Months after its release, Steam Deck It seems to have established itself as a product with much greater acceptance than Steam Machines at the time. However, Valve’s device, which is outwardly a hybrid console with a format and layout similar to that of the Nintendo Switch, is actually true. A compatible computer with a standard Linux operating system.

By default, Steam Deck works in a gaming session with the Steam client, but it also has a desktop mode that launches a session with the KDE plasma desktop, which stands out for its Windows-like layout and extensive customization options. since he said Desktop mode the user can use SteamOS 3 as if it were such a device, opening the door to using the device as if it were a normal PC.

At that time, we already covered what KDE Plasma is, the project that supports it, and some of its advantages, among which we can mention the low resource usage and the project’s proclaimed respect for privacy, which are added to the above options. personalization. As the strengths of KDE Plasma are revealed, we’ll dive a little deeper into what Steam Deck brings to the desktop technology level.

Did you know that SteamOS 3 is a standard GNU/Linux operating system?

It should no longer be a mystery that SteamOS 3, the operating system that comes pre-installed on the Steam Deck, is basically standard GNU/Linux that derived from Arch Linux and with immutability properties.

The concept handled by SteamOS 3 has some conceptual similarities to Linux systems from the RPM spectrum, such as Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite and openSUSE MicroOS, which, in addition to being immutable, try to separate applications from the operating system. The fact that the operating system is immutable means that the file system is a high percentage of read-only and that, at least initially, it cannot be modified by the user, even with administrator (root in Linux) privileges.

In addition to using Steam’s own interface and immutability, since this is a feature that happened mainstream recently in the world Linux, experienced Linux users should find it pretty familiar at a general level.and the point is that on a technological level SteamOS 3 is nothing special when you use KDE Plasma as a desktop, systemd as a framework for services, the standard graphics stack of the system present in all distributions (AMDGPU in the kernel, RadeonSI for OpenGL and RADV for Vulkan) and Flatpak as the primary means of installing graphical applications. Other things like the directory tree and configuration files are in roughly the same places.

With all this data on the table, it’s not unreasonable to consider the Steam Deck as a device that has at least reduced the fear that many had about using Linux in the home environment. There are few things in SteamOS 3 that are not present in other distributions, especially if we stick to the desktop interface.

Flatpak and the value of freedom

The fact that Steam Deck is seen as a console can be misleading, as other devices such as PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S also use x86_64 processors from AMD. Sony and Microsoft consoles are closed devices that greatly limit the freedom that the user can exercise over them, but this is not the case with the Steam Deck, which can change the operating system to Windows without any other restrictions than are common on a PC. PC, but that’s a detail we won’t go into.

As we said before, SteamOS 3 is a standard Linux operating system with all its pros and cons, although it is somewhat machine-oriented, so it may not be very graphical. NVIDIA. It stands out among all the desktop features Flatpak, a universal package format officially community in origin, but managed primarily by Red Hat.

Although Flatpak is officially decentralized, it is de facto centralized through the Flathub repository, which has proven to be an essential resource for all users who use the package format. SteamOS 3 implements Flatpak by default, which makes it easy for the user to add additional storage for multiple applications or alternative compilations thereof.

Due to the ease of adding more Flatpak repositories, the user may find that SteamOS 3 is not only less limited than “traditional” video game consoles, but also a more open platform than iOS and even Android. It’s true that Google’s mobile operating system has always allowed third-party stores to be added, but the process isn’t as simple as setting up repositories in Flatpak, while iOS is paving the way for third-party stores due to a possible defeat in court.

Taking over Flathub, a repository that de facto centralized the distribution of packages and applications in the Flatpak formathas a growing catalog where everything can be found, including office suites, drawing applications, image manipulation, video editing, etc. As a result, Steam Deck is fully capable of performing the function of a PC without having to use another operating system.

In the Flathub catalog, the user will find applications such as LibreOffice, ONLYOFFICE, Google Chrome (although not an official package), the drawing application Krita, the GIMP image manipulator, the VLC media player, the Audacious audio player, the Audacity audio editor, and the Kdenlive and Shotcut video editors. In short, the user can turn his Steam Deck not only into a computer for office automation and other basic use, but also into a computer for multimedia production.

Let’s go a little deeper into Flatpak

Flatpak is a universal package format for Linux. It aims to provide a framework for graphical applications that can run independently of a distribution. As it only covers graphics applications, it does not support service execution, nor is it capable of supporting kernels or drivers associated with them, although it does support user-space drivers (OpenGL, Vulkan, and OpenCL) via Mesa compilations in the specified format. ..

In addition to being a universal framework for setting up and installing graphical applications, Flatpak aims to be easy to configure, use and maintain, so at least with the default configuration it updates applications automatically and on the fly, although it doesn’t hurt every now and then to you look at the software store, in this case Discover, to see if there are any updates left to ask for additional permissions, a situation that thankfully is solved with the push of a button.

However, a widespread misconception among users about Flatpak is that the applications are completely self-contained. Although the packet format has isolation (sandbox) as one of its flags, the reality is this its way of working is not far from what could be called “traditional packaging”, so applications in the Flatpak format also have their dependenciesmainly from the GNOME or KDE runtimes and freedesktop, which, in addition to the Flatpak runtime, is the project that defines the de facto Linux desktop standards and the project responsible for Mesa.

One of the goals of Flatpak is to decouple applications from the system, a feature further emphasized on immutable operating systems such as Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite, openSUSE MicroOS, and SteamOS 3, where it plays the role of the primary installation path. graphics applications. Separating applications from the system is an advantage that can also be gained with mutable systems (those that give write permissions to any part of the filesystem), so it opens the door to combining Debian Stable with the latest versions of applications, which can come in handy in some contexts.

Bottom line: your Steam Deck is good for more than you think

Despite its console appearance, nothing prevents you from mounting the Steam Deck like a PC and using it as an office device or multimedia production, among other things. To do this, it is not necessary to change the operating system, but simply start exploring the catalog available in the Flatpak format.