Tucked into their FAQ about the Steam Machine release was a mention about making your own Steam Machine by installing steamOS to a computer you already have. AMD only for now.
Tucked into their FAQ about the Steam Machine release was a mention about making your own Steam Machine by installing steamOS to a computer you already have. AMD only for now.
We could always do this, by the way. SteamOS has been available since the release of the Steam Deck. The main drawback is that core updates will wipe a bunch of changes you’ve made to your OS. I got tired of reinstalling AUR and a bunch of other things every month, so I changed distros.
Once that issue goes away, I’ll likely switch back.
What did you switch to? I want to get away from windows and rn my main contender is Bazzite, but i wouldnt mind a non Fedora alternative…
I like both Mint and Zorin. Once I learned you can make your desktop environment whatever you want, I became less concerned about which specific Ubuntu distro I use, because I just want KDE Plasma. Kubuntu seems like a great option. Bazzite also seems good, but I haven’t tried it yet and I like to tinker every once in a while.
I dont think thats really an issue and more so a design choice to keep steam os immutable. I doubt that’ll change since it does make it much harder to break the system.
On immutable fedora, I can layer packages. Is this not possible on SteamOS?
Yep. I think its actually pretty ideal for a pure gaming machine that lives under the TV. If I were going to build a machine for that I would go with SteamOS.
My understanding is SteamOS was lacking hardware support for most devices, and that they’ve been slowly fixing this. It’s been mostly functional for awhile now, but used to be completely broken, and it’s only now that Valve is saying it’s actually ready for most AMD devices.
It’s part of why people had needed to use things like Bazzite/ChimeraOS on other gaming handhelds, because bare SteamOS wouldn’t work. There were things like hardcoded support for just the Van Gogh chipset, hardcoded TDP management that would cause system crashes on different hardware, no support for network devices, etc.
Need to make all changes through ansible, then you just run one job post update :)
Bazzite is the same way. It’s an immutable OS
You can layer packages with rpm-ostree on bazzite tho, which do persist through updates. As far as I know, steam os has no such thing.