Björn Tantau

I had to do some manual work. I mainly did it to get full disk encryption working. Getting that with an on screen keyboard running was a pain in the ass. I probably made a post about it, I’m too lazy to look for it now.

I also was too lazy to hook up a keyboard. But I could run the installer from the Gnome live boot because that seems to be the only one with a working on screen keyboard.

For day-to-day operation I use KDE with Steam running in the background for the keyboard, similar to the desktop mode on SteamOS. I did copy the setup for gaming mode over but I never use it.

Also got the Hardware Survey the other day and confused them with OpenSUSE instead of SteamOS on the Steam Deck.

Yeah, but there are tons of those.

Honestly, the only outstanding thing about it is that it boots directly into Steam Big Picture with tight integration into the Stem Deck controls. Everything else is more or less standard Linux. (apart from some Deck-specific drivers that haven’t been upstreamed yet)

But the standard Linux parts are great because it means that it can (and is) easily copied into other distros and that you can also use a standard Linux distro on the Deck.

So I’d say it’s only suited for consoles where you don’t need a full fledged desktop.