Steam Deck

Fedora.

A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.

I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.

The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).

How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.

Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.

Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.

I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.

If you want to get started with Linux, I'd recommended Mint. It's very easy to install and will run on just about anything. The Cinnamon desktop is pretty similar to Windows and you'll feel right at home. Install Steam and start playing your games, it's that simple. There are of course plenty of other excellent options but for ease of getting started, I don't think anything beats Mint.

One thing to be aware of in Linux is the fragmentation of where packages can be installed from.

Default package manager? Differs across distro-bases: rpm, apt, pacman, apk and more. Cross-distro? Flatpak, snap, appImage. Install on "wrong" distro? Distrobox and others.

Oftentimes one package is packed up for multiple managers and you'll see a giant list of red and green in their github showing where you can and can't find it, but it's still worth being aware of it.

There are frontends that unify a handful of these but I wish there was a better option. Also inb4 standards.xkcd

With that said, getting started in Linux I recommend immutable images, only because you can't tweak it so hard it borks. And afaik updates will always "just work". I quite liked bazzite for that.

For some reason CachyOS hasn't been mentioned. Like others said basically any distro can do what you're describing, and this one is also one of those "with gaming in mind" distros. Didn't mean you can't do anything else on them, but anything making should "just work". They also have a dedicated image/installer for "handheld" PCs like the steam deck that come preconfigured for that interface combination (but don't use this special image on a normal PC/desktop).

Like SteamOS, it's based on Arch, but unlike SteamOS or Bazzite it isn't immutable. That's a matter of preference. Being a rolling release means frequent and direct updates of new releases of any kind (kernel, software, everything, ...). KDE is the default install option, like on the steam deck, but of course basically all other options are also available is you want (additionally or instead of kde).

~~Heads up if you're eyeing Fedora or its progeny like Bazzite, Nobara: https://news.itsfoss.com/fedora-32-bit-support/~~

Proposal withdrawn according to @[email protected] 👍

I just put steam in big picture mode in an workspace in hyprland and it works wonders. Same thing basically as my deck.

I vouch for Kubuntu. It uses KDE Plasma, which is the exact same UI as SreamOS desktop mode. It's based on Ubuntu, which is a very popular distro, so there's a lot of support and apps that are packaged for it

I generally think the most important thing when you're not yet very experienced with Linux is to just pick a distro that is relatively popular, since these are usually very googleable.

My personal favorite is probably still Fedora. Pick Fedora Workstation Gnome if you want something that has the most online support and Fedora KDE if you want something with a similar workflow as Windows.

I also generally think that using a normal Linux Distro is a better choice if you don't want to do only gaming and nothing else, since Steam OS actually makes some things a lot more difficult (you cannot easily install many programs due to its immutable nature, it only has AMD GPU support, doesn't include even basic things like print functionality, the installation process is not the easiest, ...) These things will be pretty big hurdles to overcome for a newcomer. The only real thing that is probably easier on Steam OS is that Steam is already pre-installed, but considering that you can literally install Steam on Fedora without using the terminal probably less than 10 mouse clicks, I wouldn't consider this a very big advantage.

If you do end up going for a normal distro (like Fedora), I would btw highly recommend installing Steam not as a flatpak but as a "normal" application. This is not very difficult and will provide a much more stable experience than if you just use the Flatpak (which may be the first thing you come across in the software store). There are short tutorials available for: Fedora, Ubuntu, ...

Welcome to the world of Linux. Check out Fedora Kinoite. Here's how they're similar:

✅ It's immutable -- core OS files are read only. Just like the SteamDeck, this is more stable and secure. Updates happen all at once and the entire system can be rolled back to a working configuration ("snapshot") if it all goes south.

✅ Applications are containerized and installed via a software store. Flatpak via Flathub is my personal preference, here.

✅ It uses the KDE Plasma desktop environment. In Linux there are a handful of DEs to choose from. The SD uses KDE and so does Kinoite. This is probably where you'll see most similarities (that Windows '95 feel).

✅ Fedora's community, like the SD, is large. Got a problem? There's probably someone on the forums who had the same issue and can provide a solution.

I've been running it exclusively for two years now. As a self proclaimed distro-hopper, that's really remarkable.

https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/

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.

Desktop mode on the Steam Deck is using KDE Plasma. You can use that on the vast majority of Linux distros.

Here is a few the spring to mind:

• Bazzite - A good place to start, their project goal is to basically be SteamOS like experience you can put on any machine.
• Fedora Workstation with KDE - Bazzite is based off of this project, it's a more general experiance, lots of people enjoy it.
• Kubuntu - Ubuntu is very popular distro, this is their KDE version.
• OpenSuse Tumbleweed - For folks who want the most up to date software possible.

Bazzite, I guess.