It’s not the gotcha that they think it is. Increasing share of Linux, steam deck or not is progress. Any development or considerations made for the SteamDeck and its Arch based OS benefit the non SteamDeck Linux gaming scene too.
Mostly a stab at Reddit PCMR, Lemmy PCMR has a different vibe.
I’ve never touched a steam deck nor its OS. How much of the underlying OS is exposed to the user? Is it easy to bring up a terminal emulator?
It’s surprisingly straightforward! There’s a menu option in the UI that can switch you to desktop mode, which is KDE Plasma. You can open up a terminal emulator from the K menu there.
Alright, good to know.
Also, the gate is open come in. There seems to be some elitism regarding the choice of distro, but don’t pay any attention to that. “Mint and Ubuntu are noob distros, I use arch btw” is only partially a meme.
I’m a linux user of 20+ years, and I run Mint on my desktop. Arch users are the linux equivalent of the car guys who spend ages tuning engine performance and gear ratios in their car. I just want something that works well and that does what I need it to do in a reliable way. Plus, the Mint user base is so large that it’s relatively easy to find a workaround/fix for whatever strategy nge issue you might run into.
I hear good things about Pop OS, but I have no firat hand experience with it, so I can’t comment on that.
Use Pop!_OS myself. Its “grand” / “fine”.
I’d recommend it to a new user. If however you are an existing user who’s happy I’d say not to bother.
Pop!_OS and Fedora are my usual choices for a desktop OS, unless I have reasons not to.
Ubuntu is not controversial because it is a “noob distro”, it is controversial because the company behind it (Canonical) is turning almost as bad as Micro$oft.
While maybe not quite the hyperbole of turning into MS, it’s not entirely wrong either. That’s why LMDE was created - in case they go completely off the rails. And that’s why I run LMDE - I support the move.
One thing to note though is that SteamOS is immutable, i.e.
/is blocked for writes by default, you can only write to/home, so you need to install things via flatpaks not via package manager. So not ideal for a power user, but should be enough for most people.I disagree that Arch guys are the guy who tunes up everything, I think that would be Gentoo. I think Arch guys are the equivalent of the guy that built his own PC, it’s not an impressive feat (even though some act as if they were superiors for doing it) and probably lots of the people who buy prebuilts can do it, they chose not to bother assembling things if they can get someone to do it for them. The reason I think this is because I use Arch for the same reason I built my PC, i.e. I’m lazy and want something that might be a slight hoccup to setup but will be a breeze to maintain, it might be a Frankenstein, but it’s the Frankenstein I built and know.