SteamOS 3.5 Rolls Out In Preview On The Steam Deck With Many New Features

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SteamOS 3.5 Rolls Out In Preview On The Steam Deck With Many New Features

In time for the weekend gamers, SteamOS 3.5 has just rolled out into Valve's preview channel for the Steam Deck. Those switching over to the "Preview" mode from the System Update Channel setting can begin to enjoy this huge feature update for the Arch Linux based SteamOS...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/SteamOS-3.5-Preview

[ezst036]

SteamOS as it sits does tend to have some walled-garden tendencies in that it is built up around the Steam storefront platform and is generally only meant for the Deck.

That being said, Valve has turned out to be one heck of a powerful corporate partner for desktop Linux, for Linux gaming in general, and all sorts of upgrades and goodies that we have all seen come around the corner at Valve's doing over the last decade.

Good job Valve!

[Linuxxx]

Well, about time!

Michael

Remember my offer?

Over the weekend, I will publish my article.

Would you then be willing to run a few gaming benchmarks comparing the current stable SteamOS 3.4 vs. 3.5 vs. tweaked 3.5, whereby you will just need to do a single copy & paste operation into the terminal to have those tweaks applied?

If yes, which games would be the ideal candidates from the available options within your PTS?

Once we've agreed on the terms, I will send you a 100 $ immediately for your efforts.

Deal?

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

I put this on my deck last weekend.

https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite

Worked fine. But I've done exactly zero cool things with it so far, so may as well just run SteamOS.

Also worth mentioning that the deck is on sale again right now. $360 for the base model. You can add a 1TB NVMe drive yourself for another ~$60.

[Mangix]

My external display no longer works. Unfortunate.

[dlq84]

SteamOS as it sits does tend to have some walled-garden tendencies in that it is built up around the Steam storefront platform and is generally only meant for the Deck.

That being said, Valve has turned out to be one heck of a powerful corporate partner for desktop Linux, for Linux gaming in general, and all sorts of upgrades and goodies that we have all seen come around the corner at Valve's doing over the last decade.

Good job Valve!

Sure, it starts steam as a default but desktop mode where you can do pretty much what you want and install anything you want is just a couple of button presses away. I wouldn't call that a walled garden. Let's not make that phrase meaningless while we still have Apple, ok?

[Beherit]

Is it still not updated from kernel v5.13.0?

[Kepsz]

Is it still not updated from kernel v5.13.0?

They jumped to 6.1 LTS kernel.

[Linuxxx]

Michael

So, I just published my article here:

https://medium.com/@a.b.t./here-are-some-possibly-useful-tweaks-for-steamos-on-the-steam-deck-fcb6b571b577

It all comes down to these commands:

cat << EOF | sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/cpu_performance.service
[Unit]
Description=CPU performance governor
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/bin/cpupower frequency-set -g performance
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable cpu_performance.service
cat << EOF | sudo tee /etc/tmpfiles.d/mglru.conf
w /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/enabled - - - - 7
w /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/min_ttl_ms - - - - 0
EOF
cat << EOF | sudo tee /etc/security/limits.d/memlock.conf
* hard memlock 2147484
* soft memlock 2147484
EOF
cat << EOF | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/64-ioschedulers.rules
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="nvme[0-9]*", ATTR{queue/scheduler}="kyber"
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]|mmcblk[0-9]*", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="0", ATTR{queue/scheduler}="kyber"
EOF
sudo sed -i -e '/home/s/\bdefaults\b/&,noatime/' /etc/fstab
sudo sed -i 's/\bGRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="\b/&mitigations=off nowatchdog nmi_watchdog=0 /' /etc/default/grub
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/steamos/grub.cfg

You can simply copy & paste the whole block above into the terminal in order to have them all applied at once.

Just a handful of games would be enough to see any differences between SteamOS 3.4 vs. 3.5, which would certainly drive quite some traffic onto Phoronix, too.

Hope you consider it...

[skeevy420]

Sure, it starts steam as a default but desktop mode where you can do pretty much what you want and install anything you want is just a couple of button presses away. I wouldn't call that a walled garden. Let's not make that phrase meaningless while we still have Apple, ok?

I think they meant that some of the extra features in SteamOS only work with the Steam Deck and not generically on Linux (I think that's the hold up with non-Deck SteamOS releases). Then there's Proton itself. That's specifically a Steam thing and it's up to the community to make it available for non-Steam uses, into custom Wine builds, etc.

I'm trying to point out that Valve does things for themselves first and foremost...which is how Capitalism and business works. We're just fortunate that they're altruistic enough to do it in an open source manner so communities can even hack away at it which makes it less a Walled Garden and more a Commune Garden.

I'm neither complaining nor upset with Valve, just trying to explain how I see their point of view.