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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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