In trying to get Linux on my og Surface Go lately, it’s not easy or straightforward.

Dave the Diver. I was playing a pirated copy through October, it was a lot of fun so when it went on sale last week I bought it.

Crate was formed by former Titan Quest devs (can’t remember the name).

Maybe if you use Proton VPN on KDE it could need to pull in some Gnome packages. Which isn’t a problem. I use Proton VPN on KDE but I just install it from flathub to keep it simple, so I couldn’t say for sure.

I ran Bazzite on a mini form factor pc for about 12 months. It was just connected to the TV and used to play games.

I turned it on, I used my controller to start a game, that was it. I’m not sure what actions would be doing to break it.

I haven’t used it in about 6 months since I got a steam deck, but I just plugged it in and tried it again. Still starts up fine, played dead cells for a few minutes.

But if you’re looking for immutable distro for gaming then Bazzite is the gold standard.

Other immutable distros like Kinoite, Aurora, Aeon are targeted to desktop use, but in my experience they play games just fine too, no reason they wouldn’t (Aeon used to have a weird security policy that caused problems with Wine, but I think they changed that)

It should work I believe. used it on Opensuse tumbleweed, Fedora, bazzite, and CachyOS. Just by turning Bluetooth on and pairing it.

I assumed from the start this would be the issue. The mention of it happening to non-Steam games is the giveaway -

Steam provides pre-compiled shaders for the games they supply, non-Steam games have to build up their shader cache whilst you play.

Automatic updates are there with the right distro. Which highlights the need to look around for the right distro for the use case.

Example being Opensuse Aeon - automatic updates - doesn’t even tell you it’s happening, just pops up “your system was updated” out of nowhere

Automatic rollback - if an update broke something you would never know, at boot the system will pick the previous snapshot with no user intervention

As far as the user is concerned you just have a working system; that it is the entire goal of that distro

I tried to find the github issue, but it’s eluding me, so I’m going to go into detail since I spent about 3 weeks troubleshooting this.

Hard crash when playing a game. Restarts steam deck with a “verifying installation” message.

This happens anywhere from 2-15 minutes of playtime. Game didn’t matter, Terraria, Skyrim, Borderlands 1, Dave the Diver, Shredders Revenge, Doom 2016 … It was also reported by users with both LCD and OLED decks, so hardware revision didn’t matter either.

Anecdotally you find people saying that some of these steps work:

Memory retraining, re-imaging steam deck, Flashing different bios versions, Messing around with gpu clocks

But almost all of those threads loop back to the OP saying something like “nope, still crashing”. Any reprieve they did have seemed to be coincidental.

Valve themselves recommend those first two steps and then an RMA if it doesn’t fix it.

A Brazilian user in the issue tracker worked out you can flash BIOS 0116, and disable two specific memory power management flags. I believe the settings are hidden in other versions of the BIOS.

A Valve rep on the tracker confirmed that would work, but suggested not to do it as the deck is not functioning properly and needs to be replaced. They then closed the issue and advised to only use that fix if you can’t RMA.

Worth noting, 0116 is a pre-OLED BIOS, and can only be flashed to the LCD models. There is no way to reveal these BIOS flags on the OLED model, so you can only RMA in that case.

This has absolutely solved the problem. But I think I’m having a few dodgy side effects that weren’t happening before, like updates failing, and USB connection has become iffy and needing a few restarts to recognise devices are plugged in.

At least I can play games again, which work flawlessly now.

I didn’t know systemd-boot loader could boot snapshots. Do you know if there’s a guide to set this up?

I’m not using tumbleweed anymore for a few reasons, but my system does have snapper taking snapshots, and I’m using systemd-boot loader instead of grub. But I don’t know how to make those work together.

My partner bought me one a few months ago from Kogan for my birthday. But it does have a problem which needs to be RMA’d and I knew there was no hope of that.

I thought we could try our luck with Kogan returns, but they only have the OLED model now so don’t know how that would go. Especially as it appears to work fine ( until you get 5 - 10 minutes in-game then it hard crashes).

I found on the github issue tracker for steamOS someone from Brazil (who also had to resort to grey imports) found a way to flashback to an older BIOS and adjust memory power settings. That fixed it, but it’s a bit bodgy and introduces other issues.

This is a known issue that the Steam rep on the issue tracker said only follow that process if you absolutely can’t RMA it. They closed the issue in the basis that you just RMA it if it happens.

I don’t know, I’ve never looked for that function. Just that I’ve used Varia and it was not good.

I use gabut from flathub now, which again uses aria2 backend but does download things reliably.

I tried it for a while, but downloads kept stalling and I’d come back hours later to find a corrupt file.

I’ve used other download tools with aria2 as a backend and didn’t have any issues.

I know what you mean. I just started playing Borderlands and it’s so hard to do the shooting. I don’t know how people play these games on consoles.

Depending how familiar and comfortable you are with linux, that could be right.

Bazzite is a dependable experience that you setup it up to do a job and just use it. Tinkering around with it isn’t really a thing.

CachyOS being basically Arch with some performance based modifications is absolutely for tinkering with, customising, learning to get under the hood with Linux… but also very breakable.

Generally; CachyOS is Arch Linux, which means all the good sides and down sides of Arch.

Bazzite is universal-blue. Which is immutable Fedora. You can’t really mess around with the system. You install software via flatpak, everything is a very controlled environment.

Sounds like bootlicker talk to me.

Absolutely. Look at Aeon. I turn it on and do what I need to do.

Later I might see a quick pop up that says system has been updated. It didn’t require intervention. It didn’t even tell me it was happening, it just informed me after the fact.

If anything broke, I would never know because on the next boot if something failed it just uses the previous snapshot to boot. As far as I am concerned the system is working just like it always has.

But even as recently as this week I see people saying: immutable? No don’t make it a bad experience for them! Just recommend Ubuntu for newcomers! >:/

I loved this on ps3. I thought I had it on GOG, but apparently I have it on steam instead. Before this I’d only played Tower Defence games on a flash website that had been clearly drawn using paint, so seeing one professionally made was very nice.

Yes, but he also commented that the rust infrastructure isn’t super stable.

The point is that that Linus responses were not as overtly simplified and predictable as lung suggested.