker for me

> Nvidia and Intel GPUs are not supported

Any specific reason why that is? Or if it’s in roadmap?

It is a copy of SteamOS which uses its own Wayland compositor (Gamescope) that is not compatible with anything other than AMD (since it was originally intended to only be used with Steam Deck, there was no reason to make it work anywhere else)

I would have thought that installation of Nvidia driver packages for Arch would do the trick. I'll admit that I'm unfamiliar with the interaction between GPU drivers and Wayland, so I'm guessing it would just result in an unstable combination?

Not just unstable, until I think 2 years ago literally not useable as the nvidia proprietary drivers didn't implement useable GBM by default, so even if it didn't hard crash it would never show anything besides a blank screen.

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/commit/b48cb6b0ec1320ad25fd2c...

Intel's dGPUs have a ~0% market share, Nvidia's driver situation is a shitshow.

Intel GPUs dominate the market by far. Every Intel CPU since 2010 has a GPU, with only very specific exceptions.

I believe the "d" part of "dGPU" is tripping you up here -- the "d" is "discrete", meaning unbundled from the CPU. IOW, Intel GPUs that are not bundled with the CPU have roughly a 0% market share.

Source states "Intel GPUs are not supported", parent comment noted Intel discrete GPUs have no marketshare.

Parent comment is thus irrelevant at best, misguided at worst. Not supporting Intel GPUs is throwing away the dominant leader in the GPU market.

We're talking about a dedicated gaming system here, iGPUs are pretty much irrelevant in that context. Things would be different in the context of a browser or word processor.

Besides, counting "1 Intel CPU sale = 1 Intel GPU" is misguided since that would count everyone using an Intel CPU with a dGPU as an Intel GPU customer, even if the iGPU sits idle 100% of the time.

Looking at a more representative demographic, the Steam users[0], Intel has a 9% market share, vs AMD's 15% and Nvidia's 85%. I don't know whether this also overcounts hybrid-GPU users (Optimus/DSG) into the iGPU bucket as well.

[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Title should be changed to "Instantly Turn 12% of PCs into a gaming console" because that's what fraction of the GPU market AMD has.

It probably uses SteamOS, which has no need to include Intel drivers, and probably absolutely no desire to include proprietary Nvidia binary blobs.

Probably supports just AMD because the focus of this is for mini pcs from companies like Beelink etc that use either mobile AMD cards or on board graphics from an AMD chip. Mini pcs are currently dominated by AMD hardware.

Thanks, that makes sense. Intel is also getting out of NUC market. But there are still lots of NUCs out there that could be used as a light gaming server.

I've been running ChimeraOS on a NUC and it works fine

I guess it has to do with their lack of open source drivers, and I bet you can install NVidia or Intel drivers by yourself.

The Intel GPU drivers have been open source for years.

To save some investigation, this project might once have been better than the SteamOS natively, but as of now it is no longer the case. It doesn’t do anything particularly well and has a nightmare of a time with Bluetooth support.

"Instantly turn our developers' PCs into gaming consoles" is more like it.

Cool logo, though.

The name conflicts with https://chimera-linux.org/

More like, "Is Not Supported" OS

I've run ChimeraOS for a while now. It's such an impressive experience. You really just install it and it works.

I'm using a NUC8 and PS4 controller. The amount of effort Valve have put into the Steam Deck really shows, I guess game developers are encouraged to make the Deck compatibility good, and ChimeraOS takes advantage of that.

What’s different about it versus ordinary Steam Big Picture?

ChimeraOS has an immutable root filesystem which does A/B updates, so it's much closer to having the Steam Deck OS on a PC than a regular distro running Steam with Big Picture.

It's also got a web interface (called just Chimera) which lets you install stuff from Flatpak, or add ROMs which it integrates with RetroArch and nice pictures so they appear in the Steam interface as a regular game.

Cool, the biggest issue for me when I was trying to do the same thing (turn my beefy PC to a "gaming console") was the ability to turn it on with gamepad. I've spent a lot of time researching it and have not found a reliable solution.

As a workaround, with a USB remote controller[0] you can put a PC to sleep and wake it up by pressing the power button. That's what I did with my setup of a mac for game streaming[1]. In my experience, the sleep/wake functionality works on Windows and Linux as well, so it should work on this.

[0]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005766837072.html

[1]: https://datalars.com/2023/07/29/using-a-mac-mini-as-a-bedroo...

I just have my PC in my living room boot Straight to Steam Big Picture Mode. It's great.

On windows or what?

Although Valve promised to release the steamOS image publicly they still haven't done so officially.

I believe companies like Asus or Lenovo would greatly benefit from putting steamOS on their consoles instead of spending their own developer resources in trying to make windows work. It just doesn't.

I have an Aya neo 2, I put chimeraOS on it and although there's a couple details missing, it generally works very well, it makes the thing usable as opposed to having windows on it.

Add a Parsec server by default and it'll be perfect so it can be deployed to Google Cloud or other servers :D

Parsec doesn't support Linux host. The alternative should be Sunshine (host for client Moonlight), but doesn't seem like they wanted to add it: https://github.com/ChimeraOS/chimeraos/pull/587

MIT License:

https://github.com/ChimeraOS/chimeraos/blob/master/LICENSE

For the old folks like me that started on linux installing Mandravia CDROMs from magazines back in 2000, this looks retrospectively so odd, unreal and fantastic

"Any PC" without Nvidia GPUS that is.

No screenshots?

Seems like it is just a build of SteamOS? There is a youtube linker from their Twitter (https://twitter.com/ChimeraOS_Linux): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awAFyXYh22M

Edit: Found this post on their Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChimeraOS_Linux/status/15144199120805969...

Can anyone recommend a good budget mini PC (on par with maybe the Steam Deck) for some casual gaming?

Hard to beat the Steam Deck if it's available in your country I think. Valve is selling at a cost, or at least with very little margin, since they make up the difference with sales on Steam like other console manufacturers. No other PC manufacturer can really do the same.

What is the value add vs Ubuntu + Steam manually installed?

"Includes out-of-the-box support for Epic Games Store and GOG"

Vanilla Ubuntu isn't going to offer you that level of integration.

https://github.com/ChimeraOS/chimeraos/wiki/OS-Comparison

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