Are you trying to imply having an “official SteamOS” means you will be able to call Valve to have them troubleshoot your game? Because you can’t do that with the current official SteamOS on the Steam Deck. I don’t think you thought this through.
For some devices, gaming is all they need to do.
Serviceable isn’t good, even if gaming is all you do, you’re better off with a regular distro — this was brought up already in the comment you’re replying to.
EmuDeck, Heroic and Lutris integrate directly into Steam. With a single click you can add a shortcut in your Steam library
Adding a secondary launcher to a launcher is bad design. Again, this is something that I brought up in the comment you’re replying to, along with having to use hacky software that only exists to remedy SteamOS usability problems, of which emudeck is one.
I’m not sure how they can make it any easier
They don’t have to. The problems I mentioned only exist because of SteamOS dumb decision to completely segregate the “desktop” and “gaming” experiences. They’re fixed by just letting me use my computer. Imagine if Steam logged you out every time you exited Big Picture mode, because this is pretty much how SteamOS currently works. I think you guys are cutting a LOT of slack to SteamOS because of what Valve did for Linux gaming but there’s really not a single reason to use it over something like Bazzite (not the Steam Deck version, obviously).
I’m confused, do you think Canonical, RedHat or SUSE are going away in the near future? Or that they don’t have support?
Let me preface by saying I love everything Valve has done for Linux gaming and I’m fully aware that Linux wouldn’t be where it is now without Steam. With that said… I really don’t get the hype for SteamOS on other devices. I mean, it’s serviceable if all you do is gaming but it’s honestly one of the worst desktop experiences I’ve ever had (and I’ve used gnome had many): You need to go into desktop mode to do pretty much anything a regular computer should be able to do and, when you get back into Steam, it closes everything you opened while in desktop mode. This means you have to rely on hacky software to do things you would just be able to do if Steam was better integrated with the desktop. For example, why do I need to install a plug-in to import all of my games from different stores into Steam when I should just be able to alt-tab into whatever launcher I want? No, I will not import other launchers into Steam’s launcher and then launch the launcher from the Steam launcher to launch the game — I’m not a crazy person. It feels as if Steam is doing everything in its power to keep me from leaving it and punishes me for daring to try, which honestly reminds me of a certain fruit company. Now, Valve obviously designed SteamOS to be used with a controller and only for games bought from Steam (which is delusional but I digress), so let’s assume you are that person: you have your entire game library on Steam and you use a controller as your main input device so you don’t see the need to ever leave Valve’s walled garden. Then you’d still be better off with any one of the other 37 thousand distros that come with Steam preinstalled because then you at least have access to the desktop Steam UI.
tl; dr: SteamOS kinda sucks, just use a normal distro. Yes, even if you exclusively buy games from Steam.
It’s not. It’s weird that you’re defending a billionaire, bootlicker.
What on earth are you talking about? Windows is the king of a system just breaking itself for seemingly no reason with no way of fixing it. At least on Linux, I know there’ll be hundreds of forum posts telling me how to fix something.
While we’re on the subject of esoteric issues with Windows, Update just recently had a bug where it couldn’t update if your Recovery partition wasn’t big enough. The Recovery partition that was created on install. Automatically. By Windows.
Welp, good thing I didn’t have dinner because I have to eat my words now.