i moved recently and don’t have a TV anymore so my excitement for this kinda dwindled. the 2TB price seems like a bit of a hard sell, but honestly i expected them to be even wilder given the circumstances. personally much more excited for the Steam Frame
I’m more interested for SteamOS if it allows for that seamless console experience for a DIY Steam Machine hooked up to you’re TV, I already have a main gaming rig would just love something to have for the living room but the current price is way too rich for my blood especially with steam frame likely coming next (I’m okay dropping money on that). So far I’ve been experimenting with different distros and really enjoyed Garuda though I’m not a fan of how it handles updates (it seems to perform better at gaming compared to Mint), how’s Bazzite when it comes to updates?
Bazzite is much more like a console experience in some ways and very different in others
Bazzite is immutable. Every app is a flatpak and sandboxed so the idea is that even if you completely fuck an app up it won’t mess with the underlying os. As such updates are image based. Very similar to steamos and consoles, downloads in background and applies upon reboot. There’s not really a need to fuck with apt or whatever and updates aren’t really something you think about
While you can get to a desktop environment it boots to a game mode ui (steam big picture). Native controller support too for Xbox, PlayStation, and switch.
Where it differs is that some games need extra config. Additionally, if you run games outside of steam (eg epic, Ubisoft, gog) you need to change launchers to lutris or heroic and this kind of breaks the “console” feel and often requires some more tweaking (though some like lutris can add games to the steam launcher as a nonsteam game). But that’s really only needed to get a game working, once it works it’s usually sorted. There’s often info already on how to get it working if it doesn’t by default (protondb, lutris scripts) but admittedly some of these can be wrong. The main bazzite site straight up tells you to just configure lutris manually for games because most of the scripts are poorly maintained, for example.
if your library is 90+% steam games this isn’t really an issue. This is where the “I just download it/put the disc in and play it” part of the console experience can fall apart though. The tradeoff is worth it imo though for both having far more freedom for things like modding and avoiding windows
Otherwise it’s basically limited to the woes of linux gaming. Games with anticheat often flat out don’t work (no Fortnite), Xbox gamepass is a pain if you use that, that kind of thing