My current system was installed as manjaro, but i immediately started having AUR issues, so I just changed all the repos out to the official arch ones and over time everything manjaro specific has been updated or removed.

The first lines in my /var/log/pacman.log are from early 2015, and ive fully rebuilt my computer since then, including swapping hard drives (dd’ to clone old drive onto new drive). So at this point my PC is a hardware and software ship of theseus.

Back in october I travelled for a lan party. I didnt bring my linux desktop with me, and just brought my steam deck and dock, and when I got there, borrowed a keyboard/mouse/monitor.

Then i swapped it to desktop mode, and the people I was with all commented on “Oh wow! it’s just like a regular computer”

One of them has explicited said they were fed up with microsoft’s BS and would swap their gaming PC over to steamOS once it’s formally released for desktop (they were uninterested in Bazzite and wanted an official Valve release for their gaming PC).

It’s immutable (you can’t break the core OS, there is no deleting system32). You can’t install packages (like you would from AUR), but have access to flatpaks.

Firefox is preinstalled, but anything from flathub is also available.

So yes, it has all the things most people need from a desktop OS, and is harder to break, and is supported commercially.

It has a desktop mode, I’ve never looked into whether you can boot to desktop by default. But I would imagine if they released a desktop friendly version, that would be an option.

SteamOS has a web browser.

It boots by default into Steam Big Picture mode, which is the SteamOS/HTPC style “intended to be used with a controller” layout.

In the power menu, it has a “switch to desktop” button that drops you to KDE. Firefox is pre-installed, and immediately available for use.

But also, it’s just an immutable OS with plenty of things installable via flatpak in KDE Discover. Which means Slack, Discord, Zoom, Chrome… all of the “desktop” things most people need are available.

If those personal photos and videos are important to you, you should have them backed up anyway. If you ever spill anything on that laptop, or it gets dropped or broken or lost. All those things are gone.

But as others have said, you can sometimes resize a partition from gparted if the drive isnt mounted (ie, use the live USB).

Counter point… Both are generating perfectly valid JSON, so who cares?

Python 3.13.2 (main, Feb  5 2025, 08:05:21) [GCC 14.2.1 20250128]
Type 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information
IPython 9.0.2 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. Type '?' for help.
Tip: IPython 9.0+ have hooks to integrate AI/LLM completions.

In [1]: import json

In [2]: json.loads('{"x": 1e-05}')
Out[2]: {'x': 1e-05}

In [3]: json.loads('{"x":0.00001}')
Out[3]: {'x': 1e-05}

Welcome to Node.js v20.3.1.
Type ".help" for more information.
> JSON.parse('{"x":0.00001}')
{ x: 0.00001 }
> JSON.parse('{"x": 1e-05}')
{ x: 0.00001 }

Javascript and Python both happily accept either format from the string and convert it into a float they are happy with.

In theory, “in theory” and “in practice” have the same results, but in practice, they often differ.

You may not agree, but some people actually like the platform integration features that Galaxy and Steam and the like provide. Cloud sync and achievements and things that you may not care about are important to other people.

And then there’s just the whole “They said they would, and this is not very reassuring about their commitment to Linux users.”

I have an ultrawide with a 16:9 on either side mounted portrait. I get the vertical space and the ultrawide.

Got it. Linux is not VR ready until it supports discontinued headsets. that were previously at 10% of the 2% market, but are now even less (because it’s discontinued, and thus only going to continue to shrink).

The number of different branded headsets using WMR doesn’t make it significant in any way. Based on Steam hardware survey, WMR headsets only account for 2.84% of VR headsets. Index, Quest 2, Quest 3 account for ~70% of VR headsets in use, and they all work on Linux. Index just naturally in SteamVR and it’s my understanding that setting up ALVR for the quest ones isn’t that tricky (but I’ve also never tried). And much of the remaining 30% other headsets work with ALVR too.

And the point of comparing things to Windows, is that if we’re stating “Linux isn’t ready for gaming because not every VR headset works”, then by that definition Windows isn’t either. Which you probably agree with, but generally speaking “people” / society view Windows as ready for gaming despite it not supporting every headset.

It’s basically getting into the “Fortnite doesn’t work on Linux” type of situation now. Some things are just never going to work, and it’s because of the creator of those things and not Linux itself, and who cares. Even if the things that don’t work are popular, that doesn’t mean that on the whole, the OS isn’t ready.

Also, according to steam only 1.9% of accounts have a VR headset. That alone makes VR an edge case. but 2.84% of 1.9% is 0.05% of overall steam accounts using WMR. I think Linux can be ready for gaming without WMR support.

Counter point: VR is working. It’s not working for your specific hardware and use case.

My Oculus Dev Kit 1 and 2 don’t work properly on Windows anymore. Does that mean Windows isn’t ready for gaming because my specific VR hardware doesn’t work on it? Or does it mean that “VR ready” doesn’t have to include every VR headset.

I recently switched my VR PC from Windows to Bazzite. No compiling necessary.

