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Valve will officially let you install SteamOS on other handhelds as soon as this April
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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Are there handhelds with nvidia GPUs? That might be the big distinction.
Valve's added some Nvidia support to steamos, but Nvidia has not played well with Linux in general in my experience. Sounds like that's gotten a lot better recently though.
Yeah, nvidia started open sourcing their kernel interface. But it only works with new GPUs and not the millions of 1080s people still have. Plus the license of nvidia's closed source drivers (which are still needed) forbid them from being included in an OS image.
Small projects like Bazzite might get away with including them anyways but I bet Valve will have to make a deal with nvidia.
edit: With nvidia releasing their cloud gaming client on SteamOS I just now realised that that is probably a direct result of this kind of discussions.
Nvidia is fine and has always been fine, it just hasn't been ideal. I've used Nvidia GPUs on Linux for >10 years, and it has worked well.
The main issues are (and have always been):
If you use a release based distro and don't need to be on the bleeding edge (describes pretty much everyone), Nvidia is fine.
I switched to AMD a couple years ago because they offered better value and I needed an upgrade anyway, Linux compatibility was a nice value add.
Back before AMD bought ATI (and during the transition) nvidia was actually much better than ATI. For my previous desktop I specifically bought an nvidia card for the better Linux support.
I also wasn't so worried about my laptop having an nvidia GPU either. And then it kept crashing after being suspended to RAM. Stopped after switching to the integrated Intel graphics. Sadly nVidia doesn't care about old or laptop graphics.
Absolutely! I remember having ATI embedded graphics on my motherboard and it was more annoying than Nvidia's drivers. Nvidia didn't really change since then, it's just that AMD submitted their driver to the kernel, so newer software tends to work better with it.
dGPUs on laptops have always sucked on Linux, this isn't new, nor is it necessarily a problem specific to Nvidia. Graphics switching on Linux just isn't smooth, which is why I haven't bought a laptop with a dGPU since switching to Linux. I hear it works, I just don't see the point. Get a cheap laptop with an AMD APU and you can play casual games on it, and then build a cheap desktop PC with the savings and your experience will be much better. It'll probably cost a bit more at the start, but your laptop will last much longer and you can upgrade the desktop more cheaply.
Oh true, but it is based on arch so I figure it should be possible to install the nvidia drivers. They may get wiped each system update though