Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it’s still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
I wonder if this means it’s less locked down the Deck? Like is it kind of an iPad vs Mac situation? When I got the Deck and it was my only CPU travelling around at one point, I tried installing some general tools so I could get some actual work done on the road. Things were fairly heavily sandboxed, though nothing was a total deal-breaker I guess?
Curious about this too. I love my Steam Deck, but Desktop Mode is horrible. You can’t install apps from the command line because they just get deleted on every update, including CUPS which made printing a huge hassle. You have to jump through hoops to get it to mount an external hard drive automatically. I could never get Discord voice or video chats to actually work. But if you install a separate distro, you lose out on the performance settings that are locked to Game Mode.
Now that Valve is actually doing a desktop, I’d love to use this as my daily driver so my old ThinkPad can finally rest. I’m hoping Valve will finally fine-tune Desktop Mode so people can actually use it. Or at least not throttle performance if people want to install a different OS. Maybe they could even let us boot directly into Desktop Mode this time?
I wonder if this means it’s less locked down the Deck? Like is it kind of an iPad vs Mac situation? When I got the Deck and it was my only CPU travelling around at one point, I tried installing some general tools so I could get some actual work done on the road. Things were fairly heavily sandboxed, though nothing was a total deal-breaker I guess?
It will run on Steam OS like the steam deck is.
If you have troubles with its protections (like the non-writeable system partition), you can just disable them.
You do know you can boot up to a full-ass Linux on the deck?
Afaik that side has zero sandboxes
Yeah but that lock down is just there to protect most users. Afaik it doesn’t require any heavy workarounds?
yeah you can just dualboot another non-atomic distro and call it a day
Curious about this too. I love my Steam Deck, but Desktop Mode is horrible. You can’t install apps from the command line because they just get deleted on every update, including CUPS which made printing a huge hassle. You have to jump through hoops to get it to mount an external hard drive automatically. I could never get Discord voice or video chats to actually work. But if you install a separate distro, you lose out on the performance settings that are locked to Game Mode.
Now that Valve is actually doing a desktop, I’d love to use this as my daily driver so my old ThinkPad can finally rest. I’m hoping Valve will finally fine-tune Desktop Mode so people can actually use it. Or at least not throttle performance if people want to install a different OS. Maybe they could even let us boot directly into Desktop Mode this time?
That would all work when using a regular Linux distro like mint or ubuntu