The Steam Deck has revolutionized the gaming handheld market. With the Linux-based immutable SteamOS, Valve has fostered an active community developing mods and alternative systems for this platform. Other manufacturers distribute Windows-based mobile consoles. However, time and time again it has been shown that they lag behind Linux in terms of software support.
But how easy is it to bring a Linux distribution, say openSUSE, to the Steam Deck?
In this talk, a prototype based on openSUSE’s open technologies and infrastructure will be presented, which is already (almost) fully functional on the Steam Deck and many other devices.
I don’t want a rolling release if I can avoid it. I don’t want a from-scratch distro where I’m suddenly in trouble because I forgot to install some crucial package that I wouldn’t have had to install on other distros. But I also don’t want a distro that’s forcing all sorts of software on me because that’s what it comes with (this point is about Arch-based distros: something that only ArcoLinux got right). I don’t want to wait to compile COSMIC every time there’s an update. I don’t want to compile from source all the time because that’s what the AUR is. And as powerful as the AUR is, it always feels janky, even with paru or yay.
I don’t want to worry that if I haven’t updated in a few weeks, I might get issues with the archlinux-keyring. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve used Arch long enough.
And after being an Arch Tester for a while and seeing how brittle package testing is (there are barely any testers, and that’s a massive concern), I decided I don’t trust the stability of Arch. So I left.