I think they’re showing us how mature user-facing Linux in 2025 really is. With a little focus and investment on the UX for the end user on top of the open source core OS it has already beat any console OS by a mile.
It does not use any of the popular desktop environments (unless you drop into Desktop Mode). It heavily curates hardware, kernel, and drivers to keep the platform from breaking and install with sane (performance) defaults for gaming. It doesn't rely on a common package manager.
Beside a Steam Deck I also use a Linux PC for gaming and even with 25 years of Linux experience I still struggle sometimes to keep hardware acceleration working after a driver update, sometimes spending an evening of troubleshooting instead of gaming. Certain parts of the desktop environment sometimes lock up to the point where I have to SSH into the PC to fix it. It's like owning a vintage car in a certain way.
And yes, I prefer all of that over the Windows experience, but it's not seamless and not simple enough for anyone to just jump into.
They have a custom window manager because they had to build a controller friendly UI from scratch since one didn’t exist already. Not because existing DEs are broken.
Their package management also isn’t that exotic. It’s a lot like Fedora Silverblue where the OS is an immutable image and user software is installed with Flatpak.
I'm not saying existing desktop environments are broken, my point is that SteamOS does not show that KDE / Gnome / etc are "mature" because it doesn't actually use them. In the same way that we know all dogs are good dogs but my house doesn't show that because there is no dog here.
That's a pretty weak argument given that I use Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, and Debian and have had these issues with all of them.
You can look for things like "nvidia drm broken" and find thousands of threads of people all types of problems spanning decades, meaning; old and new. Some of them are pure driver issues caused by NVIDIA but that doesn't matter because we're not trying to assign blame, but we're trying to see if the ecosystem is "mature".
Linux biggest problem as a consumer OS was rarely tech and mostly just the schizoid amount of options, and lack of consensus on what to use.
In essence Linux suffers from a Lisp curse. Whenever two OS nerds disagreed on something they made their own slightly different distro.
This means wasted effort on multiple DE, window managers, app flavors, installed libraries. To this day, almost no two distros can agree on baseline libraries every Linux must have.
> Linux biggest problem as a consumer OS was rarely tech and mostly just the schizoid amount of options, and lack of consensus on what to use.
It's only a problem if you think it is. In practice I use at least 3 or 4 different distros on a daily basis and I never have any issue juggling between them. For most of the typical use cases it does not even matter, and on the desktop side flatpak resolves many issues.
Except the user-base wants infinite customizability, and users are often to mess with it. And getting the code to just work together nicely is a nightmare, where OS updates can break drivers, forcing you to try to jerry rig a solution that partially works.
Yeah, duplicating/triplicating/n-cating bugs, feature development and support effort, really paid off for the Linux desktop ecosystem. Which year will be the year of the Linux desktop? One, when we get brain to brain communication and abandon desktops entirely?
Haha, you may be too young I'm sorry; it was meant to be a joke.
Back in the 90s when linux came out and started getting traction, Richard Stallman was adamant that people should call the operating system GNU/Linux , because Linux was only the kernel, but mlst of the userland utilities were the GNU software (which were planning to make a full OS like GNU/Hurd).
Some people made fun of that, and I was just kind of paying the joke.
By in essence using none of desktop Linux... Steam Deck shows just how bad things are. Regular users will spend their entire time in very limited application launching other applications. Distant way from any traditional personal computer model.
It does not use any of the popular desktop environments (unless you drop into Desktop Mode). It heavily curates hardware, kernel, and drivers to keep the platform from breaking and install with sane (performance) defaults for gaming. It doesn't rely on a common package manager.
Beside a Steam Deck I also use a Linux PC for gaming and even with 25 years of Linux experience I still struggle sometimes to keep hardware acceleration working after a driver update, sometimes spending an evening of troubleshooting instead of gaming. Certain parts of the desktop environment sometimes lock up to the point where I have to SSH into the PC to fix it. It's like owning a vintage car in a certain way.
And yes, I prefer all of that over the Windows experience, but it's not seamless and not simple enough for anyone to just jump into.