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Comment by jonathanstrange | Hacker News Reader

Very cool. As a Linux Mint user, I'm starting to get interested in SteamOS. So maybe someone with experience can answer my question:

How good is SteamOS as a general distro for a desktop machine? What are the Pros and Cons?

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I found it very annoying and restricting. Most significantly being restricted to flatpak. For example I failed at installing whonix and couldn't get rust and vscode to work together.

If I didn't plan to get rid of by steam deck, I'd install a different distro in it. I definitely wouldn't install it on a desktop, support for the deck's keyboardless form factor is the only reason I might choose SteamOS over a normal distro.

Though I didn't know about distrobox then, perhaps that works better.

For development work you could try using toolbx or distrobox.

You can also use Nix or Homebrew to install additional software.

SteamOS is not designed or meant for installation as a generic OS. It is only designed to run on the specific supported hardware devices that it comes preinstalled on.

No matter how many times you see LTT install it on a system they have assembled, its not supposed to be used that way and not supported.

It's good if you use Distrobox and it comes with it.

Thank you so much! For some reason, I didn't even know about Distrobox!

I installed Antigravity with Codex in Distrobox Ubuntu. The Agents happily use sudo without care that it is a container. It's great when I run random scripts from the web that I don't even know how to uninstall and never worry about gunking up the main system.

It might be fine for just avoiding clutter, but be warned that distrobox defaults to very weak separation between container and host (e.g. default mounting your real home into the container). Good organizational tool, bad sandbox. (This is not a fault, just a matter of what the tool is optimized to help you do.)

I like that as a feature because I can use it like a normal root system. I have a pretty easy time seeing what goes in my home folder. It isn't esoteric to explore like system folders. If I had something I needed to keep private from Distrobox I could put it in my SD Card since it isn't mounted in the home folder on SteamOS and is in /run/media. You could also install QEMU in Distrobox or the virt-manager flatpak for a full sandbox.

it makes no sense, just use bazzite or something

I mean it literally is not meant to be used as a general distro for a desktop machine so I'm guessing not very good.

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