I’m wondering if that’s something like Obsidian

Linux has had a major increase in usership lately if I recall right, and supposedly windows has lost a major number of users (although mostly people dropping desktops for just phones).

No idea if PewDiePie contributed or not.

I hope so, I know I’ve run into issues before with streaming from a server with no available monitors, so I’m hoping this will fix that.

I’m mostly playing Ys 9 Monstrum Nox, and it’s been a fun time. Also been playing some Mindustry with friends, although I suspect I’ll want to make some tweaks to the control scheme before I play too much longer.

Yeah, I don’t think it quite applies here since all that was needed was a reboot.

Yes, it was fixed December of 2023 or January of 2024, if I recall right. Not long after the OLED launched. It was some specific wifi features, mostly wifi 6 features, that would cause the wifi card to malfunction and not work at all until you rebooted. Had to disable the specific wifi features on your router if you wanted to use 5ghz, or stick to 2.4ghz networks. Didn’t usually affect LED decks afaik since they wouldn’t try to use the affected wifi 6 features.

While valve got it fixed in SteamOS not too long after launch, they only recently applied that wifi fix to the SteamOS recovery usb drive. There was over a year where people could still run into the wifi issue if they had to repair their OS from a recovery drive.

The default desktop mode layout opens keyboard just by pressing x I believe, and if it doesn’t you can customize the desktop layout to set a different keybind for keyboard. I haven’t actually seen it open big picture mode from pressing steam+x at all, I’m curious if anyone else has encountered that.

I’ve been wondering about the GoG captcha thing. Captchas don’t even really work anymore for preventing bots, and GoG has given me some captchas lately that kept giving me new challenges for like 1.5 minutes before finally letting me redeem the game.

Microsoft’s biggest concern here is another Crowd Strike like event, so they’re prioritizing kernel modifications that impact businesses.

While Bazzite is gaming focused, it will still be a great non-gaming distro. The main things gaming distros do is include some optimizations, prioritize faster software updates, bundle in some programs like Steam, and usually try to be more new user friendly. There’s also Fedora Silverblue, which is like the parent of Bazzite. It’s more developer focused though, and may not be as new user friendly as Bazzite.

But as others have said, your biggest request is having the same desktop environment as SteamOS, which is the KDE desktop. This is available on nearly every Linux distro, so you can get that experience with any of them. KDE even has it’s own official distro in the form of KDE Neon, which could honestly be a good choice for you if that’s your main requirement. It’s based on Ubuntu, which makes it easy to find help if you have an issue.

The biggest thing left to understand is that SteamOS and Bazzite are immutable distros, which means the system files are locked down. This makes those systems hard to break, and very reliable. However it can make installing some kinds of software harder. More tradition desktops like KDE Neon/Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora(non-silverblue) are not immutable. They will give your more options for installing software/etc, but there’s a higher chance of breaking something if you start messing with system files.

If immutable sounds good, I’d recommend going with Bazzite still. If you want more freedom to customize your system and install software from outside of the discover store, I’d recommend KDE Neon.

It’s a great one, although it can definitely be a slow burn at first.

A very good point.

Honestly depends on what kind of games you like.

Many Metroid games are classics and still great to play. For the 3D Metroids, you can install Primehack and play Metroid Prime Trilogy for an amazing experience. For the classic style 2D metroids, I’d recommend a play order of Zero Mission (GBA), Samus Returns (3DS), Super Metroid (SNES), and Metroid Fusion (GBA).

Many older mario games are great, both 2D and 3D. Mario 64 has some great recompiled versions, and even stuff like sm64coopdx that lets you play online coop. Mario Sunshine (GCN) is fun too, and both Mario Galaxy (Wii) games are fantastic. Lots of good Zelda games too, such as Wind Waker (GCN/WiiU). Until recently I would have highly recommended Xenoblade X (WiiU), but it just got a remastered and expanded version on switch.

Fanatical has it 27% off right now, and they’re a trustworthy store. Reviews are pretty poor for Civ7 last I checked though, so it might be better to wait for more patches and bigger discounts.

A lot of good games in Steam’s deep discount section, but unfortunately I already own most of them. Picked up Furi for $2, but haven’t grabbed anything else from Steam yet. If you don’t have them, some deep discount games I’d recommend are Besiege, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Borderlands 3, Black Mesa, and Steins;Gate.

I also picked up Neon White from Fanatical, been waiting a long time for the price on it to drop below $10.

Steam Summer sale just started, so steam servers are getting hammered.

Time will tell, there’s progress towards proper open source drivers for Nvidia now, but I don’t know how long that will take to catch up.

The fundamental issue with kernel anticheat is you’re giving full control and unlimited monitoring of your computer to a company, and trusting them to not abuse that access. Being able to see some processes it runs isn’t any kind of guarantee that those processes aren’t doing something undesirable, and doesn’t guarantee that there aren’t other processes doing things secretly.

EAC should be one of the better ones, but it’s still a question of:

1. Do you trust Epic Games to act in your best interest?
2. Do you trust Epic Games to dispose of your personal info and not sell it or use it? (remember, it’s not a question of whether your info is being collected, anticheat programs are intended to gather a lot of info on everything you do on your PC so it can be confirmed if you’re cheating. So you are being spied on, it’s just a question of whether they delete the data after harvesting it or decide to sell/use the data already on their servers that you consented to giving them when you accepted the game’s ToS).
3. Do you think that Tencent’s partial ownership of Epic impacts either of the above questions?
4. Do you think that NSA and other government agencies are going to use the anticheat to spy on your computer, either through legal requirement or through undisclosed backdoors?

The next gen steam deck likely isn’t coming out for quite awhile still, so it’s probably not worth waiting for next gen.

Performance wise, the Steam Deck does struggle to run new AAA games if they’re poorly optimized, use UE5, or have mandatory ray tracing for lighting. It’s still possible to play most of these games, but it will depend on your tolerance for graphics quality or your willingness to install performance mods. There’s also no shortage of good games to play, slightly older AAA games generally work flawlessly and nearly all AA/indie games run great. I have enough good games in my library where I could never buy another game and always have something good to play.

The switch 2 in portable mode has nearly identical power to the Steam Deck, so if it sells anywhere close to Switch 1 I think we’ll see a lot of games target being able to run on it. The switch 1 was far enough behind modern platforms to not be worth optimizing for, for most AAA games/devs. But the switch 2 and steam deck generally have enough power to run new games at an almost acceptable level, and that makes optimization a much more appealing target.

Also worth considering is local streaming. If you have a decent PC/PS5 you can stream games to the deck. It can be a good compromise for the games that don’t run great natively.

I’m pretty sure it’s mandatory that any Chinese owned company has to have backdoors and provide access to the government. I’ve read interviews where people talked about running companies in China, and they would talk about how government employees would come and install hardware in all their server rooms, and they couldn’t touch any of it or do anything about it.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most kernel anti-cheat are developed/used by companies that are at least partially Chinese owned.