recently i just finished building a new pc. mostly for gaming since my only exposure to linux is steam os and i heard its uses arch with kde plasma so i try to emulate it as close as i can. however soon i realized how different it is and it requires more setup than i initially thought. i spent a whole day or two setting it up and i read now im responsible on maintaining it, what does it mean? is it just finding and testing drivers? or system update? what is the easiest way to do it? and what i getting myself into?
when i was about to install steam i found a tutorial on it with 3 - 4 pages full of text and was a bit overwhelmed, i decided just set it up using discover with flatpak, the problem is when i was about to find out how to do that i read mostly people really hate when you ask how to enable it in arch, is it really bad? should i just use konsole instead?
im not very tech savvy and at first I was really reluctant to use konsole but since i decided to use arch its inevitable that i have to use konsole and so far its not that bad, yet.
I’m just wondering for the long term, should i just change distro? or i should just powertrough arch and see where it goes.
thank you for your time.
Luckily, Linux has evolved in the past 30 years. A package manager (one usually comes with your system, like apt, dnf, pacman) will handle almost all direct dependencies for you. When installing Steam, you may be asked which 32-bit Vulkan library you want to install, but aside from that it should get everything automatically. (Hint: vulkan-radeon on AMD, otherwise pick the one for your GPU brand)
Managing and “maintaining” (updating, sometimes cleaning) an Arch Linux installation is definitely more involved than what you are used to on Windows or the Steam Deck. Some people prefer this workflow, as it offers more control over their system. Others prefer an already set up and maintained environment.
Bazzite is a very SteamOS-like experience. You click update once in a while, and shouldn’t have to touch anything else internal to the system. You get Steam and Flatpaks out of the box.
Since Linux gives everyone the freedom to do things the way they want, there will always be people shitting on a specific way to do things. There are definitely good reasons to dislike certain software, but generally you should be just fine. Just because someone thinks their way of doing things is better doesn’t mean you should immediately switch to that.
That being said, the main downside of Steam in a flatpak is the sandboxing possibly getting in the way of modding your games, or games that use unique hardware (like steering wheels or so).
steam(pacman package) does not have those specific issues, but it lacks sandboxing (aside from Steam’s pressure vessel for games).You can continue with Arch if you want, and there’s certainly good resources to learn (like the wiki) or get help (like the IRC or Matrix rooms). It will require you to learn about how to actually set up and configure your Linux installation the way you prefer. Other distros (usually marketed as “user friendly”), like Fedora, Bazzite, Mint, will automatically perform or set up some of the maintenance you’d have to do manually on Arch.
Regarding installing Steam as a flatpak, as you’ve already noted[1], it ain’t ideal. That’s why AFAIK all “gaming distros” (including Bazzite) install Steam natively.
Though I’m not 100% sure if the pain points you explicitly mentioned don’t have any ways/means to bypass/circumvent them. ↩︎