I honestly don’t want to be tinkering all the time. The steamdeck is pretty much my limit for tinkering with gaming these days. Kids do that to you lol
I imagine it is great but I just don’t want to have to troubleshoot my operating system, games, and hardware. It is probably reasonable to assume that a stable steam OS will be more consistent for me. Maybe I’m underestimating bazzite but in my experience regular Linux users (I have some experience but hardly an expert/daily user) underestimate how frequently one has to tinker with their OS’s.
I use Linux every day and I never have to tinker with it, nor did it need any tinkering to install. An extremely tinker-free experience especially compared to modern Windows.
I feel your anecdotes are at best outdated. Desktop Linux has come along way.
I get people bristle when someone says linux has a little friction, but as someone who does use Elementary and Mint from time to time I just don't get how people can say my view is "outdated" when all one has to do is pick up a console or Mac to see the difference. How many times have we seen folks troubleshooting wifi card drivers on forums? It is not some massive gap, using Linux is not some herculean feat, but surely we can agree that most people would never call it plug and play.
Linux is a great experience these days but you do have to tinker sometimes. You have to mess with drivers and settings and command line. It may be minimal for people comfortable with computers but it's not as friction-less as you're claiming.
I think you're both kind of wrong and right on this. Contemporary linux distributions really don't require tinkering anymore for most cases, yet it's also true that sometimes there is tinkering required. The reason why this is true, yet I don't blame Linux for it, is because it is hardware dependent.
If you buy hardware that is compatible with Linux, then you won't really have to tinker (at least, any more than you would with any other OS, for example, tweaking resolutions, etc). Unfortunately, it's newer hardware that typically requires the tinkering. If you don't want to tinker, I would recommend going with generation n -1 or even n -2. If you go with the latest and greatest, expect to have some tinkering required.
Distro choice does of course matter a great deal. I've been using Fedora as primary OS now for many years and absolutely love it, and it's what I recommend to most people. Ubuntu and derivatives are good of course, though the older kernels do often decrement the generation of hardware. For example, Fedora on n-1 is going to be pretty good. Ubuntu might still lack some support at that age, so should go with n-2 or n-3 to be safe.
The plan is to build a modern PC and the fact that people have to adjust their hardware decisions in such a way (downgrading/using older components) to accommodate linux kind of reiterates my point IMO. If I was installing windows this wouldn’t remotely be a consideration. Though I certainly don’t want windows, it is a notable difference.
Bazzite is atomic and image-based, so it is designed to play your games out-of-the-box without any additional configuration, and instead of package updates you are pulling the new image that's built and tested by Bazzite. From a design perspective it's extremely similar to SteamOS.
Yeah same. I didn't want to install all of those i386 library versions either. But I've found the flatpak steam client to be wonderfully easy and maintenance free, which let's me use my computer for other things, too.