A Review of SteamOS

From Hackaday: "A Linux Power User Puts SteamOS To Work." The Steam operating system is a Linux based system designed to make your Linux experience more like using a regular laptop operating system (like Mac or Windows) rather than other Linux graphical user interfaces. SteamOS is an "immutable Linux distribution" intended to "dramatically reduce the chances an installation behaves erratically by making direct changes to the underlying system either impossible or irrelevant." In the case of SteamOS, the author explains:

    ... Again, having essentially no experience with immutable operating systems beyond having seen these words written together on a page, I was baffled at what was happening once I got my hands on my Deck and booted it into the desktop mode. I couldn’t install anything the way I was used to, and it took an embarrassing amount of time before I realized even basic things like Firefox and LibreOffice had to be installed with Flatpaks. These are self-contained Linux applications that bundle most of their own dependencies and run inside a sandbox, rather than relying on the host system’s libraries. In SteamOS they are installed in the home directory, which is important because any system updates from Valve will rewrite the entire installation except the home directory. They’re also installed from an app store of sorts, which also took some getting used to as I’ve been spoiled by about 20 years of apt having everything I could ever need.

    But after that major hiccup of learning what my operating system was actually doing, it was fairly easy to get it working well enough to browse the internet, write Hackaday articles, and do anything else I could do with any other average laptop. This is the design intent of the Steam Deck, after all. It’s not meant for Linux power users, it’s meant as a computer where the operating system gets out of the way and lets its user play games or easily work in a recognizable desktop environment without needing extensive background Linux knowledge. That doesn’t mean that power users can’t get in and tinker, though; in fact tinkering is almost encouraged on this device. It just means that if they’re used to Debian, like I am, they have to learn a completely new way of working than they’re used to.

This is an OS for someone like me. I experimented with Linux (using Ubuntu) many years ago, but really haven't retained much knowledge of it (my knowledge of C has similarly dissipated over the years), but I wouldn't be afraid of experimenting a bit.