(I’ve been operating a Windows desktop with a controller 99% of the time thanks to steam input so a lack of keyboard and mouse doesn’t stop me using a terminal haha)

you’ll think I’m a freak, but Windows 8.1 for me, purely for stability reasons :P

(but the UI was horrible of course)

but there’s some other “it just works” conveniences that Steam OS has for the living room (assuming I’m not mistaken) like system updates being handled through the Steam interface and probably some other things, but in 6 months I might be comfortable enough to replace it with plain ol’ Cachy or Arch

I suspected that how ever it is valve does game mode would work on other Arch distros (I mean, at “worst” you just have to add valve’s repo to pacman, right? although if all it is is Steam running in gamescope then even *that* wouldn’t be required)

it’s the ease of setup* and “game mode” that’s why I’m specifically picking Steam OS for the living room

*afaik the Steam Deck recovery installer kinda “just works” on all-AMD desktops

it does sound like it would’ve been a lot of fun (and if memory serves I’m younger than RedHat but older than Ubuntu)

I’ve seen it pop up quite a few times recently (ProtonDB and YouTube mostly tbf) so I peaked on their website and it’s on my list for consideration because it does seem good. (defo Steam OS for the living room one though)

I’m waaaaaayyyy too sentimental for that, but at the same time my strategy is effectively that this time haha. I’m finally putting together a NAS so all my NTFS/ExFAT drives are going in there or the “Legacy Windows” system and I’m just going with 1 NVMe drive per system and NAS-ing everything else

it must’ve been around 2017/18 when I gave up on desktop icons. I haven’t used my triple monitor setup in a while (MacOS is shockingly easy on just a laptop screen, and my PC has been a games console for two years) but that is pretty much how I used mine too (+editor or second browser window)

on the positive side most of my games ran (when I had them on a non-NTFS volume) and I even managed to copy over my firefox profile folder with only minor certificate settings that had to be reset! also that was Manjaro and this time I’m doing Steam OS for the gaming system and fedora for the other

I’ve done it a couple times before (well… attempted) and the last time I tried (around the start of 2021) I mostly ran into issues around my 4 NTFS formatted hard drives and *something* (DE, login, window manager, goodness knows what) not remembering the order my three monitors were in.

*looks at hundreds of tabs per window and many many open windows*

…

I don’t have a problem you have a problem

/j

oh that’s the stupid web browser behaviour of it only *actually* remembers your tabs if you use the menu and select “Exit/Quit”, otherwise it’ll only reopen whatever window you closed last

(just to cheekily maintain my tech street cred; in the next few weeks everything non-Mac in my house is switching to Linux, because fuck Microsoft, the greedy bastards)

I did wonder if it was just my being on MacOS…