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by Defenestresque 1802 days ago
>The end user won’t be doing anything with the OS itself.

What makes you think so? The desktop environment will be powered by KDE Plasma.

>Accordingly, the underlying distro just doesn’t seem that interesting.

Valve is pretty clear that in addition to having a gaming mode they want the device to be a full-fledged (linux-based) PC.. hopefully with everything that entails.

>What about the distro could possibly be surfaced to the end user/gamer that they would care about?

Maybe nothing in "gaming mode," but in "desktop mode", it's Arch running KDE Plasma. It's essentially a Linux-based PC with a gaming option. (Or vice-versa, depending on your primary use case and point-of-view.)

Given the fact that the desktop mode exists and is leaned on as an important feature, I'd assume a lot of underlying functionality will be exposed.

>It’s not like Steam will apt dist-upgrade their device: upgrades will be a complete reimage.

I too am interested to see how they will handle this, but based on their website copy I would not be surprised if you could at least apt-get upgrade the desktop portion, with the gaming mode running either on top or separate from it.