Not sure there was ever a “formal” announcement/promise, but yeah, this was mentioned as being the plan since before the Steam Deck was even released. People were expecting a general SteamOS ISO to be available on launch day.
Yep, all my games just work, to be honest it takes me less time to setup my gaming rig on Linux than windows, and it feels solid as hell. If I have a Linux PC I can get steam in a few seconds and start playing just like that!
I use bazzite on steam deck. The only kinda irritating thing is the game mode update changelog displays the steamos notes and not bazzite notes. It will be 99% the same for basic users and not worth switching for anyone not needing the additional nerd functionality. If it’s a new installation regardless on a handheld computer then bazzite for sure especially because bazzite already accounts for many deck alternatives.
The only kinda irritating thing is the game mode update changelog displays the steamos notes and not bazzite notes
And you have to do a Bazzite update to make it go away, which is slightly annoying. I’m not sure if you can do it from the Steam UI either, although I can always SSH in.
I cannot for the life of me get bazzite to use the Nvidia gpu in my laptop for shit. Like proper 3d games refuse to launch and simpler 2d games run but at like 4fps. The icon in the system tray for gpu selection/info won’t let me select dgpu, only integrated and hybrid. Gpu basically never gets touched. I’m sure it’s less of a bazzite issue and more of an Nvidia drivers on Linux issue, but can’t really test full functionality of bazzite like this.
And that’s with the Asus laptop Nvidia gpu specific image of bazzite. Very disappointed because I otherwise love bazzite. I have been keeping the windows drive in the laptop specifically for gaming until I can figure out how to fix this. I wish there were more laptop options with amd dGPUs… Looked at microcenter today and there was only one option. :(
My nvidia card works but is quite old and of little use. Nvidia is traditionally bad on linux and from what I can gather seems like is still hit or miss on normal distros, let alone atomic/immutable distros like bazzite. I would imagine the steam os release will be troublesome for nvidia users too but maybe valve has some more magic tricks to pull.
I did enable HDR in the display config. If it’s disabled, all the colors on the desktop are annoyingly saturated. I don’t know if disabling it in the display config will prevent gamescope from using HDR correctly.
Good question, should have been more specific in my post.
Thing is, the colors on my HDR display are all washed out on the desktop if I enable HDR. Specially without a color profile. Are you using a color profile?
Interesting. No, I’m not. I’m curious if you would think the desktop colors on my monitor are washed out when HDR is enabled in display config, though I know that’s not particularly helpful. I’m sorry I don’t know much else. I’m disappointed by the lack of any HDR related tuning built into Bazzite though I don’t know enough about HDR to even go about tweaking the colors.
I wouldn’t be. I appreciate the work done so far by KDE and the Plasma team. They just started support with plasma 6. It will improve.
Bazzite
I wouldn’t count on them to solve it. It’s not like they have anything to do with Plasma desktop. They just package existing software in their own distro.
Are you using a DP -> HDMI converter? I know they can be temperamental.
You can try switching VTs back and forth (CTRL-ALT-F1 <-> CTRL-ALT-F7), and maybe switching resolution back and forth could help.
Make sure you have the latest kernel and try the latest Plasma 6. If all of that fails, you can try Steam with gamescope running in KMS mode (easiest way to test this would probably be Bazzite or Nobara if your distribution doesn’t support it), but it’s also a bit temperamental with enabling HDR.
Are you using a DP -> HDMI converter? I know they can be temperamental.
Nope, those converters do not allow the HDMI 2.1 spec.
I’m running 6.10.x kernel on plasma 6.1.4. I’ve been bleeding edge because of the NVIDIA card for years now. I’ve been played with gamescope HDR, ICC profiles and everything you can think of since it was first possible.
I’ll have to play with it some more when I have time.
Okay. So it’s working. And probably has been working. I’ve been trying to test it with video all this time. VLC and MPV. I decided to setup HDR with Hell Divers and it’s working.
THANK YOU. I added the options to my ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf and everything is working. For some reason I was running with vo=gpu instead of vo=gpu-next . I really appreciate the discussion, it seems I didn’t quite understand how the HDR implementation works and was looking at it the wrong way. It makes sense now. I was way overthinking it.
I was finally able to fix the washed out issue when enabling HDR.
Turns out my TV has known HDR issues with devices like the AppleTV Apple DiscussionI reset the picture to default. Opened the picture menu where it displays the signal. Enabled HDR on the Display Configuration and this time instead of washed out, it was an actual proper HDR desktop.
Neat. I feel like there must be some way to automate both the install of STL and making every game default to gamescope with HDR, but that’s cool you got everything working!
Will the Gnome version of Bazzite work for HDR on an Nvidia GPU, or for that matter any other OS as long as I’m using gamescope to run the game with HDR enabled?
I don’t think it would work because of the fact that HDR isn’t properly implemented yet on GNOME, still waiting for that to land in 47…
My guess is that you’re correct about that. I just wasn’t sure since I’m unfamiliar with just how powerful gamescope is, or how much control it has over the hardware
You don't really need STL, just set gamescope as the launch parameter. I suggest checking --help to see what the flags do, but in general you'll want gamescope -W <res width> -H <res height> -r <refresh rate> -f --force-grab-cursor --hdr-enabled -e -- %command%. This works for me on TEKKEN 8, Helldivers 2 and Deep Rock Galactic.
There are some issues, however. Some games might just freeze when running with gamescope (or gamescope with HDR flags), which is the case for me with Deep Rock, it'll freeze merely 20 seconds after it starts. Second issue is that, at least for me, the image will be incredibly dark and for some reason the SDR content brightness slider on Plasma settings will change the brightness of the HDR gamescope window, so I have to set it to 1000 to "fix" the brightness, but my desktop will be blown out with brightness.
Does –force-cursor-grab fix the issue where the mouse cursor might be misaligned with where you’re clicking? Hadn’t ever used that parameter in my setup and have avoided games that had 3rd party launchers because of this very issue.
Deck's game mode is already running an embedded gamescope session with the flags enabled, so that wouldn't be needed. Might be something else going on that's worth searching about, though
If you're running it as a launch parameter on Steam you need it for the overlay and input to work, however this has been broken for quite a while now. Some people say gamescope 3.14.24 fixed it, but it wasn't my case.
Or just use Bazzite. Already supports multiple handhelds, desktop, and you can have the same exact experience of opening into big picture like the Steamdeck if you’d like.
Welcome to the club! I did the same thing earlier this year, although I ended up moving from Mint to openSUSE Tumbleweed after a couple weeks due to needing support for some bleeding edge hardware.
Thanks to Steam / Proton it’s been relatively painless!
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