I'd be happy if Valve finally makes the distro good on the Deck itself. Comunity can do the rest.
Gaming mode wastes a truck load of battery. I can get 10-20% more battery life playing Fell Seal than let it sit on the Library/Recent games.
They finally fix the Desktop mode on-screen-keyboard last month to a almost usable state, because it's much more important to make keyboard skins than to be able to type. And no, there's no flatpack available for a actually great OSK called OnBoard.

/rant over

Nothing but truth. A PC release solves both problems but Valve would probably just brute force their way past any inefficency problems by having higher system requirements than most distros (let alone Arch distros).

Like any Linux distro, it takes time and cooperation between developer and audience to get it right.

As for nVidia...the less said about them and Linux the better. They've never been pro-open ecosystem and likely never will be. If the latest problems with their 4000 series GPUs are any indication then I don't think people are missing much.

Well I have an RTX 3080. I've had zero problems withe nVidia on Linux. It's not like nVidia doesn't know how to write drivers. They do a better job than AMD historically. So if you get your drivers from nNvidia and don't try and use open source drivers from community guess work you're likely going to be fine. Brand new cards like the 4000s could have issues anywhere at launch. Hell they have issues with even their power cables. I'm sure AMD cards are fine (for most thing like gaming) but everything has its issues. Windows gets complaints all the time because millions use it. The complaints are both justified and unjustified. But the complaints are amplified by how many people use it.

Same with nVidia. Its way more popular than AMD. So any issues are going to seem amplified. Plus be honest, many Linux users are going to take issue with a company that does not completely open source their code no matter how good it is.

Honestly, I'm going to eat crow on this one. I just read an article from nVidia's tech blog that they have released open-source drivers! A shame that they locked CUDA support, Vulkan and OpenGL support behind a proprietary license but it's definitely a plus for Linux users.
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/

I'd probably find which distros the drivers are available from hardware manufactures as well as adding in Vulkan.

I wonder if it's because the community will do the work and they won't have to bother anymore...

Looking at it, apparently the image only boots if written to the media a certain way, and if it's written with dd, the block size needs to be 4MB. Any idea why the block size would be different?

(Incidentally, I think a similar distro, but without the steam client, might be an interesting option.) I'd actually prefer to avoid using any proprietary software other than the games themselves.

(Not to mention that I refuse to get a steam account, and suspect the client might be useless without one.)

This thread makes me wonder how much of adamhm's guide is still current...

Well you can always use WINE to run each game directly. It will just require a little more work on your part to add any DLLs that may be needed for each game. But WINE + DXVK will handle much of the cases.

Yeah, that's fair enough. Thankfully when it comes to game launchers you've got several good options. Hope the gaming on linux journey goes great!

it become almost to easy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9tb1gTTbJE

I'm on Linux since a bit more than half a year now.

The forced Microsoft account on Windows 11 Pro was the straw that broke the camels neck for me.
And yes, i know there are still ways to circumvent the account, but i got tired of jumping through Microsofts hoops. Not to mention the atroicious GUI design decisions that MS made.

I have to say though: i am primarily a Steam user now. Many things about GoG in the last few years just rub me the wrong way.
You have to admit: Valve did and does a lot for Linux gaming at the moment. Proton is just great.
Aside from some multiplayer games that use invasive anticheat software, you can get most games to run. Often you do not need to do anything. If in doubt, check www.protondb.com.

But you do not have to use Steam to use Proton. Proton works just as well on Lutris (where you have to manually install various Proton versions first) or on the Heroic Games Laucher, where Proton is fully integrated, very similar to the Steam Client.
The Heroic Launcher works quite well for GoG games. Lutris can work as well, but can be a bit fiddly at times. Advantage to Lutris: You can use the offline Installers to install the games.

My distribution is Manjaro with KDE. Arch based and using KDE like the new SteamOS 3, the Steam client is even preinstalled, as are all neccessary libraries for gaming.
I would *not* way for an official release of SteamOS 3. Who knows when that will come out, and if it works similar as it does on the Steam Deck, you will lose a lot of configuration on OS Updates. If you are exclusively using the machine for Steam gaming it might be fine, but in all other cases: Use a regular Linux distribution.

I only have personal experience with Manjaro. Garuda and Pop_OS have somewhat of a good reputation.

I generally create manual WINE installs for my GOG games whenever possible using the offline installers. Steam works great, but I don't like needing to be online. I just feel better knowing I can do it offline.

But I am curious if a game was installed using WINE if Heroic Game Launcher can be used to point to the game's exe and run it with proton? Or can games only be setup with an online install?

I really wish someone could write something to get GOG achievements to function on Linux because Galaxy does not run well (on Linux).

I think whether Linux works for gaming depends on what kind of games you play. I play almost exclusively single player offline games, and I feel most of them work. Then sometimes people ask about games with anti-cheat that doesn't play well with Wine and I go "oh, right, I don't play that".

For my setup, I use Kubuntu (not because it's good, but I was curious about how well KDE worked at the time and I didn't bother to change distro after that) and I use Lutris.

I also dislike launchers, but I see Lutris as more of a solution to installing Windows games. It doesn't take more clicks to launch games via Lutris compared to using shortcut menus, especially as those games are not on Steam, so I don't have to wait for Steam to launch and then call the games.

However, there are still games that don't work. Now and then I ask GOG for a refund just because I couldn't play the game I've just bought on Linux. It's not so many that could make Steam deck become a complete rubbish, but you would have to keep in mind that you wouldn't be able to play all the games your Windows using friends could play.

Perhaps Linux is not as very convenient as someone would like for gaming purposes, I just hate using Windows more.

Are you saying that Heroic Games Launcher *doesn't* allow you to install from the offline installers?

Also, I ran into an annoyance with Lutris; to run a previously downloaded installer (for example, from a different computer with a more stable internet connection, or with lower power consumption), I had to select every single file of the installer individually, which is not necessary if just running the installer manually.

It still does take more clicks than starting the game from the command line.

If there's a game I've been playing, and I'm not shutting down the computer regularly, I can easily start the game with 0 clicks:
* Alt-tab to the terminal window I used to start the game the last time
* Press up (which gives me the last command, which in this case is the one used to start the game)
* Press Enter

Much nicer than having to use a mouse for this, *especially* if I'm using a laptop (although laptops are more likely to be shut down when not in use).

Block size doesn't matter. I can't remember if dd zero pads the last block when writing to a block device (it certainly doesn't when writing to a file), but that also shouldn't matter unless the image is very stupid.