Quoting: Purple Library GuyEveryone's talking about the dock, but I think it's pretty significant that we've reached the new stage with the deck itself, where people can just buy it instead of signing up for a waiting list. I do think that there are people who don't have that "Oooh, sign up and wait eagerly" enthusiasm who might buy now. It is also now possible to impulse-buy a Steam Deck. Or to buy one for somebody's birthday or anniversary with some confidence that it might arrive at the time you want it to.
It is also now possible to talk coherently about things like monthly sales figures and whatnot. Well, if Valve ever tells us any of the information.

Great points! I'll be interested to see if it stays up there in the top sellers list [External Link] as it has been for 32 weeks now! We can at least extrapolate, maybe a game will publish their revenue and we can compare 😎

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Quoting: GuestThe price of the docking station is absurd.
People who keep saying that Valve is "the good guy" will get a rude awakening once more questionable decisions will be made.
I will go with the JSAUX dock instead.

Do you have any inkling toward which questionable decisions you suspect Valve might make?

I imagine them reintroducing Steam Machine consoles and deciding not to undercut the rest of the market by 50-66% like the did with Deck, dastardly! Perhaps even they'll offer something else we have to BUY - IF we want it - virtually criminal! 😯 They may even let third parties sell products specifically designed to run SteamOS.

But perhaps you suspect them of doing something like winning a majority in the PC gaming market share with SteamOS, and then creating a subscription fee to use it. Further, they have root! Perhaps they're going to install ransomware, encrypt our personal information and extort each and every Steam user, probably that.

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Quoting: Supay

Quoting: BlackBloodRumI mean for example, let's take VPN connections. You simply can't set them up in KDE because OpenVPN/WireGuard isn't installed by default, if you put that into distrobox, you still won't be able to get a system-wide VPN connection.

Of course, if you enable "development" mode you can put OpenVPN or WireGuard in there, but as soon as the next SteamOS update is released those changes are wiped and you'll have to manually install them again.

Wireguard is available in the KDE network settings. It was one of the first bits I setup, so that I can access my home network and its media remotely. Haven't had to tinker with it since I did, through multiple updates. OpenVPN and pretty much any other protocol I might want is listed there too when I checked.

Were you able to set up a VPN on Deck without disabling the immutable file system? If so, would you mind sharing how?

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Looks like Valve's support for docked mode is making strides now, official dock release must be coming up within a month I'd guess.

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Monster Train cutscenes can apparently be fixed by changing the video playback to "Unity" in the game settings.

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Quoting: BlackBloodRumI mean for example, let's take VPN connections. You simply can't set them up in KDE because OpenVPN/WireGuard isn't installed by default, if you put that into distrobox, you still won't be able to get a system-wide VPN connection.

Of course, if you enable "development" mode you can put OpenVPN or WireGuard in there, but as soon as the next SteamOS update is released those changes are wiped and you'll have to manually install them again.

Where as with package layering you could install OpenVPN or WireGuard and it would become part of the compose, and remain after updates, while retaining all the immutable benefits.

Thanks for clarifying. So if I understand correctly, with package layering, Valve could retain an immutable file system and users could install root privileged packages without them getting wiped upon OS upgrades?

Nothing available in Arch yet to do this, or is there?

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I saw Phawx playing this and it looked cool, got it, played it - it is cool. Been enjoying it on Deck.

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Thank you, Linus. And thank you, Liam. 🙏🏻

EDIT: And thank you all other contributors, I know you are many!

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Quoting: BlackBloodRumIt's great to see this!

Now.. if I had one request about SteamOS, it's if Valve made it more like a proper Linux distribution immutable OS.

I mean in the same sense of like Fedora Silverblue, where you can layer packages etc in addition to flatpaks[1].

But it's a minor niggle since this is a specific-purpose device, it would just give a bit more freedom that's all.

[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/getting-started/ [External Link]

Did you see Liam's post about Distrobox? I know it isn't built into SteamOS but it does address your concerns I think.

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This is just the news I was asking about the other day, very glad to hear there is collaboration happening between KDE and Valve devs.

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