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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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I highly recommend not using SteamOS on your PC, unless it's literally used as a console. Use any major distro instead.
I agree with your sentiment, but I disagree with your conclusion of using any major distro. If you've ever had to fix a corrupted package manager database caused by an in-place distro upgrade or had to install third-party package repositories to get access to up-to-date software, you'll understand where I'm coming from.
Beginners should start with something that either has bells and whistles included for out-of-the-box gaming, or comes with an easy way to un-fuck itself when you end up breaking something. It doesn't need to be Nix, but it probably shouldn't be Debian (which has a slow release cadence) or Ubuntu (because fuck Canonical and their "my way or the highway" approach to doing desktop OSes).
Debian is totally fine, why do you need a rapid update cycle? Everything you need is packaged with Steam. If for some reason you need something newer, you can always use whatever release is in testing at the time (use that release name, not "testing" itself) and you'll get newer packages with minimal risk of stability issues (a lot of people run testing).
There's really nothing special about newer packages for gaming. Once it's working, Debian will keep it that way.
I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed because I like newer packages for other reasons (I use it for software development) and hate release upgrades because they take forever, but tons of people use stable distros without issue.
If you want some bells and whistles out of the box, I hear Bazzite is good. But any distro will work fine with Steam, and I'd assume Heroic and other launchers should also work fine on any distro they're packaged for.
Drivers can be an issue with recent hardware on Debian due to said slow release cadence. May not work as well on recent hardware.
In that specific case, yeah, maybe try a different distro. SteamOS will still be a worse option since Valve doesn't have any published update cadence.
But still stick to a major distro, like Fedora or Linux Mint. It's unlikely you'll actually run into issues on Debian though...
Also, kernel upgrades. Unless the user knows about and specifically opts to use Debian backports, they're going to be on the same kernel version until the next stable Debian release. It's not the end of the world to leave performance on the table, but some people are picky about getting their money out of their hardware.
Using backports and upgrading to a newer kernel is fine for someone familiar with Linux and confident enough to tinker and make at-your-own-risk changes. Having to do that can be offputting for newcomers, coming across as intimidating or unnecessarily complicated.
A newer kernel does not automatically offer more performance. In fact it could be the opposite if it includes workarounds for Intel's latest CPU security fuck-ups.
It's not so much the lack of a rapid update cycle as much as it's the pinned kernel version alongside the years-long pace of Debian's stable upgrade cycle.
That would be fine if the kernel didn't see much improvement over ~2 years of development, but there's constantly new stuff being added or optimized with every kernel release. It's just not much of a friendly introduction to Linux gaming for a newcomer to either have to pick between missing out on recent improvements, or diving into the intimidating realm of fiddling with packages and backported kernels—especially if they're not coming from a tech savvy background.
Most Linux users, including gamers, don't really benefit from improvements to Linux since most of it is drivers for hardware they don't have. Most userland software can be installed via flatpak or PPA (or other form of additional repository for your distro) if you really need something newer. But my understanding is that people (esp gamers) get annoyed more by stuff changing than missing out on new stuff.
The whole point of recommending a stable distro is to give the best chance of the person finding the help they need, as well as things not breaking randomly, and you get that with stable release distros. If the user knows enough to disregard that, they know what distro would be a better fit anyway.