Valve have released SteamOS 3.7.0 Preview, which they noted has the beginnings of support for non-Steam Deck handhelds! So we're closing in on the previously announced Beta for more handhelds. Although this release is still just for Steam Deck.
Apparently SteamOS doesn’t have plans for large scale desktop support. I’ve been using cachyos for the last 4 months while playing games on my NTFS Windows steam libraries and it has been fine. On Nvidia even.
I think that if you’re looking for a Linux distribution that is as polished as the Steam Deck, then SteamOS on desktop might not be the right play. SteamOS will probably (rightfully) be developed solely for handheld, low-power devices, and won’t work unless you’re using the specific APUs that they’ll include drivers for.
If that sort of streamlined experience interests you, Bazzite has very similar goals to SteamOS (good OOTB gaming experience, safe updates etc.), except that they also target wide hardware compatibility. Other gaming distros exist, but I’m probably just not aware of them.
Bazzite works wonderfully even for non techy types. On mobile at least, NV drivers are working well but there is a performance penalty. Surprisingly, when the windows drivers are CPU limited, the linux one is actually performs better but, generally, there is a performance penalty on linux. AMD GPUs have parity except for Raytracing, at least from what I’ve seen, RADV performs below the proprietary driver on Windows.
I’m not personally running Bazzite, but before I switched to an AMD card, Nvidia worked just fine for me. Bazzite being more streamlined and gaming-specific, I can only imagine it would do perfectly well running Nvidia.
Check out sunshine/moonlight. It takes some tinkering but it runs better than remote play and can be configured to auto change your resolution on connect and disconnect. There’s also a plug-in for decky as well.
Out of interest (I asked someone else the same question) how is the support for Nvidia drivers? Other than my handhelds all my systems are team green and it’s what has always deterred me from switching to Linux on them as from what I gather support is flaky on most distros.
I genuinely can’t wait for the day I can finally drop Windows altogether and boot directly in to steam os on my gaming pc’s / laptops and handhelds.
Windows becomes more of a bloated mess every update. Literally the only thing I use it for these days is launch games.
Bring it on Steam !
Apparently SteamOS doesn’t have plans for large scale desktop support. I’ve been using cachyos for the last 4 months while playing games on my NTFS Windows steam libraries and it has been fine. On Nvidia even.
I think that if you’re looking for a Linux distribution that is as polished as the Steam Deck, then SteamOS on desktop might not be the right play. SteamOS will probably (rightfully) be developed solely for handheld, low-power devices, and won’t work unless you’re using the specific APUs that they’ll include drivers for.
If that sort of streamlined experience interests you, Bazzite has very similar goals to SteamOS (good OOTB gaming experience, safe updates etc.), except that they also target wide hardware compatibility. Other gaming distros exist, but I’m probably just not aware of them.
Thanks for this!
Out of interest, how is the driver support for Nvidia cards? This is the thing that has always put me off bailing on Windows for games.
Bazzite works wonderfully even for non techy types. On mobile at least, NV drivers are working well but there is a performance penalty. Surprisingly, when the windows drivers are CPU limited, the linux one is actually performs better but, generally, there is a performance penalty on linux. AMD GPUs have parity except for Raytracing, at least from what I’ve seen, RADV performs below the proprietary driver on Windows.
I’m not personally running Bazzite, but before I switched to an AMD card, Nvidia worked just fine for me. Bazzite being more streamlined and gaming-specific, I can only imagine it would do perfectly well running Nvidia.
Bazzite comes with Nvidia support out of the box.
You can… currently.
I’m running bazzite on both my handheld and my PC…
Other than a mild annoyance at having to manually changing the resolution on my PC to get remote play to work properly, it’s been great.
Check out sunshine/moonlight. It takes some tinkering but it runs better than remote play and can be configured to auto change your resolution on connect and disconnect. There’s also a plug-in for decky as well.
Out of interest (I asked someone else the same question) how is the support for Nvidia drivers? Other than my handhelds all my systems are team green and it’s what has always deterred me from switching to Linux on them as from what I gather support is flaky on most distros.
Sorry, can’t say. I’m all AMD.
You can still drop windows and boot to KDE (the desktop is based on it for the steam deck) :)