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Cake day: April 11th, 2024

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  • It’s pretty much impossible to get gnome on regular steamOS. Bazzite also has some additional stuff compared to steamOS, namely printing support, optional full disk encryption, newer plasma version (SteamOS should be on 5.27 or what ever the latest version of plasma 5 is). Nothing major, but small stuff. Bazzite has the disadvantage of not being installed by default and less of a backing (Valve still is a big company). Most things on steam deck are easily replaceable, except for the battery, but not necessarily upgradable. If you want to upgrade storage be aware that the steam deck uses a relatively rare nvme size, so prizes might be higher than expected (other than that it’s quite simple). The screen also can be upgraded but that requires a sizable amount of work, same with ram.







  • If you start the demo mode there will be no changes to disk until you open the installer for both distros. Most distros will boot into the demo mode directly from the USB and then have a shortcut to start installing. Once you have created a bootable USB it will work with any device so you can test the distros out now with your current machined and when you get the new one you can just plug it in there and see if there are any hardware specific issues


  • The difference between NVIDIA and AMD/Intel is that Linux has a different way of handling drivers compared to windows (all drivers are part of the Kernel). AMD/Intel respect this. NVIDIA develop there drivers like on windows even though Linux is not designed this way. Also sometimes a new standard is made (eg Wayland) but NVIDIA has little to no support for a long time. Additionally there drivers are proprietary which limits how distros can/want to ship them.


  • Generally, Linuxmint is the go to distro if you want something that holds your hand, but due to your limited needs outside of gaming and already having a Steam deck you should take a look at Bazzite, which is basically the desktop mode of the Steam deck for PCs.

    As for hardware, one thing that can be annoying is NVIDIA (drivers), but that shouldn’t be a major problem with these distros as mint has a built in manager that does everything for you and with Bazzite you just need to specify your GPU when downloading and don’t have to do anything.

    My recommendation is download the distros you want to try, get Rufus put them on a USB and then play around with them in demo mode, make sure everything works (graphic card, printers) and if you like the distro then start the installer. If you don’t like it you can just unplug the USB and reboot without anything persisting.