Shower thought: Valve could do the ultimate boss-move this year
If Valve really wanted to make a splash, they could release a desktop version of SteamOS in October, right when support for Windows 10 ends. For additional damage, they could bundle in Half-Life 3. Just imagine the coverage this would get.
Reminder that supporting a single GPU is a lot simpler than supporting all of them...
Also, SteamOS would make a dogshit desktop OS. It’s designed specifically for Steam’s Big Picture Mode. It has Arch running in the background, but that’s not the primary focus of the OS.
It would be great for something like an arcade cabinet or a family TV, but not so great for a desktop.
Yup.
I've spent a good while running Deck in desktop mode compared to my laptop running Manjaro, and so far the only thing I've noticed is that the Deck has that handy "add to steam" context menu item that automatically sets a 3rd party game to run in proton through steam.
And there's an AUR package for that.
So unless there's something major I've managed to miss, Manjaro + that package gets you the entire desktop SteamOS experience on any device.
They can make SteamOS Lite at any point.
My point is that it already basically exists... It’s called Arch.