this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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Love Linux and steam deck, but AS IS, steam os is a horrible choice for a desktop general use computer.
It's immutable without layering, so there are things that you can't install/keep after an update. Case and point, printers. You can't print, period. Valve knows, they don't need a gaming device to print so they don't care.
Hopefully they will do something about this, but I don't hold my breath for 2025
They wont do anything about it because SteamOS is not and will never be a general purpose desktop OS. Its a gaming distro designed to do one thing and one thing well, game. It can do other things but its not meant to, kinda like a reverse MacOS.
Currently, you're right. But it's a bad move, I think, moving forward for valve.
They have already confirmed they want steamOS to be a distro everybody can install on any computer. Being more limited than most distros is going to make it a hard choice to pick. On the deck, it's fine tuned to that hardware. What is going to offer that Bazzite won't replicate a few months afterwards, while offering a better general OS experience?
I think that just having layers and a recovery partition that can restore the system while preserving steam games (even if removing all configs) would increase the appeal a lot.
You might like Bazzite. Its like a general purpose version of SteamOS with layering and printers
My desktop is Bazzite and my htpc is Aurora (the non gaming version of Bazzite), so I have to agree with you haha
I think printers is kinda going the way of having to support winmodems for Linux... Just not as important as it used to be.
Last time I printed something was for a pistol permit. 3 years ago. And I just sent that to Office Depot to print it, and picked it up on the way to the permit office.
Students at the local uni don't really need printers, either. Generally, the few times they do, there's public printers to email the doc to, and go pick up (Or, QR code and a phone, etc).
Personal printers just aren't that big of a deal these days.