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I think they’re showing us how mature user-facing Linux in 2025 really is. With a little focus and investment on the UX for the end user on top of the open sour

I think they’re showing us how mature user-facing Linux in 2025 really is. With a little focus and investment on the UX for the end user on top of the open source core OS it has already beat any console OS by a mile.

Manfred 1y ago
SteamOS actually does the opposite. It does not use any of the popular desktop environments (unless you drop into Desktop Mode). It heavily curates hardware, kernel, and drivers to keep the platform from breaking and install with sane (performance) defaults for gaming. It doesn't rely on a common package manager. Beside a Steam Deck I also use a Linux PC for gaming and even with 25 years of Linux experience I still struggle sometimes to keep hardware acceleration working after a driver update, sometimes spending an evening of troubleshooting instead of gaming. Certain parts of the desktop environment sometimes lock up to the point where I have to SSH into the PC to fix it. It's like owning a vintage car in a certain way. And yes, I prefer all of that over the Windows experience, but it's not seamless and not simple enough for anyone to just jump into.
- selivanovp 1y ago
  Quit using Arch. Normal linux distros have no such problems.
  - Manfred 1y ago
    That's a pretty weak argument given that I use Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, and Debian and have had these issues with all of them. You can look for things like "nvidia drm broken" and find thousands of threads of people all types of problems spanning decades, meaning; old and new. Some of them are pure driver issues caused by NVIDIA but that doesn't matter because we're not trying to assign blame, but we're trying to see if the ecosystem is "mature".
- Gigachad 1y ago
  They have a custom window manager because they had to build a controller friendly UI from scratch since one didn’t exist already. Not because existing DEs are broken. Their package management also isn’t that exotic. It’s a lot like Fedora Silverblue where the OS is an immutable image and user software is installed with Flatpak.
  - Manfred 1y ago
    I'm not saying existing desktop environments are broken, my point is that SteamOS does not show that KDE / Gnome / etc are "mature" because it doesn't actually use them. In the same way that we know all dogs are good dogs but my house doesn't show that because there is no dog here.
Ygg2 1y ago
Linux biggest problem as a consumer OS was rarely tech and mostly just the schizoid amount of options, and lack of consensus on what to use. In essence Linux suffers from a Lisp curse. Whenever two OS nerds disagreed on something they made their own slightly different distro. This means wasted effort on multiple DE, window managers, app flavors, installed libraries. To this day, almost no two distros can agree on baseline libraries every Linux must have.
- spookie 1y ago
  I love how in this context people call it wasted effort while in other areas is just competition.
  - ashdnazg 1y ago
    Competition works because the more successful a company is, the more resources it gets (money from the customers). If a free Linux distribution is more successful, its resources don't scale accordingly.
  - Affric 1y ago
    Cooperation/Symbiosis: win-win Predation: win-lose Competition: lose-lose This is how dynamically coupled systems work.
  - Ygg2 1y ago
    Yeah, duplicating/triplicating/n-cating bugs, feature development and support effort, really paid off for the Linux desktop ecosystem. Which year will be the year of the Linux desktop? One, when we get brain to brain communication and abandon desktops entirely?
- ekianjo 1y ago
  > Linux biggest problem as a consumer OS was rarely tech and mostly just the schizoid amount of options, and lack of consensus on what to use. It's only a problem if you think it is. In practice I use at least 3 or 4 different distros on a daily basis and I never have any issue juggling between them. For most of the typical use cases it does not even matter, and on the desktop side flatpak resolves many issues.
Ekaros 1y ago
By in essence using none of desktop Linux... Steam Deck shows just how bad things are. Regular users will spend their entire time in very limited application launching other applications. Distant way from any traditional personal computer model.
- tuna74 1y ago
  There is no "desktop Linux". There is desktop infrastructure and Desktop environments that run ON Linux.
  - akagusu 1y ago
    Please, don’t tell this. People are not ready for the TRUE.

Manfred 1y ago

SteamOS actually does the opposite. It does not use any of the popular desktop environments (unless you drop into Desktop Mode). It heavily curates hardware, kernel, and drivers to keep the platform from breaking and install with sane (performance) defaults for gaming. It doesn't rely on a common package manager. Beside a Steam Deck I also use a Linux PC for gaming and even with 25 years of Linux experience I still struggle sometimes to keep hardware acceleration working after a driver update, sometimes spending an evening of troubleshooting instead of gaming. Certain parts of the desktop environment sometimes lock up to the point where I have to SSH into the PC to fix it. It's like owning a vintage car in a certain way. And yes, I prefer all of that over the Windows experience, but it's not seamless and not simple enough for anyone to just jump into.

selivanovp 1y ago
Quit using Arch. Normal linux distros have no such problems.
- Manfred 1y ago
  That's a pretty weak argument given that I use Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, and Debian and have had these issues with all of them. You can look for things like "nvidia drm broken" and find thousands of threads of people all types of problems spanning decades, meaning; old and new. Some of them are pure driver issues caused by NVIDIA but that doesn't matter because we're not trying to assign blame, but we're trying to see if the ecosystem is "mature".
Gigachad 1y ago
They have a custom window manager because they had to build a controller friendly UI from scratch since one didn’t exist already. Not because existing DEs are broken. Their package management also isn’t that exotic. It’s a lot like Fedora Silverblue where the OS is an immutable image and user software is installed with Flatpak.
- Manfred 1y ago
  I'm not saying existing desktop environments are broken, my point is that SteamOS does not show that KDE / Gnome / etc are "mature" because it doesn't actually use them. In the same way that we know all dogs are good dogs but my house doesn't show that because there is no dog here.

Ygg2 1y ago

Linux biggest problem as a consumer OS was rarely tech and mostly just the schizoid amount of options, and lack of consensus on what to use. In essence Linux suffers from a Lisp curse. Whenever two OS nerds disagreed on something they made their own slightly different distro. This means wasted effort on multiple DE, window managers, app flavors, installed libraries. To this day, almost no two distros can agree on baseline libraries every Linux must have.

spookie 1y ago
I love how in this context people call it wasted effort while in other areas is just competition.
- ashdnazg 1y ago
  Competition works because the more successful a company is, the more resources it gets (money from the customers). If a free Linux distribution is more successful, its resources don't scale accordingly.
- Affric 1y ago
  Cooperation/Symbiosis: win-win Predation: win-lose Competition: lose-lose This is how dynamically coupled systems work.
- Ygg2 1y ago
  Yeah, duplicating/triplicating/n-cating bugs, feature development and support effort, really paid off for the Linux desktop ecosystem. Which year will be the year of the Linux desktop? One, when we get brain to brain communication and abandon desktops entirely?
ekianjo 1y ago
> Linux biggest problem as a consumer OS was rarely tech and mostly just the schizoid amount of options, and lack of consensus on what to use. It's only a problem if you think it is. In practice I use at least 3 or 4 different distros on a daily basis and I never have any issue juggling between them. For most of the typical use cases it does not even matter, and on the desktop side flatpak resolves many issues.

Ekaros 1y ago

By in essence using none of desktop Linux... Steam Deck shows just how bad things are. Regular users will spend their entire time in very limited application launching other applications. Distant way from any traditional personal computer model.

tuna74 1y ago
There is no "desktop Linux". There is desktop infrastructure and Desktop environments that run ON Linux.
- akagusu 1y ago
  Please, don’t tell this. People are not ready for the TRUE.