SteamOS Linux 3.8 released as stable • Hacker News Board

Re: SteamOS Linux 3.8 released as stable

#71

Post by jeroenhd » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

twoquestions wrote: post #65

I hope the Bluetooth audio latency issue I've been having is fixed. I have two Bluetooth pairs of headphones, one open-ear and one noise-cancelling, and they both have either a half-second or one-second latency between what happens on screen and the audio feedback. Luckily wired headsets work perfectly fine.

I've had this issue with a different Linux distros. If I recall correctly, it was becauserthe headphones were using some proprietary codec to push more bits over an older Bluetooth standard.

If you boot into desktop mode, you can check if switching to plain old A2DP works. That solved the issue on Ubuntu (and Windows) for me. I think audiophiles will lament the loss of audio quality, but lower latencies are much more important for gaming.

Re: SteamOS Linux 3.8 released as stable

#72

Post by ASalazarMX » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 10:54 PM UTC

streb-lo wrote: post #70

hilsdev wrote: post #63

I tried installing SteamOS on a couple machines last week. One pain point is that their install scripts are just that - non interactive scripts that are designed for gaming handhelds such as the steam deck. The main issue being it expects to be the only OS installed, it will clobber your entire physical volume with its new partition layout and file systems. Not a big deal for a dedicated gaming machine but not what I…

It really is not hard to install a Linux operating system manually. "Linux power users" should easily be able to handle bespoke installations.

Becoming a "Linux power user" is a harder task than one might suspect, though. More so nowadays, where distros like Ubuntu just work, and you can use it as a daily driver without debugging issues.

Re: SteamOS Linux 3.8 released as stable

#73

Post by Atotalnoob » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 2:42 AM UTC

kombine wrote: post #10

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #2

A very fine sense of timing to release this one year after KDE 6.4 was released! https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.4.0/ . Here in 2026, KDE 6.7 just dropped. I'm still super excited for this release. KDE 6.4.3 from 6.2.5 is a nice jump. I'm very excited to get Wayland here, which is my normal baseline. Maybe this time I'll try to get Niri running on this desktop. This is one of my daily driver systems, with a…

I'd kill for KDE 6.4 crying in my work laptop with Ubuntu 24.04 with Plasma 5.27 :)

At least you have Linux.

I got a beefy mac laptop to rdp into a windows vdi with 2cpu/8gb to do my actual work.

Re: SteamOS Linux 3.8 released as stable

#74

Post by CodeCompost » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 8:42 AM UTC

koolala wrote: post #18

CodeCompost wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just run CachyOS on my gaming desktop which is also Arch based. Works fine.

Yeah that works but they asked about SteamOS not CachyOS and SteamOS doesn't work with NVIDIA.

Ok, I was only making a suggestion which I thought might be helpful.

Re: SteamOS Linux 3.8 released as stable

#75

Post by KetoManx64 » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 7:36 PM UTC

ASalazarMX wrote: post #72

streb-lo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is not hard to install a Linux operating system manually. "Linux power users" should easily be able to handle bespoke installations.

Becoming a "Linux power user" is a harder task than one might suspect, though. More so nowadays, where distros like Ubuntu just work, and you can use it as a daily driver without debugging issues.

It's not anymore. Any issues you run into you just paste into your LLM of choice and it will give you the fix in a couple of back and forths 99% of the time.

A couple of days ago I told Claude to just go ahead and install the android development stack on my arch Linux laptop, and it went though and installed all the packages needed through pacman, download a few packages from Google and extracted them the right spots and added all aliases to my configs files as needed. Took about 10 minutes total and I had a basic android app going in about an hour with its help.

Re: SteamOS Linux 3.8 released as stable

#76

Post by hilsdev » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 11:36 PM UTC

streb-lo wrote: post #70

hilsdev wrote: post #63

I tried installing SteamOS on a couple machines last week. One pain point is that their install scripts are just that - non interactive scripts that are designed for gaming handhelds such as the steam deck. The main issue being it expects to be the only OS installed, it will clobber your entire physical volume with its new partition layout and file systems. Not a big deal for a dedicated gaming machine but not what I…

It really is not hard to install a Linux operating system manually. "Linux power users" should easily be able to handle bespoke installations.

I've recovered some systems I b0rked by dding from a healthy system or a livedisk to a machine I updated incorrectly, I could have tried just copying from the disk fine and figured it out I'm sure, but I didn't want to open another rabbit hole with the SteamOS update and config. SteamOS has duplicate /, /var, and /boot partitions, and I assume there's some part of the install configuration that sets the active and inactive sets.

Really I was just after testing/listing included bt drivers on some specific hardware for some wonky controllers I have, installation was a secondary thought.