KDE is available for Ubuntu. There’s even an edition that ships with KDE (Kubuntu).

Neither of those are package managers. That’d be Pacman and Portage.

You know somebody’s putting barebones LFS on one of those drives.

The distro IS the OS, so no.

You can buy them used if you can find them. I bought 2 directly from Valve before they were discontinued then a 3rd on Ebay.

It uses the system dialogue, but it starts from the same directory each time. If I’m saving files it’s usually multiple files in succession, so I want the dialogue to start off pointed at the last directory I saved to. The Arch build does that.

I usually can’t find what I’m looking for, so a larger catalogue would go a long way. I also had problems with some software versions. The one that comes to mind is that Firefox had behavior with the save dialogue that I don’t like. It’s a minor issue, but one that I don’t have with the build in the Arch repo. I have a vague memory of something just not working, but I couldn’t tell you what at this point.

I wasn’t aware of it. It’s certainly an option, but Gentoo isn’t for me.

It’s Arch-based, but if
distro = base
then
Mint = Ubuntu
Ubuntu = Debian

Mint = Debian

Steam Deck is weird. I mean, I love it, but coming from vanilla Arch it can be frustrating at times. Discover is terrible. Luckily, Distrobox is a thing.

I read Tim Sweeney’s name for the first time in this thread and don’t care enough to look him up, so I can’t comment on him. I don’t play a lot of multiplayer either, so Proton has been pretty great for me.

Pretty much the only remaining hurdle to Linux gaming is kernel-level anti-cheat which may be going away in the near future.

It’s been a while since I’ve used Gentoo, but aren’t their repos fairly robust? I don’t remember having to use GitHub (or SourceForge back then) for much at all.

Now I get to deal with my keyboard backlight not working

Could I get that problem please? Pretty much any keyboard anymore comes with a backlight which I can’t even imagine being useful to anyone who can type. If they provide a way to turn it off, it’s via Windows-only software.

That’s what I’ve done with my deck. Some things just aren’t available through discover, and the Firefox build on there has behavior that I don’t like or know how to correct. Distrobox gives me access to the Arch repos + AUR with persistence that you can’t get on SteamOS without it.

Yeah, even the “difficult” distributions tend to just be a matter of following instructions to get a working installation. Gentoo was a massive PITA to maintain though. Chances are I was missing some knowledge that would’ve simplified things, but I spent way too much time on maintenance for the system to actually be useful. Arch has been much kinder.

The launcher wasn’t cracked. It’s a cross-platform open source launcher that works quite well under linux. The game itself was cracked, meaning they were trying to play without having purchased it.

Grab 'em by the kernel.

This is only true if you’re still using a 32 bit cpu, which almost nobody is. 64 bit cpus can use up to 16 million TB of RAM.

Installing software on Linux almost never involves “copying and running random bits of code” unless you have a need for some really obscure program. Learn how to use your distribution’s package manager.