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Why install other Linux ISOs on Steam Deck?
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this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
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Steam Deck
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SteamOS itself is write only and changes to the system get lost with updates. Also someone might just like certain distributions more. And they can have customization and optimization built in, without digging deep into a rabbit hole you don't understand.
A "why" explained by the bazzite project itself can be found here: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/?tab=readme-ov-file#why
Assuming you meant read only (How would a write only OS or software work lol), you can actually disable the read only nature of the OS and install pacman and then your own packages.
That being said, yeah, it is a bit of a mess as all of that can be wiped out or thrown into dependency conflict hell following an SteamOS update.
That being said: As someone who is using my SteamOS as my main PC was fucking stolen...
I am both trying to get into game dev and also just far more used to Debian and Debian based OSs.
Trying to get a game engine other than Godot to work on Arch has been an insanity inducing experience, and I've found Godot 4 to be insufficient.
Unreal and Unity and 03DE work on debian. They release debian variants.
Sure, there are AUR repos or whatever, but theyre based on many alternative libs that cause things to bug out, and they don't even actually list all the dependencies, you just have to spend hours and hours googling errors when you try to build, figure out what you are missing, then find the Arch version of that lib, or the AUR version, in which case oh fun more unfully listed dependencies and compatibility errors.
So... yeah basically an actual reason to install another linux OS on the Deck would be if you wanted to do software dev in Linux and don't want to deal with the tangled rats nest of basically everything that actually works on a debian distro either resulting in you having to rely on slapdash AUR bullshit, or massively space wasting containerized packages.
In SteamOS you can also make use of the Nix package manager, which has official support from Valve https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/7173.
/nixis included in default installation I think, but I never used it. Then there is also Distrobox, which lets you install any package from any distribution. I also never used this and apparently it works on Steam Deck too? https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/steamdeck_guide.mdDepending on how complicated or limiting these alternative options are, they may be enough. If you want develop a game and only have a Steam Deck, then maybe for testing it would be a good idea to keep SteamOS. I don't know how viable it is to have dual boot, but that could be an option too? I guess a builtin SSD would be a requirement for this.
I will have to look into nix more. I remember when it came out, thought it might be neat if it caught on and got developed and supported well, maybe that's the case these days?
And yeah I would want to keep SteamOS as yeah the whole steam deck control interface, as far as I know, only works on SteamOS, it'd be good for testing and I do like playing games on the thing.
I've got the Terabyte OLED version, so I could probably dual boot on that alone fairly fine, but having an SD and an external drive would probably be good ideas too.
It's still a niche off course. And the packages from the Nix package/repository in the end is just installing an application like from any other repository. But its usable on any distribution. That's the point here, because it can be used on the Steam Deck without root privileges (as far as I know) and packages should stay after an update. I wasn't much talking about the distribution itself.