Makes me wonder - how viable is it to install actual SteamOS on devices that aren't the Steam Deck (and use the Deck UI and all)? Are there any mods or something to make that work?
The Deck UI is two parts: the Steam client in Big Picture Mode (which is most of the Steam Deck UI and runs on Mac and Windows as well), and the gamescope compositor. Gamescope is open source and Steam is available for download on Linux.
You could run any of the replacement Steam Deck OSes (Jovian/NixOS, Bazzite, Chimera...) and get a UI that's identical to what's on the Steam Deck, down to the "Deck Verified" badges and sidebar sliders that may not work on your machine. They're all essentially running the Steam Deck UI atop whatever distribution each one chose.
I'm not sure you'd want the literal Steam Deck image on your machine. It's an older kernel with a bunch of patches that expect the SD's hardware. But if you want to explore that more, there was an excellent article on the front page this morning about building your own clone of Steam OS.
You seem knowledgeable, so a casual question. I installed bazzite :testing fork on the steamdeck oled and wifi speeds were absolutely terrible. Like 100mbit max where as I see 500-600 on stock.
Do you have a perspective on the driver layer here? I’m assuming bazzite is using something out dated or maybe didn’t have hardware acceleration on wifi packets etc
You could run any of the replacement Steam Deck OSes (Jovian/NixOS, Bazzite, Chimera...) and get a UI that's identical to what's on the Steam Deck, down to the "Deck Verified" badges and sidebar sliders that may not work on your machine. They're all essentially running the Steam Deck UI atop whatever distribution each one chose.
I'm not sure you'd want the literal Steam Deck image on your machine. It's an older kernel with a bunch of patches that expect the SD's hardware. But if you want to explore that more, there was an excellent article on the front page this morning about building your own clone of Steam OS.