Hello community!
I come to you for advice. Using an m1 macbook air since 2020, I installed popos on my old 2013 macbook pro and I was quite happy with it but… I bought a steamdeck two weeks ago and exploring its desktop mode made me reconsider some choices. Using distros based on different systems, with different commands, desktop environment, etc. gets a little confusing for someone like me, who doesn’t use linux as my main machine. Do you have any advice for me? From what I understand, steamos is debian-based while popos is ubuntu-based: is that the biggest part of how a distribution works, ie commands, etc.? Good ui/ux is important for me so i should maybe use nitrux or deepin, that are debian-based, or is it a bad idea to choose a less common distro for a amateur like me?
Thanks in advance, I’m a bit lost.
I do not think anybody has mentioned it yet but the closest you can get to SteamOS is this:
https://github.com/HoloISO/holoiso
That may not be your best install experience as a newcomer to Linux though.
My favourite distribution is EndeavourOS ( easier to deploy Arch Linux ). If the Arch association seems scary, my feeling is that the best all around newbie distro is Linux Mint. My impression is that the distro people are happiest with is PopOS but I have not used it. It sounds like you have.
Reading into your question though, the “desktop mode” of SteamOS is KDE ( the desktop environment ). That provides the user experience and is the biggest factor on how you interact with your computer.
KDE is available on most distros but it is not the default desktop environment on many of them. Ubuntu uses a modified GNOME desktop for example and Debian defaults to GNOME as well. Linux Mint uses a GNOME derived environment called Cinnamon. If you wanted KDE on Ubuntu, there is a project called Kubuntu that delivers it out of the box. The last disto I used that installed KDE by default was Big Linux.
As I said though, most distros offer KDE even if it is not the default.