Bazzite – a SteamOS-like OCI image for desktop, living room, and handheld PCs • Hacker News Board

Re: Bazzite – a SteamOS-like OCI image for desktop, living room, and handheld PCs

#111

Post by cassianoleal » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 1:32 PM UTC

scheeseman486 wrote: post #87

SushiHippie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIUC As the SteamDeck does only use AMD GPUs they have no incentive to support their UI on Nvidia GPUs.

Gamescope leans on Wayland features that the Nvidia proprietary driver either doesn't have support for or only preliminary support. It's on Nvidia to catch up. It's not about incentives for Valve, they can't change the driver themselves. Proton has received patches for Nvidia support in particular, some from Nvidia themselves.

> s not about incentives for Valve, they can't change the driver themselves.

Sure they can. Perhaps not the proprietary drivers but they could contribute to the open source ones and bring them up to speed.

I bet they won’t do that though. It’s probably a massive amount of work and they have no … incentives to do it.

Re: Bazzite – a SteamOS-like OCI image for desktop, living room, and handheld PCs

#112

Post by cassianoleal » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 1:35 PM UTC

I tried this months ago when I was building a gaming rig as it looked like a very interesting option.

I ran into a bunch of problems and after maybe 6 or 7 failed attempts I gave up and now I’ve settled with Debian on it (https://blog.c10l.cc/09122023-debian-gaming).

I’d be willing to give Bazzite another go and see if it has fixed whatever many issues I had though. There used to be one showstopper limitation (for me): it didn’t support dual/multi-booting. Does anyone know if that’s changed?

Re: Bazzite – a SteamOS-like OCI image for desktop, living room, and handheld PCs

#113

Post by scheeseman486 » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 6:48 AM UTC

cassianoleal wrote: post #111

scheeseman486 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamescope leans on Wayland features that the Nvidia proprietary driver either doesn't have support for or only preliminary support. It's on Nvidia to catch up. It's not about incentives for Valve, they can't change the driver themselves. Proton has received patches for Nvidia support in particular, some from Nvidia themselves.

> s not about incentives for Valve, they can't change the driver themselves. Sure they can. Perhaps not the proprietary drivers but they could contribute to the open source ones and bring them up to speed. I bet they won’t do that though. It’s probably a massive amount of work and they have no … incentives to do it.

There may be legal issues, Pierre-Loup at Valve (who incidentally recently tweeted about NVK's progress) used to work at Nvidia on Linux driver development. There's a good chance a lot of Valve's employees have signed NDAs too. They've been leaning heavily on partnerships and contract work (like with Collabora, who also host NVK).

Valve want to extricate themselves from Windows, their incentive is to break free from "Wintel". Steam Deck is a priority, but SteamOS is clearly built to extend beyond that and in order to have any success on standard PCs, Nvidia GPUs need to be supported well.

Re: Bazzite – a SteamOS-like OCI image for desktop, living room, and handheld PCs

#114

Post by cyanwave » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 5:12 AM UTC

bsimpson wrote: post #80

tavavex wrote: post #40

Makes me wonder - how viable is it to install actual SteamOS on devices that aren't the Steam Deck (and use the Deck UI and all)? Are there any mods or something to make that work?

The Deck UI is two parts: the Steam client in Big Picture Mode (which is most of the Steam Deck UI and runs on Mac and Windows as well), and the gamescope compositor. Gamescope is open source and Steam is available for download on Linux. You could run any of the replacement Steam Deck OSes (Jovian/NixOS, Bazzite, Chimera...) and get a UI that's identical to what's on the Steam Deck, down to the "Deck Verified" badges…

You seem knowledgeable, so a casual question. I installed bazzite :testing fork on the steamdeck oled and wifi speeds were absolutely terrible. Like 100mbit max where as I see 500-600 on stock.

Do you have a perspective on the driver layer here? I’m assuming bazzite is using something out dated or maybe didn’t have hardware acceleration on wifi packets etc