Thank you! I deeply appreciate that Steam works so well on Linux these days. I don't take for granted the hard work happening behind the scenes to make that a reality for us.
Flatpak fixes this problem. You don't need gamescope unless for stuff like scaling. The only few times you need to fiddle with anything on desktop is changing proton version or adding a launch variable from protondb.com (just like on steamdeck)
You seem to think steam on Desktop Linux is somehow different from steam on steamdeck Linux. Like I said in my previous post, the only "fiddling" you need to do is copy pasting launch commands and choosing a different Proton version from a drop down _just_like_on_steamdeck.
It's also an immutable distribution, like SteamOS (except it's based on Fedora Silverblue instead of Arch) so there is no "incompatibility with your exact distro setup": you have the exact same distro setup as every single Bazzite user.
PC gaming is very enticing but we all know that’s simply not how it goes down. I would love to build a PC that is literally just discord and Steam. I want to run it in big picture mode for the most part and treat it more or less like a console.
I have really enjoyed my steam deck and it has fit that desired role pretty well. But obviously it is just not that powerful. It’s impressive for what it is, but for me it’s basically a great indie game machine with the occasional AAA option that is tolerable. A well-built machine with that kind of UX (minus the known idiosyncrasies of the deck) would be fantastic.
To answer your question more directly: Most Linux distros do not offer this either. Bazzite is the closest I’ve seen.
https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Steam#Gamescope_Compositor_/_%22...
I feel your anecdotes are at best outdated. Desktop Linux has come along way.
Linux is a great experience these days but you do have to tinker sometimes. You have to mess with drivers and settings and command line. It may be minimal for people comfortable with computers but it's not as friction-less as you're claiming.
If you buy hardware that is compatible with Linux, then you won't really have to tinker (at least, any more than you would with any other OS, for example, tweaking resolutions, etc). Unfortunately, it's newer hardware that typically requires the tinkering. If you don't want to tinker, I would recommend going with generation n -1 or even n -2. If you go with the latest and greatest, expect to have some tinkering required.
Distro choice does of course matter a great deal. I've been using Fedora as primary OS now for many years and absolutely love it, and it's what I recommend to most people. Ubuntu and derivatives are good of course, though the older kernels do often decrement the generation of hardware. For example, Fedora on n-1 is going to be pretty good. Ubuntu might still lack some support at that age, so should go with n-2 or n-3 to be safe.
My big takeaway is this; if you are comfortable using the Steam Deck to play games and install software, you will not struggle to get Linux to run games. Pretty much anything that isn't a gaming laptop is going to have some form of support, and even the famously crappy Nvidia drivers were recently updated to support Wayland and other new Linux protocols. Now more than ever before, using Linux to game is probably easier than getting the equivalent experience on Windows.
by this standard Mac OS is still a hobby OS because it can't be installed on random hardware.
No, it isn't too much to ask that you make sure the hardware you buy works with the OS you intend to run. If you find Linux fiddly in the modern era it's solely because of this.
> in such a way (downgrading/using older components) to accommodate linux
When I buy a Mac or a windows machine I don’t have to purposely avoid newer hardware to ensure it works.
It also matters how far along in the product life cycle it is. If it came out last week, it may not be supported yet. If we're nearing the refresh point then it may be supported.
> When I buy a Mac or a windows machine I don’t have to purposely avoid newer hardware to ensure it works.
But you are also comparing apples and oranges (pun incidental) and shifting the goal posts. If you buy a Mac, then you aren't building a gaming PC, which is what the rule of thumb pertains to. You're buying a complete system that has been integrated and tested. You can do the same thing with a Linux machine from various vendors (Lenovo, Dell, Framework, among others), in which case you don't have to do any investigatory work because (just like with the Mac) it's been done for you by the manufacturer.
From https://repo.steampowered.com/steamos/README.txt
SteamOS version 1 'alchemist' and version 2 'brewmaster' have been discontinued. No further updates are planned.
The SteamOS 'clockwerk' prototype has also been discontinued and will not be released.
But I haven't heard anything one way or the other in a while. But as it stands, they have stated that they plan to do a general release. Unless there is another source where they say they changed their mind?
Some of the recent SteamOS release notes have included references to Asus's handheld, which has reinforced the community expectation that it will eventually be available as a distribution you can install on 3rd party hardware. If you go read interviews from Valve employees (Lawrence Yang comes to mind), I believe they've publicly stated that after the OLED shipped, they wanted to start focusing on porting to other devices.
If so, it is kind of bizarre they haven't reached out to the Bazzite maintainers at all.
In general, it seems like it would save them a tonne of effort if they'd switch from a bespoke Arch-immutable spin to making a spin of Silverblue, something that has been meant to be immutable from the beginning.
They already have a system that works exactly how they want it. They already rebased from Debian to Arch to get it there. They have enough Linux staff on contract to build and maintain that system.
Maybe Bazzite is closer to their goals; maybe it's not. It's certainly not a slam dunk that the best thing they could do is throw away the thing they've been building for years to join a community project on GitHub that's trying to clone that thing.
There are many gaming distributions (e.g. Bazzite, Jovian/NixOS, Nobara, Chimera…) that take this approach.
They're usually just standard desktop distributions (Fedora or NixOS) with gaming packages configured. There is a Russian teenager who's trying to cobble together a SteamOS clone using as many Valve packages as possible. His project is called HoloISO.
The compositor is what runs two layers down, under the window manager.