The Steam Deck has hands down my favorite computer and gaming device I have ever used. What Valve has done for PC gaming is a wonderful thing. They have brought 3 of my favorite things together, Linux, gaming and portable computers.
I remember when Valve brought Steam to the Linux operating systems, specifically Ubuntu to be more precise. I was using Linux Mint at the time and was glad to hear my OS kernel of choice was gaining support for games.
When Valve announced Steam Machines, I was in. That year, I purchased an Alienware Alpha, 2x Steam Controllers and a Steam Link. I did not end up buying the Alienware Steam machine, as the Alpha was sold at a $100 discount to the Steam Machine version, for whatever reason. I loaded SteamOS 1.x on it and thought it was neat, but due to the lack of Wine support and only a few of my games could natively run on Linux, I ended running Linux Mint on it for a while. I would switch back to Windows 10 on it when I was frustrated with the game support. Currently, it has Windows 10 on it as it is now my HDMI capture and streaming machine; OSB on Linux is missing easy Virtual Webcam support.
I gave away my Steam Link to a friend, as I hadn’t used it much and it turns out that a lot of my hardware had Steam Link software; my TV, chromecasts, phones and Linux flatpak support Steam Link.
I never used the controllers much, until I got a Deck. Turns out that the Deck showed me what the benefits of the Steam Controller. The touchpads and gyro make for fine grain control of cursors and reticle. I pray that Valve and 8BitDo team up and make a Steam Controller 2, one that has all the buttons and functions of the Steam Deck plus the rechargeable battery configuration of the 8BitDo Pro 2. Also, please 8BitDo, update your support so people can configure your controllers and upgrade their firmware on Linux.
After watching ETA Prime’s video about ChimeraOS, I decided to try it out again. I used it a couple of years ago, but I didn’t stick with it as the one game I really wanted to play would not run for me; the game was Magic: The Gathering Arena from the Epic Game Store and it was having issues using proton for me. Now that they have switched from Big Picture Mode to Game mode, they have interested me again. I have to say, I am glad I did.
It runs well and this time, MtG:A did not crash. I am going all in with gaming on it. The 1TB SSD and 4TB HDD I was using for Windows 10 have now been formatted and setup ChimeraOS. With its web helper app, they make it easy to format an extra drive for another Steam library, plus add ROMs and Epic/GOG games.
There was an issue I encountered, though. When I tried to remote play from the PC to the Steam Deck, it would connect and then crash steam on the PC. No idea why it is doing that, using an AMD RX580 8GB and Intel i7 4790 with the iGPU disabled.
If the developer continues working on improving ChimeraOS, then I might just stick with it even after SteamOS 3.x comes out. I will also do some testing to see if it runs well on the Deck itself. I am very excited about Linux gaming still.
Thanks for reading and I pray my Lord blesses you.