Couldn’t find a dedicated community for distro recommendations, I hope it’s ok to ask here.
A couple of years ago my wife and I built a computer and gave it to a friend’s kid. We put ElementaryOS on it since that seemed pretty fool-proof, but it appears to require a re-install to upgrade major versions so it has been stuck with an old glibc and because of that he can’t play Factorio.
For his 13:th birthday we bought him a SSD so it would be a good time to reinstall Linux, but is there perhaps some better choice than ElementaryOS? They live quite far away so I can’t easily pop over to fix his computer if something breaks, we don’t spend enough time there for me to teach him to fix things himself, and he doesn’t seem very interested in learning how computers/operatings systems work either.
- Hardware: Some old Intel CPU with 8GB DDR3 and a GTX1080
- Usage: Gaming through Steam+Proton, Lutris and browsing.
- Requirements: Games work, OS never breaks on updates. Doesn’t need to be “kid proof”, I don’t think he touches any stuff he doesn’t know what it does.
Sounds like SteamOS might work? https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/
This is the old SteamOS from over a decade ago and isn’t usable anymore. The modern SteamOS from the Steam Deck isn’t available yet for desktops.
fyi you can use the deck restore image on an amd build, although probably there will be complications
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1b71-edf2-eb6d-2bb3#reimage
afaik chimeraos is the recommended alternative, which is a fork of the current steamos, with more supported hw (but not nvidia)
This is depreciated now right?
Do you know how mature it is as a desktop OS? I saw the official FAQ does recommend against using it as such. I tried it on a HTPC a few years ago but at that point it didn’t seem very usable outside of Steam’s full screen UI.
Don’t try to use it, it’s an old discontinued version of SteamOS based on Debian that was around long before the Steam Deck.
Bazzite will get you a similar experience to the current Steam OS with better desktop experience.