This comes a year and a half after they resorted to disabling Wayland support

Yeah. A lot of progress has been made in the past year and a half. This is a clickbait headline. It’s not like last week they were like “this is super broken… oh well shipping it anyway.” It feels like pointing out their previous criticisms is almost trying to call them out as hypocritical or something.

It was previously broken. They said it was broken. And now it’s fixed, and they re-enabled it as the default. There’s no bigger story or drama around their previous comments.

EGS finally has a shopping cart now, so it’s basically equal now, right?

I’m surprised their website works and uses web standards and they didn’t just NACK everything about HTML and go off and do their own thing.

SteamDeck + SteamOS has the same compatibility and playable games as ArchLinux/Fedora/Ubuntu/desktop linux.

PS5 and FreeBSD do not have any overlap there. If PS5 had no proprietary layers on top of BSD (or the layers were otherwise accessible to the public and could be installed on top of BSD by end users), then you would be right in a way.

But any game released for SteamDeck, I can run on a linux desktop without any special tweaking, so they are related enough. Any game released on PS5 will not run on a BSD desktop, so clearly they are not related in the same way.

SteamDeck being popular and mainstream means that more games work on SteamDeck, and more games working on SteamDeck means more games working on Linux. (Another aspect which is not true of PS5 and BSD).

So having people in the industry, who will potentially be involved with the studios, having (and enjoying) a SteamDeck means studios will hear things like “I hope I can play this on my SteamDeck” from people involved in the creation of games … which helps push forward Linux gaming. Even if only a little.

Random broken things and weird tinkering to get some things working. And even when they work, not quite as good as windows.

Most overlays don’t work because they are tied to windows specific windows capture things. On KDE wayland, the default “view desktop” from SteamVR doesnt even work.

But if youre looking for some very chill things, it’s generally passable. I’ve been playing beat saber, which is fast paced (at least for the hand tracking) and proton handles it perfectly. From what I can tell, proton can handle VR games just fine, there’s just some work to clean up the SteamVR interface in general.

I’m still delusionally hoping that the Valve Deckard is shipping soon and that when that drops, there will be a big SteamVR 3 linux update (kinda like how SteamOS 3 came out with the steam deck), and the headset will run linux itself so naturally they will have to ship all their linux VR improvements, and we’ll see linux VR suddenly become mega viable.

tl;dr - working, depending on your level of tolerance for slight jank, and what games you want to play.

I have a separate PC for VR (with an old Vega64 in it) on my valve index. Just a week or two ago I got fed up with something on Windows 10 (i think it was trying to get me to upgrade to windows 11 maybe?) and installed bazzite.

I started with HORRIBLE performance issues. Like could barely run beat saber smoothly issues. And then I changed something minor around (Disabling the VR Home was I think the biggest thing, it’s like it was constantly running in the background or something), and ran some script i found online (https://gist.github.com/galister/a85135f4a3aca5208ba4091069ab2222 - i think it was this one, but disclaimer, i have not looked deeply at what this does, I was running this on a fresh gaming only distro so I had nothing to lose), and suddenly performance was just fine. I’m sure this isn’t motion smoothing, but going from stuttery to smooth made me think of this. And a Vega64 is pretty old, and pre-dates any modern “rdna” AMD improvements. But it is GCN at least. I might

Audio switching on Bazzite does work. In fact it works more reliably than it did on windows for me. I feel like “using a gaming dedicated distro” can go a long way in making gaming things work, and this is a dedicated gaming PC. YMMV

Base station auto sleep mode does not work, but https://github.com/ShayBox/Lighthouse this CLI script can solve that. Just set something to run lighthouse --state on and lighthouse --state standby and you’re good.

Performance is generally worse than windows, and some things won’t work (OVR toolkit requires some windows specific things, so naturally doesnt work). But on windows, the first time i launch steamvr for any session (its not just per boot, its just more like “if the headset has been off for more than an hour”), the headset screen wouldnt turn on. Put the headset on, i can see the tracking is working via the mirroring on the display, but the headset doesnt light up. “Restart headset” and then it works. Every time. Doesn’t happen on linux. And with bazzite, the power button does a quick sleep just like on a steam deck, and the index still works reliably after the computer wakes from sleep.

I don’t do a lot of VR, i just regularly play beat saber for exercise. And it works well for that. I’m perfectly happy sticking with bazzite for VR workouts. I havent really tried any other games, but would be willing to test drive anything for compatibility if anyone cares about something specific.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

even if you can figure out specifically WHAT a function does, it’s not always clear WHY a function does, and honestly, if this function wasnt labeled in the code, no way in hell would I know what it does.

It has an entire wiki page dedicated to explaining it, and it involves enough math that most people wouldn’t be able to follow along.

Nothing this atrocious lives in any current codebases I work on… but if you work at an old enough company, some of the load-bearing code will be tricky to figure out what is calling it, but also it was written in a time where little hacks were needed to eke out performance.

You only have to experience it once for it to be a memorable enough thing that you will cite it for the rest of your days.

Or more realistically, it IS comprehensible, but the level of effort necessary to comprehend it is not worth it. So you leave it as “undecipherable” and move on.