this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2025
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Steam Hardware

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A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.

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[–] tunetardis@piefed.ca 2 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?

I wonder if this means it's less locked down the Deck? Like is it kind of an iPad vs Mac situation? When I got the Deck and it was my only CPU travelling around at one point, I tried installing some general tools so I could get some actual work done on the road. Things were fairly heavily sandboxed, though nothing was a total deal-breaker I guess?

[–] MystValkyrie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

Curious about this too. I love my Steam Deck, but Desktop Mode is horrible. You can't install apps from the command line because they just get deleted on every update, including CUPS which made printing a huge hassle. You have to jump through hoops to get it to mount an external hard drive automatically. I could never get Discord voice or video chats to actually work. But if you install a separate distro, you lose out on the performance settings that are locked to Game Mode.

Now that Valve is actually doing a desktop, I'd love to use this as my daily driver so my old ThinkPad can finally rest. I'm hoping Valve will finally fine-tune Desktop Mode so people can actually use it. Or at least not throttle performance if people want to install a different OS. Maybe they could even let us boot directly into Desktop Mode this time?

[–] SparroHawc@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 days ago

FYI the way to get around updates deleting everything is to build a flatpak with the things you want, and then install that.

[–] Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

That would all work when using a regular Linux distro like mint or ubuntu

[–] lepinkainen@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

You do know you can boot up to a full-ass Linux on the deck?

Afaik that side has zero sandboxes

[–] rollerbang@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah but that lock down is just there to protect most users. Afaik it doesn't require any heavy workarounds?

[–] darkreader2636@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 week ago

yeah you can just dualboot another non-atomic distro and call it a day

[–] cron@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago

It will run on Steam OS like the steam deck is.

If you have troubles with its protections (like the non-writeable system partition), you can just disable them.