Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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The closest thing to SteamOS is ChimeraOS. Though it sounds like you're mostly referring to Plasma, which is the desktop environment (DE) AKA the graphical user interface (GUI), and can be installed with just about any distro. ChimeraOS looks like it only comes with GNOME, which I personally prefer anyway.
It is very friendly until you need to do something other than very basic things, at which point you'd better be prepared to become very familiar with the terminal.
Bazzite is the new hotness though, and it's what I use, because it comes with a variety of customizations out of the box, and the ujust commands can greatly simplify a lot of common tasks that are otherwise far more complicated. Only downside of that is that it mostly only supports flatpaks and appimages, .deb and .rpm are the most common package formats and those have to be installed in containers, which comes with all the fun complications of containerization and sandboxing.
You might give GNOME a try though if you want to play around with something different. I much prefer it from an aesthetic perspective. Plasma is essentially made to look like Windows and GNOME more resembles MacOS.
Be aware that when using these distros that some games will recognize your device as a Steam Deck and apply some fucked up graphics tweaks that severely limit performance. You can undo them with a simple launch argument but it's super frustrating until you figure that out. Protondb is your friend there.