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I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

iliana.fyi

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Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#171

Post by brnt »

LegitShady wrote: post #139
hhh wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want to tweak stuff for a week to get a comparable experience playing games to a fresh W11 install.

to be fair a fresh W11 install still doesn't have a usable taskbar or start menu - you have to install explorer patcher to get those back.

Looking back, that may have been my switching point: when setting up my distro of choice took less time then windows after a fresh install. Life without package managers, even now that there is chocolatey, is just unnecessary pain. And as a DE, windows had no edge over something like KDE.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#172

Post by frutiger »

techknowlogick wrote: post #145

I love this kind of deep dive into customizing the software/OS on a device you own. Glad that "Tivoization" isn't a concern for the steamdeck. The most interesting part of the article was the mention of a /nix partition, as I didn't realize the steamdeck supports nixpkgs, after researching it more, they do indeed (not installed by default, but at least it is possible without having to fork an entire os to get it on t…

nix has always been installable onto any *nix OS without requiring you to “fork an entire OS”.

You can put the nix store in any writable location and modify $PATH to point to the symlinks directory.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#173

Post by brnt »

pjmlp wrote: post #132
nindalf wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re missing the bigger picture. Yes, developers really appreciate that their games work seamlessly on the Steam Deck and Linux with no effort on their part. But there are a couple of knock on effects. One is that developers now a specific hardware + software combo to test their games with. Even if it’s the same build they’re sending out, they’re still testing their game on the Deck and fixing issues, leading to a…

Valve adocates are the ones failing to learn from OS/2 history, "it does Windows better than Windows". Studios don't care about native GNU/Linux, despite the games being shipped with Android/NDK, PlayStation POSIX environment, and the available APIs on Switch OS. All of them much easier than porting from Windows/XBox, almost straight ports if coming from Android/NDK.

Having a desktop OS was a big thing 30 years ago, but now nobody cares anymore. Who interacts with their OS other than launching browsers or apps based on browsers? Not even most coders these days.

OSes are irrelevant these days and having basically libwindows.so these days only underlines that.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#174

Post by slimsag »

smoldesu wrote: post #166
slimsag wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. Not even questionable. If you have an NVIDIA GPU, You're on your own. Latest Valve updates for Steam client including normal and Jupiter bootstraps have broken gamepadui on NVIDIA GPUs, and if so, no support will be provided for you. Bummer. This rules out 76% of steam users, according to their hardware surveys.

That description is pretty hyperbolic. The SteamOS UI (eg. the Steam Deck-looking part) is very broken on Nvidia right now, but the actual gaming part (eg Proton and the Steam launcher) works fine. If you just want to play mouse-and-keyboard in desktop mode, recent Nvidia cards are generally pretty cooperative.

Well, I'm not smart enough to know if it's hyperbolic but it's a pretty damning statement right there in the README. Certainly enough to turn me away from ever trying it on one of my machines.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#175

Post by goda90 »

quaffapint wrote: post #34

I actually just ordered a GPU for my unRaid NAS server just to be able to do Steam Headless via a nice docker image(1) and then use Moonlight (for example) as a client on my Windows laptop. If it works, it's much better than buying yet another piece of desktop hardware just to play games when my NAS is just sitting there idle most of the time. Just need to make sure I keep the power level setting on the Nvidia card t…

Oh nice. I've been day dreaming of setting up a server with turn based, hot seat enabled games (like Civilization) and a browser based way to remote into them so that friends and I can play long turn games from anywhere at any time.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#176

Post by calamari4065 »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #78

Tangential: anyone have experience with unity and/or unreal on Linux these days? Last I checked (2-3 years ago), they technically worked but we’re janky and buggy. Is it improved?

Unity is only a little more janky and buggy than it is on Windows.

I had a lot of trouble getting the unity editor working on my steam deck, but that may have been due to using an editor version from 2021 (for unrelated reasons). It seems to behave fine on a normal desktop environment though.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#177

Post by glitchcrab »

accelbred wrote: post #135
glitchcrab wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please stop with the FUD around Arch and poor stability? It's an old meme which will never die, but it has no basis in reality. I've been using Arch on my personal and work laptops for probably 7 years now and the only time it had been a problem has been due to layer 8 issues and doing something stupid. I certainly wouldn't be using it for work if it was unstable.

I used Arch for years, and left it due to poor stability. Every time I would try to use an AUR app it would be broken and need re-installing. Sure the non-AUR stuff was mostly fine, but a lot of necessary applictions are in AUR, and AUR is touted as a major selling point of Arch. When there was an issue during a system update, recovering the system was a mess. I also cannot call it stable when you can't update one ap…

Counterpoint to this; I have many packages from the AUR and I've never had any issues like you describe with them. Both of our viewpoints are polar opposites but they are only a single datapoint each.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#178

Post by glitchcrab »

0x457 wrote: post #141
glitchcrab wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please stop with the FUD around Arch and poor stability? It's an old meme which will never die, but it has no basis in reality. I've been using Arch on my personal and work laptops for probably 7 years now and the only time it had been a problem has been due to layer 8 issues and doing something stupid. I certainly wouldn't be using it for work if it was unstable.

It's because plenty of arch users just copy and paste things from arch wiki and stackoverflow without thinking.

Agreed, Arch is not a good My First Linux for sure. I would never suggest it to someone without a decent bit of experience under their belt.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#179

Post by jwells89 »

zeta0134 wrote: post #66
jorvi wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, except I prefer the cleanliness of Gnome over how scattershot and buggy KDE feels, so I’m SoL. I’ve even looked into launching games into their own little Gamescope instance, but if you don’t run Gamescope as your main window manager, you lose most of its benefits. > For Mirror's Edge, were you using Steam Input? Yes. The problem lies in the fact that only the Xone driver properly supports the Xbox wireless ada…

Honestly it's the reverse for me, but I guess that's down to personal preference. "Gnome" apps keep updating with the "new" GTK style, which means the title bar becomes a conglomeration of a bunch of weird controls, the familiar dropdown menus vanish, everything gets moved into a tiny little hamburger menu and, often , the layout breaks in subtle ways. The calculator app just recently did this, and now I have to type…

Hamburger menus are among my greatest gripes with GNOME. In apps with any functionality at all they end up being poorly organized junk drawers filled with odds and ends, and because they have to be somewhat short to be effective, functions that don’t fit in them either get buried or cut.

What makes this all worse is that GNOME has acres of space reserved at the top of the screen with its statusbar, most of which is empty and doing absolutely nothing. It could house a macOS-style global menubar (as Unity did for fullscreened windows) with room to spare… Though global menubars aren’t everybody’s cup of tea I think many would agree they’re better than the alternative of oversimplified hamburger menus, and they would help achieve the clean look GNOME is going for without so dramatically impeding functionality.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#180

Post by dataangel »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #146
jokethrowaway wrote: post #118

Interesting read! The A/B upgrade sounds a bit overkill, you can always just pop up a live distro or install a recovery system (on an old version) in a partition in case something goes wrong. I recently moved to Arch after a few years of NixOS (preceded by years of Arch) and I think the fears of the author are misplaced. Arch is definitely a very serious and mature distro and I'd trust them more than Valve. The quali…

> The quality of the packages available for Arch is what made me move from NixOS. Can you give some examples of this please? I generally find the NixOS packages high quality.

Unless you care about packages from lang package managers like pip...
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