A human who has opinions
Not out of the box. You don’t have sudo privileges on the SteamOS 3. Valve made an immutable fork of Arch for stability and to dissuade unskilled folks from punching stuff into the terminal that might cause customer service nightmares.
It’s an immutable filesystem fork of Arch, not vanilla Arch. It’s as stable as any operating system is, doesn’t update in the same way Arch does, and doesn’t even allow the user sudo privilege. Also, you don’t even need to interface with Linux. The front end is extremely intuitive, but you also have the option of a pretty great KDE Plasma desktop mode if you switch over. Fortunately, it has no Candy Crush, Teams, or Cortana in the Start Menu.
They switched from a Debian based OS to an Arch based immutable fork for the Deck. There are folks who have built a close version to SteamOS 3, but there would be no need if Valve would just release the official OS. I can’t imagine why they haven’t. It would only make it cheaper for other hardware manufacturers to release a product. I don’t know how much of the Ally’s price is just covering the Windows license, but it has to be a substantial percentage of the overall retail price.
While not the official Steam OS, which Valve still hasn’t released officially, people have thrown Arch on one to do benchmarking comparisons and there are tutorials for getting Linux on it.
Choice in this market is good for end users, as is competition. Both of the machines are a compromise in one way or another and different in substantial ways, so it’s really just down to personal preference. I can’t wait to see how this market grows over the next few years.
I just can’t believe that they expect people who bought the Ally to interface with the regular ass Win11 desktop without touchpads. Sure, horsepower and a better display is cool, but not at the expense of battery life and heat. I hope it’s successful so we get revisions and incentive for others to get in the game, but it it’s not quite there for me.
Mom’s spare bedroom closet 70 miles away, but yeah.
It’s not black and white. It’s different tools for different jobs. You can get by with either, depending on what you are trying to do.
Weird to put the Self Hosted podcast on the FOSS-only Gentoo user seeing that Jupiter Broadcasting has been on the contrarian “Red Hat is actually good” train.