Honestly, it doesn’t really matter, pick the one you’re most familiar with. Performance-wise, distros are largely the same, unless the distro ships really old libraries or something.

So I recommend either Debian or Arch since that’s what you’re familiar with.

If you want to try something new, consider openSUSE MicroOS. It has a readonly root like Steam Deck, and you interact with it in transactions, so you get a really solid system. Theoretically. I haven’t actually used it, but I do plan to once I need ti reinstall one of my Tumbleweed systems (or maybe I’ll reinstall my Leap NAS at some point).

And yeah, avoid the nvidia open source drivers. It’s a cool project, but performance sucks because nvidia refuses to provide technical documentation.

nvidia having a better performance to cost ratio

Every time I’ve checked, AMD has way better raster performance to cost ratio. If you want RTX though (does it work properly on Linux?), NVIDIA is the best option.

My AMD card doesn’t use a ton of power. I’m rocking a 6650XT, which has pretty good performance (rivals consoles), was pretty cheap ($200-ish IIRC), and works for everything I’ve needed it for. It’s probably a bit sketchy for VR, but VR on Linux has bad enough support that it’s probably not going to matter either way. The HDMI 2.1 thing doesn’t bother me at all because I just use DP on my PC (doesn’t solve the living room system use case though).

I used NVIDIA for 5-ish years and it was fine, just not great. I’d have a driver breakage about 1-2x/year, which was easy enough to fix, but the more annoying thing was lack of Wayland support. Maybe it works now, but will it work for whatever comes out some years from now? I’m confident AMD will support Linux, I’m not confident that NVIDIA will.

So my choice is AMD because:

• fantastic price/performance, provided you’re looking at mid-range - top end seems to use a lot more power
• fantastic Linux support - haven’t had a single issue with drivers since switching from NVIDIA, and I’m loving Wayland
• does everything I need it to do

But you do you. I’ve heard NVIDIA works fine as well, you just might run into a few issues here and there. For top-end performance, they have the crown, and nothing is close on RTX. I personally don’t need top-end performance, and the other issues are more important to me.

Same, I dual booted for almost 10 years on 3 system machines and never once had it happen. But I’ve seen it reported before, so it’s something to be aware of.

A mitigation is to have a Linux live USB to boot into to reinstall your bootloader (GRUB, systemd-boot, etc, depending on distro). I haven’t heard of Windows actually destroying partitions or data, and perhaps it doesn’t do it if your boot partition doesn’t look like a Windows boot partition (e.g. it’s a different filesystem), IDK. But learning to reinstall the bootloader from a live CD isn’t that hard (usually just running one or two commands).

So, you’ll probably be fine, just do a little research first if you’re nervous.

Would be nice, but I think it would cost Valve more than Microsoft and Sony because volumes would be a lot lower. I’m guessing a small percentage of existing PC gamers would want a console, because a lot of the point of PC gaming is either using what you have or customizing your rig. I’m also guessing the same is true for console gamers, because they already have a console and probably want to stick with the same ecosystem.

I could be wrong, but that’s my take. I’m more interested in them refreshing the Steam Link and Steam Controller. I guess they could reuse the same SOC, but that would run really hot, so they’d probably want a check ARM SOC instead.

But who knows, maybe there’s a big enough market for it.

Their SOC makes sense in the Steam Deck because it’s running at a lower resolution. If you try to run at 1080p, you’ll get significantly worse performance, and that’s kind of the bare minimum resolution for a console.

Valve would need a significantly stronger SOC to run on a home console, and it would likely need to be stronger than what’s in existing consoles because they don’t get the benefit of devs targeting that SOC.

I’m guessing they’d need to sell for ~$800 for it to make any sense. That’s quite a bit more than existing consoles, but it’s a competitive price for a gaming PC. And I’m guessing the market for a Steam console is a lot smaller than a handheld.

It would need to be priced aggressively and have competitive specs to get enough volume of sales to justify building. They’d also need a new controller.

But if you want that, wouldn’t you just buy a pre built from literally anywhere and install Steam and enable big picture mode? That’s really not that hard, I do it on my laptop for when my kids want to play on the big screen.

And even then, you should probably be using RAID 10 instead. Resilvering a RAID 5 array is hard on the disks, so there’s an elevated risk of the entire RAID failing. RAID 6 should eliminate this, but in a desktop system, do you really have enough space to make it worthwhile? You’d need 5+ drives to beat RAID 10 capacity, and that’s a lot of space. IMO, RAID 5/6 is just not a great option in general. Don’t cheap out on your RAID setup, do the industry standard, which is RAID 10.

I use BTRFS in a RAID 1 on my NAS (plan to upgrade to RAID 10 when I run out of space), and no RAID on my desktop. Everything important gets backed up to my NAS.

I use BTRFS on root on openSUSE and it works fine. I don’t interact with the snapshot feature much beyond system updates (and very rare rollbacks), but it’s nice. I use an encrypted boot w/ an NVMe drive, and things work fine.

I’m not sure what the point of ext4 is for a system drive vs BTRFS, BTRFS on root has served me well for years (5-ish on my desktop, 7-ish on my NAS).

You can set up subvolumes and whatnot to snapshot just part of the tree as well. Or you can copy/paste the whole directory and run dedup (should work, haven’t tried).

Nope.

I don’t mind either, though I have a slight preference for KDE. I may just install both.

I’ll look through those posts and may just make one myself. :)

Cool, if you have a writeup about it, I’d love to give it a read. So the challenges you had, solutions you came up with, and ergonomics vs original SteamOS.

I don’t have any complaints right now, but I like openSUSE and sometimes like to tinker. As long as the controller works well through Steam, I’d probably keep it.

How is it? I use openSUSE on everything (desktop, laptop, NAS, VPS), except my Steam Deck.

Yeah, I’ve heard you can trigger it.

Perhaps OP opted out somehow? Because I’ve gotten it a few times over the past few years, and twice on my Steam Deck. I’ve gotten it twice on my work laptop too, but I refuse each time because I rarely use it to play games. I also got it once on Windows, and I boot into Windows like once/year…

Especially when it could be easily changed to not be misogynistic:

Joe and co need to go

What’s with the empty comment? If you want to save it for later, just click the little save button

git clone https://github.com/golang/go.git

That’s what I do. Linux is primary, and I keep Windows around just in case. Haven’t booted Windows in over a year.

Nah, Haiku and Plan9. They just haven’t seen the attention they once did.

But watch out, RedoxOS is getting better every day. :)

My read is that it matters for servers where a large number of allocations could indicate a bug/denial of service, so it’s better to crash the process.

That’s not relevant on a gaming system, since you want one process to be able to use all the resources.

The whole point is to prevent one process from using too much memory. The whole point of the Steam Deck is to have one process use all the memory.

So it makes sense to keep it relatively low for servers where runaway memory use is a bug that should crash the process, but not in a gaming scenario where high memory usage is absolutely expected.