this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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[–] Canconda@lemmy.ca 19 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I'm going to try Steam OS on one of my laptops. See what that's like.

[–] mereo@piefed.ca 49 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I suggest that you try Bazzite instead. As of now, SteamOS doesn't support Nvidia.

[–] Canconda@lemmy.ca 30 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Oh I'm poor my laptop has AMD.

[–] chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 47 points 2 days ago

AMD is better than NVidia anyway

[–] CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 20 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Bazzite also has a better package management system. SteamOS is meant for gaming almost exclusively, whereas Bazzite is meant for both.

[–] BillyClark@piefed.social 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

After using Bazzite, I'm convinced that image based distros are the future for end users. Need to install an app? Flatpak. Need to install command line? Homebrew.

It all installs in user space. And Flatpak at least uses an effective sandbox system.

Distros that maintain their own package spaces are duplicating a. lot. of work.

The downside of Flatpak is the disk space usage. But that doesn't matter as much to me as it used to.

[–] Dojan@pawb.social 3 points 2 days ago

Disk space usage isn't that bad anyway since there's some deduplication going on.

[–] Dettweiler42@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago

I ran SteamOS for a while before they made the recent announcement. It works great. Previously, just had to tell it to always boot in Desktop mode.

[–] njordomir@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago

I can chime in for Bazzite. It's imperfect, but I've blown up my fair share of aliens and they make playing your games on Linux really easy compared to anything else I've used. I can even stream the game from my desktop to a laptop in my bedroom via sunshine/moonlight which Bazzite helps you install as SteamLink doesn't play nice with Bazzite.

[–] Zedd_Prophecy@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Upvote for Bazzite - the caveat being how much support the distro gets and how long it lives. That said it turned a truly piece of crap all in one hp to something that was fun in about 30 minutes. it's a good gaming OS but I wouldn't use it as my daily driver.

[–] OldQWERTYbastard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I don't think steamos is a great choice for a general purpose OS....yet

[–] Canconda@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Probably not but maybe I'll be able to play a game. Old laptop. Old Games. New OS. See what happens.

[–] just2look@lemmy.zip 9 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Both bazzite and CachyOS are built for computers and will likely work better for a laptop than SteamOS. And they both have gaming focused builds. I haven't tried Bazzite in a while, but CachyOS has easy to understand instructions on how to install their gaming package.

[–] teslekova@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago

Can confirm Bazzite is incredibly easy to install, and all my steam games work without any tweaking at all so far except Tropico 6. And I haven't even tried to fix that.

(Windows was being a dick fuck, and life means I don't have brainspace right now to fuck around with my laptop, so no-tweaking was the goal. Bazzite has delivered that.)

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

I daily-drive Bazzite on multiple machines. It's excellent, even on machines I rarely use for games.

If you use the console version of Bazzite (which I use on a HTPC), it runs Steam in console mode on boot. I assume that's what SteamOS does, it seems like they designed that mode to feel identical to using SteamOS on a SteamDeck. That makes it easy to launch games etc. without needing a keyboard and mouse. Then you can go to desktop mode when you need it.

The desktop version of Bazzite is just a Linux desktop that starts Steam on boot so that it's running in the background. It has some gaming-related things installed but if you want to use it as a machine to write software it's basically ready to go.

[–] Canconda@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Appreciate the suggestions, probs check them out afterwards. I just wanna do it for the shits n gigs

[–] just2look@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago

Totally understand that. I have tried a bunch of different Linux builds to see what I like. So certainly won't begrudge your explorations. And I haven't tried SteamOS on any of my machines because it didn't have a desktop build when I was last playing around with new builds. CachyOS has been great though. Everything works well on my machine, and its been easy to use as a daily driver.

[–] elucubra@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I've been using Linux since it was a diskette install (Slackware). I've used all main Linux flavors over the years, and for the last few years I've lived in Mint, because lazy. I'm now on CachyOS. It fucking rocks. Like wow level.

[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I started with Ubuntu version 10.10 and currently my computer runs Linux Mint Debian 7.

Though I am seriously considering giving NixOS another spin. I gave it a try once, and it didn't quite work for me, but I think I might try it again. I am getting pretty convinced that immutability is the future because then the operating system developer can work on the operating system and the user space can focus on the user space. And user space applications can't do things to the operating system that would screw it up and bork it. I'm primarily thinking of when an application gets uninstalled and then uninstalls some shared library that's needed by another application and fucks it up.

I know immutable systems and self-contained applications require more disk space, but that's a worthy sacrifice in my opinion. Disk space is pretty damn cheap.

[–] elucubra@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 hours ago

I've tried bazzite (Aurora, actually, same family more general use), and found the thing a bit constraining. The whole flatpak or distrobox thing is a bit cumbersome for me, but I can see the appeal.

[–] Trail@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

AI says disk space is no longer to be considered cheap ;)

[–] elucubra@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 days ago
[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 days ago

For now, yes. But it's a supply and demand curve, so either the demand from AI is going to crash as the AI boom crashes, or the amount of supply will increase to satisfy the demand. I am suspecting the AI bubble will crash before the supply side catches up.