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.
My Grandpa used to say “Every farmer praises his pond.”
It is true. I’d praise Fedora currently. I have praised Arch when I used it. For all the issues I had with its outdated software, I praised Debian for that month I’ve used it. I had praise NixOS’ rollbacks, while sparing the details on the learning curve and immense difficulty of setup and weird, obscure issues I had with it.
Ultimately, every distro without exception has some issues for different people. That’s a fact. It’s all about what you can and cannot live with, what fits and what doesn’t fit your purposes.
I want the latest software after some good testing and on a static release if possible, with all the software available, a fast package manager, and NOT Arch, as I was done with it for various reasons. Got pissed at NixOS, OpenSUSE’s zypper is the worst package manager bar none (because it’s slower than the older dnf, and doesn’t even have parallel downloads, and doesn’t have many mirrors either). So Fedora it is. And I’ll stay here for a while, seeing as there isn’t anything better for me.
And I’ll praise Fedora for what it does right, while casually avoiding the fact that the first thing I did after install was to install and set up dnf5, and not mentioning I had mirror issues twice in the last month (I had none in the months prior, but twice in the span of 2-3 weeks?).
Anyways, that’s just me ranting about Linux distros, because as much as everyone claims they’re the same (and they are when it comes to usage), they are very different when it comes to package managers, package availability, package versions, and release cycles, and those are the main differences between them all.
Do you mind elaborating on why you’re done with arch?
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.