Yeah my Bazzite definitely doesn’t auto launch Steam. I think that might be an option during setup?

I installed it in a VM and after installation Steam launched. Didn’t check if that persists after several reboots. Why would I?

Then I tried Aurora and with the exception of a Terminal app in Plasma’s quick launch panel and no gaming launchers installed, it’s pretty much the same thing, so might just as well recommend Aurora instead of Bazzite if the person in question doesn’t care much about gaming. It’s the workstation variant of Universal Blue.

it doesn’t auto launch anything on desktop

I installed Bazzite just last weekend and I was definitively greeted by a Steam client login window right after logging into SDDM. No idea what you’re talking about.

Just FYI in case you don’t know - SteamOS has changed and is now based on Arch, which means Bazzite is still fundamentally different.

Both are immutable distributions, meaning software installation via Flatpak and Distrobox is exactly the same.

System-level differences are mostly irrelevant which is a fundamentally different approach from Ubuntu, Mint, etc. where users are expected to juggle with PPAs to get newer drivers on their ancient Ubuntu LTS base.

Bazzite is great on desktop

Absolutely but people not interested in autolaunching Steam and other preinstalled launchers can use Aurora which is just the workstation flavor by the same people.

Aurora is the desktop/workstation version of Bazzite, btw.

Aurora, it’s the desktop version of massively popular Bazzite (which targets gaming). That means you’ll find tons of up to date tutorials online (Bazzite tutorials are usually applicable unless they are about the few features Bazzite and Aurora diverge specifically).

I explicitly advise against Ubuntu and Mint for the reasons I outlined here. Ubuntu and Mint have the added downside that almost none of the guides you’ll find about SteamOS will work: Different desktop, different philosophy.

People need to realize that since the success of Steam Deck the “old classics” of newbie recommendations are out of the window and what helps these users the most is a Linux distribution as close as possible to SteamOS but SteamOS is not available for random PCs, so Bazzite/Aurora are currently the way to go. Personally I like Fedora KDE but I shifted my stance since the linked post and trying out Aurora.

Sure, you get an A for answering the question, but my point was that the hate they get today on Linux is misguided because people only have vague or non-specific complaints.

Not learning from the past means repeating the same mistakes. I see little evidence that NVidia’s overall approach changed. It’s always that everyone has to adapt to their way of doing things and rarely that NVidia seek collaboration first. That’s why it has taken years and three entirely different memory management technologies.

With NVidia it’s always “This is the last piece of technology and then everything will be perfect.” ExplicitSync is only the latest episode. Now that ExplicitSync is there, compatibility on Linux is still a crapshoot with NVidia.

When Nvidia announced that they were going to move the proprietary parts of their driver into the GPU firmware, and open source the kernel module, there was a lot of hate about how they’re being assholes for not releasing the whole thing as open source, relying on proprietary blobs, etc. Yet that’s stupid, because it’s literally the exact same thing AMD and Intel do for their much beloved drivers.

Where is the closed source user space of Intel and AMD drivers? It doesn’t exist because they use Mesa for the best possible compatibility. NVidia don’t. I’ve read comments by people bashing the recent Baldur’s Gate 3 Linux release and being full of graphics glitches. Then they list their hardware as proof how great it is and they all have NVidia GPUs.

Afaik, their drivers support GBM today so it’s kind of outdated.

Well, of course. I literally said this was a fight over years, so of course in the past. You wanted to one example of why the hate and I gave you one example of why the hate.

Can you give an example?

Trying to push three different technologies years after AMD, Intel, Mesa, … agreed on GBM.

In case you aren’t aware, Nvidia was the main driving force behind getting explicit sync support into Wayland, which is a feature that greatly improves performance for modern graphics APIs.

In case you’re not aware but it took years of fighting NVidia for them to finally conform to standards and conventions agreed by everyone when NVidia didn’t care to participate.

The issues may be totally valid but yeah, Nvidia can be expected to have patches ready.

Looks similar to the Google ffmpeg situation where Google AI file bug reports, bury the developers, and don’t send any patches at all.

Patches welcome

Steam web and the readme in the repo says Ubuntu is a requirement

Yeah, when their own documents don’t even mention Steam Deck or SteamOS, you can just conclude that these are yet another pieces of text that have not been brought up to date by editors, especially when the website still lists Unity as supported desktop. Keeping support documents up to date is just one of the things Valve sucks at.

The readme in that repo says the same

No, it doesn’t. It lists Ubuntu under the requirements section but under https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux?tab=readme-ov-file#reporting-issues it does not say that issues for all distributions are being rejected. It especially does not mention Unity desktop support which is a clear indicator of the page’s age.

Seems excessive when you can just as well use RustDesk.

Early Valve was totally pro Windows tech. Back when HL1 launched, it was the first idTech-derived game with a Direct3D renderer out of the box (yes, Doom95 existed but that wasn’t the default, DOS was). OpenGL was still a massive force on Windows and yet Valve decided that what their fork of GLQuake needed was a Direct3D renderer.

Valve’s stance only changed after Microsoft’s attempt to force Windows Store on everyone and Valve’s subsequent “Faster zombies” experiment (because DirectX was stagnant as well).

That text box is obviously a leftover from the before times. Some pages on Steam’s website don’t get updated for ages. It’s not great but not news either. Only the reality at https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues counts in this case.

The steam client is only officially supported on Ubuntu and only using KDE, Gnome or Unity.

No. They offer a .deb package but repackaging and redistribution is allowed.

Valve’s support team won’t check issues on any other Linux setup.

That’s false. I guess you never actually reported a bug on their Github page. Here is a random bug report from Steam on Fedora installed from RPMFusion with a Valve developer asking for details instead of closing the issue for being unsupported: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/12422

Imagine if they made SteamOS free.

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/65B4-2AA3-5F37-4227

https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/download

id love to rid my pc of the bloat of Windows

You can install and use Linux since ages. SteamOS is just regular Linux but without NVidia drivers.

It’s yet another development branch, this time for beta testing.