[Forgeties79]

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.

[Andrex]

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I feel your anecdotes are at best outdated.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.

[Forgeties79]

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but as someone who does use Elementary and Mint from time to time I just don't get how people can say my view is "outdated" when all one has to do is pick up a console or Mac to see the difference.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.

[freedomben]

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.

[Forgeties79]

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.

[talldayo]

As someone that has gamed an equal amount on Windows 10 and Linux, I think you're blowing things a little out of proportion. Windows is a tinker timesink too if you want to uninstall Candy Crush and Xbox Game Bar, disable all telemetry and ads, or even just get a good version of Java installed for Minecraft. Windows can "just work" for some games, but for others it's a nightmare to get running. Another good example is the Fallout games, which have a decades-old bug that crashes the game if you alt-tab away from it. On WINE this bug can be fixed by simply running the game fullscreen in a virtual window. The flexibility is excellent and saves me from trying to inject a DLL file just to get proper borderless fullscreen to work the way it should.

My big takeaway is this; if you are comfortable using the Steam Deck to play games and install software, you will not struggle to get Linux to run games. Pretty much anything that isn't a gaming laptop is going to have some form of support, and even the famously crappy Nvidia drivers were recently updated to support Wayland and other new Linux protocols. Now more than ever before, using Linux to game is probably easier than getting the equivalent experience on Windows.

[dingnuts]

You compared Linux to Mac a few comments back -- how is that anything but choosing specific hardware to accommodate your OS?

by this standard Mac OS is still a hobby OS because it can't be installed on random hardware.

No, it isn't too much to ask that you make sure the hardware you buy works with the OS you intend to run. If you find Linux fiddly in the modern era it's solely because of this.

[Forgeties79]

I addressed this in my previous comment figuring this comment was coming:

> in such a way (downgrading/using older components) to accommodate linux

When I buy a Mac or a windows machine I don’t have to purposely avoid newer hardware to ensure it works.

[tapoxi]

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.

[superkuh]

So it works until it doesn't (because your hardware is not their test hardware) then there's no way to debug or fix things.