Seen a few times bazzite has been mentioned, but just have seen another user say they have OpenSUSE installed.
I’m not sure what the benefits of these options are, especially non-steamOS ISOs?
I think its mostly because its possible.
One thing that Steam/Valve has done with the Steam Deck is lock down the ISO by default, and provide no tools to modify your image persistently. That is of course on purpose, because that works for 99% of users, but the 1% of users may wanna use something where they can, for instance, overlay packages and keep them with updates, or apply extra gaming-focused tweaks that may be more of a hassle to maintain on SteamOS.
For instance, I use Fedora Silverblue daily on my Desktop, and even though it is immutable just like the Deck, it offers me tools to modify my image as I see fit and have the same modifications be applied to future updates too.
One of the beautiful things about Linux is it’s versatility. Many people want to use their hardware for things other than gaming. For instance, I saw a Steam Deck at Disneyland being used to operate “autonomous” robots in Star Wars Land.
For me, I have been doing the vast majority of my gaming on my Steam Deck ever since I got it, however, recently, I was wanting to do some programming work while I was out and about, and was running into a lot of road blocks trying to do it on my Steam Deck. They can be overcome, but I found myself thinking about how much easier it would be to do my work on it, if it had a different distribution installed.
The Steam Deck is a consumer appliance, and as such has reasonable safeguards in place to protect users from themselves. Some users want to go beyond what’s available out of the box, and I imagine that freedom is what motivates most people to put other operating systems on their device.
I’m a cs student rn and there’s a lot of stuff that I’m learning specifically with UNIX and Linux related things. I use my steamdeck as a daily driver (literally sit in the front of class, pull out my steamdeck with my jsaux case and Bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo)
There’s some issues with the walled garden. The way they do system updates is basically by having system stuff on its own partition and overwriting it. It functions well for a “casual” person that doesn’t care about linux that much.
The issue is that I have to install things sometimes. Even things as simple as an OpenVPN package so I can use my nordvpn. Updates sometimes will wipe things I install in package manager. Other things (like Xelatex) are simply too big to fit in this partition so I have to install lighter packages even if I want to use the whole thing (Math formulas need a LOT of symbols).
This has actually led me to see if it’s worth it to install a third party OS. Bazzite was a good contender but I like Arch with the KDE desktop so ultimately I would just want a steamOS that I could install more things on.
Currently I’m looking into how I can achieve this. I don’t know if I should just enlarge the partition holding the system files, or if there is some pacman settings that I could have packages installed elsewhere and automatically symbolically linked in /user or wherever it needs
I also use my steam deck as my daily driver (dockcase 10 in 1 with peripherals etc).
I had been using arch for years before I got the steam deck, and for the first 8 months or so I unlocked the btrfs partition and installed everything I needed normally (kvm/qemu, devel libraries and Linux headers for c++ development, etc)… But every update from valve would destroy my environment and I had to run custom scripts to fill my etc directory back in…
For the past many months I’ve been using distrobox (which I believe comes pre-installed on the latest steamdeck updates) with a rootless arch environment inside, and flatpaks for everything that requires systemd.
You can symlink things like xdg-open from inside the container to your host, and end up with a pretty seamlessly integrated experience (distrobox does a lot of this for you anyway, and comes with utilities which make this pretty easy.)
If you want direct control of the system, this is not going to be a convenient setup, but if you’re interested in treating it like an immutable OS, there are userspace ways of getting around it’s limitations.
SteamOS has inspired me to make future installs immutable (and atomic/declarative using containers?), because it can be kinda nice once you get used to it.
I hope this helps or was interesting!
Edit: This is specifically what I meant by symlinking xdg-open.
Idk if this is done by default now, but if link handling is broken this is how you fix it
As someone that runs servers, having an immutable os (oe one that “wipes” on updates) is awesome.
The issue is that you are not in control of the config.Learning to script over it might be worthwhile. Update, apply customisation script, back to normal.
It’s good to learn declarative configuration
Mine is just running stock, but depending on what you’re trying to do with it I could imagine that a few things might not be palatable to some.
- The read only by default file system
- It kinda nukes everything on the system on update
- So much of how it handles the Linux side user profiles depends on there only being the default user
Thank you. Reading through responses this seems to answer it, I could imagine once you’re modifyinf foundational OS binaries you don’t want to have a SteamOS update nuke it.
