Ive Been using KDE Plasma after upgrading Debian which it now officially supports but I’ve been experiencing crashes and bugs… This surprises me on a Debian machine.

Doesn’t surprise me. Debian’s definition of stability is “stays the same”, not “free of bugs”. In Debian Stable packages are frozen and only severe bugs are allowed to be fixed which doesn’t necessarily mean crashes but security risks.

Then there is Debian Unstable. The name already says it. It’s unstable, it’s the development branch.

For some time Ubuntu was the middle ground of a regular, bugfixed snapshot of Debian Unstable but that Snap infested POS is no longer suitable for regular users.

A friend of mine buys every Pokemon game and described this (tounge on cheek) as a compulsive mental illness of theirs.

Rich people are only socialist until someone tries to redistribute their wealth. It’s all an act.

They don’t use Steam forums either: https://forums.playdeadlock.com/

That looks like Bazzite Desktop with a different name. Even the contributors overlap.

FAQ says: “Bazzite, Bluefin, and Aurora all came in at different times, the result of organic growth. Don’t overthink it” … Very helpful.

Most people first installing Linux will dual boot to try it out first before fully committing

Good look having a newbie set up a dual boot system in times of BitLocker. Chances are they end up with single boot Linux because they cannot downsize the encrypted Windows partitions.

imo ubuntu is a good recommendation.

The reality is that SteamOS shaped the majority of developments for home users.

They expect to just get the stuff that’s on Flathub even if they don’t even know what Flathub is. Facts are:

• Out of the box Flatpak support has been banned by Canonical.
• Ubuntu 25.10 shipped with broken Flatpak support. That was known before release but Flapak is in the unsupported Universe repository and bugs in Universe software are not release blocking.
• Juggling PPAs is complicated.

Fact is also: Because software in Universe is not supported, whether or not a community member backports bugfixes is a coin toss. Mint, pop_OS, Zorin, etc. are just as affected by this and as such software used may contain severe security issues.

Rules of thumb I use:

• Good upstream support, so not a hobby distribution by guy or two
• No reliance on add-on repositories that can mess the OS up like RPMFusion, PackMan, EPEL,…
• App store-like software management. Users shouldn’t have to see traditional package management if they don’t explicitly look for it. Default repo and Flathub is enough for the vast majority of people.
• Good internationalization. Languages other than English shouldn’t be an afterthought (even SteamOS falls into this trap in desktop mode)
• Plasma Desktop because that’s what regular users are most likely to know or at least heard of or seen in videos about SteamOS
• No Ubuntu or derivatives (bad support by Canonical and derivatives fighting an uphill battle)

Currently that means Fedora KDE. I did not yet try Kinoite or Bazzite myself but I do like the download assistant on the Bazzite website that guides users through picking the correct ISO.

Fair use is a US concept, F1 is a British company

YouTube is US American, Liberty Media is US American.

Trump obviously was never campaigning on or making a promise to shut down the government, so the first condition of LAMF (supporting the politician’s promise to do X) literally can’t be met.

But he’s the self-proclaimed world’s best deal maker, no?

Linux gamers often say stuff like “it’s literally one toggle in [insert game engine here]” but that’s never the case. Doesn’t mean new devs don’t fall for it.

If developers (those that come from Windows) fall for anything, it’s the myth that Proton is already perfect and native ports have no value.

With Steam Deck the hurdle for game developers to dog food native ports of their games is lower than ever. SteamOS comes with Podman and Distrobox, so installing the Steam Linux Runtime SDK on Steam Deck’s desktop mode should be doable after reading a howto.

It’s very difficult to justify the additional effort of implementing a platform that serves exclusively the playerbase with a ~3% market share

And yet there are many games that have a native Mac port and no native Linux port, such as the recently released Ball Pit: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2062430/BALL_x_PIT/

How is it to justify that a platform with an even smaller install base gets the native port? Two ports, actually, because ARM and Intel are both natively supported. Why aren’t Mac users expected to use Whisky to play Windows games but Linux users are expected to rely on Proton’s battery munching API translation? Apple is even worse in breaking compatibility, so game developer cannot even expect their Mac games to still run in five years.

The problem isn’t “the playerbase with a ~3% market share” because 3% is still millions upon millions users in absolute numbers given the massive PC install base. According to https://www.theverge.com/pc-gaming/618709/steam-deck-3-year-anniversary-handheld-gaming-shipments-idc there were 6 million Steam Decks sold last February and Linux is still rising in Steam’s Hardware Survey. According to a bit of googling, Steam hat 1.5% Linux users that month, a third of that using SteamOS.

I’m too lazy right now to extrapolate even a rough ballpark of the overall Linux user base on Steam but even if we assume that a big number of Steam Deck buyers doesn’t use their device, I don’t think a user base north of 10 million is too far fetched.

So the problem isn’t the 3% number, it’s the developer’s / publisher’s attitude to expect that Proton just works without any QA and that Mac users are somehow valuable while the Linux peasants are not.

Leave a bad review then.

It takes a lot of effort for little money.

The effort is not that high if the engine used already supports Linux and was written with cross-platform compatibility in mind (which is every modern engine because of consoles).

Also save data is not shared between the versions, so if you’ve already sunk a lot of time into playing the buggy native port, switching to proton requires you to start over.

To mess this up one as to be a special kind of stupid. It literally only requires to set up a few paths on the SteamWorks web UI: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloud?l=english#steam_auto-cloud

Linux just barely broke 3% share. As a company, whose goal is to make money, would you focus on what 97% of your base uses, or the 3%?

If your game is mobile friendly, treating Steam Deck not as an afterthought may be beneficial. Proton is not perfect. It has bugs, it loads a whole fake Windows environment into memory and API translation costs CPU and battery.

Further more, the company needs to spend QC resources for 1-2 versions of Windows, vs the multitude of Linux distros

That’s completely wrong. For games, the developer only needs to target whatever the latest Steam Linux Runtime is. It’s 100% identical across all distributions where the Linux version of Steam runs. That’s its entire point. Steam Linux Runtime is a more stable target than playing catch up with yearly Proton releases.

So standard Audi driver cruising speed.

Regular cuising speed here in Germany (I assume, no idea what a mph is in real units.)

Plasma has server side decorations under Wayland. While it’s admirable to wanting to support as many desktops as possible, I think it’s also fine for games developers to say “we support SteamOS – its Game Mode and its desktop mode”. Both are built on standard APIs and if a specific desktop doesn’t care to implement standards, sucks to be them.

Because they live in a fantasy world where optimizing a game for Windows and pouring countless of hours of QA into the Windows version makes a merely cross-compiled Linux version magically great as well because “PC is PC, right?”