Hi all, I just spent the past couple of days testing out SteamOS v3.7.7 on my Legion Go.
I’m happy to recommend not wasting any of your time as its quite a poor experience, below are some points I’ll raise:
No Handheld Daemon: You don’t appreciate this awesome piece of software until you don’t have it.
SteamOS is locked at a very low TDP so games out of the box perform poorly.
Desktop environment has more bugs than a motel that charges by the hour.
Audio Crackle, if you suspend and resume in a game, you will have the dreaded audio crackle, and nothing fixes it but a complete reboot, the device is so touchy, even if a low flying Swallow fly’s past your house at its maximum unladen airspeed, it will trigger audio crackle, its completely rubbish, worst experience ever.
You must install DeckyLoader, then manually install SimpleDeckyTDP as for some reason, it has been removed from the DeckyLoader store, after this, you can actually crank up the Z1 Extreme beyond the performance of a Raspberry Pi 3.
TDP can be erratic, at times it seems to get stuck in RPI 3 mode and wont budge, you will need to mess about with SimpleDeckyTDP a little, then all of sudden it will hit 30+ watt TDP mode.
Compared a few games, one to point out is Doom Eternal, performance seems to be good on SteamOS except for the aforementioned audio crackle, but its much better on Bazzite, running same thermal meltdown mode on Bazzite will hit triple digit frame rates with ultra nightmare on at 800p with clean crisp audio, on SteamOS it hovers around 75fps.
Until Dawn on SteamOS is a slide show with, you guessed it, crackling audio! On Bazzite, 45+ FPS with no audio issues.
Some games had a tendency to completely lock up my device on launch, this results in me have to mash the power button down for 10+ seconds like I’m trying to shut Windows down on a Surface tablet…
Desktop mode keeps trying to open Firefox every time I log in, it seems to be fixated on Firefox like fat kid and a cup cake, I uninstall it, then it opens Discover and tells me there is an issue and I need to install Firefox, its like the GUI is possessed or something, the GUI also seems to self impose a sticky key like “Shift” making it impossible to click on anything properly, you cant even logout or shutdown, so once again, I’m mashing that power button like I’m trying to procreate with it.
There is a lot more issues I had, I tried to like it, but I put Bazzite back on the Legion Go this morning, and the relief was overwhelming, the first thing that felt like bliss was seeing that sweet sweet Handheld Daemon pop out with a double press…ahh so good
If Steam and Arch want to support other handhelds, they have a very long way to go, personally, I think that these alt consoles should be partnering with Bazzite, they should donate funds and in turn you can do an even better job at supporting their devices.
Arch already supports them, I’ve heard some good things about CachyOS and ChimeraOS on various devices.
The problem is that Valve has to do things right – making sure everything is okay in terms of licenses and support. HHD is likely just out-of-scope for Valve, everything has to be done via the kernel, systemd, underlying KDE/Qt components if necessary, and Steam components that Valve controls.
This isn’t hard if you work with the manufacturer from the very beginning, but is a different story when you’re working backwards. I wouldn’t be surprised if non-official Handheld support remains unreliable for years because it’s not like we haven’t seen the same thing with support for various Steam features on Nvidia (which could theoretically be fixed through various hacks and trickeries).
I haven’t tried CachyOS, but I was testing/using ChimeraOS back when it first started, I found it to restrictive at the time, and this was long before the current Arch build of SteamOS.
Its all the little additions in Bazzite that just make it a better choice, they have better support for all of the alt consoles, I like pure SteamOS, but its just not worth running unless you are using one of the official supported consoles, Bazzite will give you a far better experience, even for newbies and it makes something like the OG Legion Go so much better to use.
I have been using and playing with Linux since the 90’s, and up until recent years, I was an avid Debian user, but recently, I have just found Fedora to be the better choice, it supports more hardware out of the box, things just work, less messing about, and they release rapidly, things get fixed fast, and yes I’m sure plenty of other releases do this too, I’m just liking Fedora based operating systems more and more, and as far as I can see, Arch based gaming builds will offer nothing over Fedora based for normies, except for additional head aches, for experienced users, Arch may be the better choice.
My recommendation for a normie, that wants to give Linux a go for gaming, or would like to make their Windows based console work better, I will tell them to try Bazzite first.
Thanks for the report, my experience with SteamOS on the AMD AtomMan was surprisingly bad as well.
I guess that without HHD, there is no way to swap the start/select buttons with Steam/QAM? Do you remember how SteamOS mapped them out of the box? Having start/select in the bottom left corner feels wrong to me.
I always play indies at a low TDP and I never open desktop mode or HHD/Decky, so I could probably survive on SteamOS if not for the audio issues. But I am also not going to mess with my current Windows/Bazzite dual boot setup.
HHD really makes the LeGo work properly, and I agree on the button placement, the LeGo is garbage, those back buttons are the first thing I disable, they give me the craps as I constantly press them, and the start select location is terrible, the Steam Deck is far far more ergonomic.
Also the easy touch screen disable in HHD is also a must, none of these nice to haves are available in SteamOS.
I disable those stupid RGB’s, the charge light, the touch screen, remap buttons, disable the grip buttons, switch the controllers to XBOX mode, the list goes on, without HHD, SteamOS is just not usable, but on a HTPC setup, SteamOS will be fine, as HHD does not even work on those machines, but you will still hit the TDP issue, as it leaves a lot of performance of the table without that and there is so many little things Bazzite includes, yes you can add most of them to SteamOS, but you dont need to with Bazzite, and Bazzite updates far more rapidly.
SteamOS on HTPCs is not necessarily great either. Its 6.11 kernel doesn’t support my Bluetooth chip, and I’m experiencing hard GPU crashes that didn’t happen under Bazzite. But that is a bit off topic now.
Yes, this was my point as well, Bazzite is more up to date, I had SteamOS running over a month ago on a UM773-Lite from Minis Forum and it did perform perfectly, but I did notice some weirdness with Bluetooth and PS4 controllers, so I also went back to Bazzite on that system.
For gaming, I think we are always going to want cutting edge kernel’s as we will always need the most up to date drivers for games to function properly, Linux is not going to differ to Windows in the aspect, in the past if I install the latest AAA title, I would always go and update all of my drivers, GPU and motherboard, so Linux would be similar, at least for the GPU, Bazzite is pretty good in this regard, same can be said for Fedora in general.
