- cross-posted to:
- steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
You know what the worst thing about the Steam Deck is? Being able to play your games on the go. Wouldn’t it be better if it was a screenless brick that lived under your TV? Well, maybe not, but at least one person thought so, because [Interfacing Linux] has created the GeekDeck, a Steam OS console of sorts in this video embedded below.
The hack is as simple as can be: he took a GEEKOM A5, a minicomputer with very similar specs to the Steam Deck, and managed to load SteamOS onto it. We were expecting that to be a trial that took most of the video’s runtime, but no! Everything just… sorta worked. It booted to a live environment and installed like any other Linux. Which was unexpected, but Steam has released SteamOS for PC.
In case you weren’t aware, SteamOS is an immutable distribution based on Arch Linux. Arch of course has all the drivers to run on… well, any modern PC, but it’s the immutable part that we were expecting to cause problems. Immutable distributions are locked down in a similar manner to Mac OS (everything but /home/ is typically read-only, even to the superuser) and SteamOS doesn’t ship with package manager that can get around this, like rpm-ostree in Fedora’s Silverblue ecosystem. Actually, if you don’t have a hardware package that matches the SteamDeck to the same degree this GEEKOM does, Bazzite might be a good bet– it’s based on Siverblue and was made to be SteamOS for PC, before Steam let you download their OS to try on your PC.
Anyway, you can do it. Should you? Well, based on the performance shown in the video, not if you want to run triple-A games locally. This little box is no more powerful than the SteamDeck, after all. It’s not a full gaming rig. Still, it was neat to see SteamOS off of the ‘deck and in the wild.
Usually we see hacks that use the guts of the SteamDeck guts with other operating systems, not the other way around. Like the Bento Box AR machine we liked so much it was actuallyfeatured twice. The SteamDeck makes for a respectable SBC, if you can find a broken one. If not, apparently a Chinese MiniPC will work just as well.
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Steam has released SteamOS for PC.
SteamOS has been available for PC for years and years (the Deck is a PC). The only thing they’ve done is expand official support to 2 more handhelds.
Arch of course has all the drivers to run on… well, any modern PC, but it’s the immutable part that we were expecting to cause problems. Immutable distributions are locked down
Immutability does not affect hardware compatibility.
Still, it was neat to see SteamOS off of the ‘deck and in the wild.
It’s been seen hundreds of times already. There are entire YT channels dedicated to it.
If I had this hooked up to a large monitor could it stream movies and be a “smart tv”?
If you want to stream TV and movies on Linux, get familiar with bittorrent or usenet. The streaming providers won’t let you watch in high quality to “prevent piracy”, which just makes people pirate even if they would have been willing to pay for the content. On the plus side, you won’t have to worry about a show disappearing when you’re in the middle of watching it.
Yes and no. There aren’t any 1st party apps for Linux on any of the popular streaming TV platforms. You could run them in the browser but then you’d need a keyboard and mouse, and most of them limit your resolution.
That being said people around here will tell you to just become a sysadmin, pirate all your media and self-host it on Jellyfin for playback, in which case yes, that works very well. There are 1st-party clients and you can simply add them to Steam to be available in big picture mode.
