The Steam Deck has revolutionized the gaming handheld market. With the Linux-based immutable SteamOS, Valve has fostered an active community developing mods and alternative systems for this platform. Other manufacturers distribute Windows-based mobile consoles. However, time and time again it has been shown that they lag behind Linux in terms of software support.
But how easy is it to bring a Linux distribution, say openSUSE, to the Steam Deck?
In this talk, a prototype based on openSUSE’s open technologies and infrastructure will be presented, which is already (almost) fully functional on the Steam Deck and many other devices.
Why?
Zypper is by far the best package manager available, providing atomic and reversible updates, and their open build service makes reproducible builds. Those two are by far the best things about openSUSE. It’s not without its faults, which is why I have switched away at times, but I always come back after using the crap available in other distros.
Agree with this. Also they extensively use OpenQA CI and testing framework and it is what makes the rolling release openSUSE Tumbleweed the most stable rolling release distribution I have used since they can quickly catch an updated package that would cause problems and halt it being introduced. And even if something problematic would get through they really have excellent integration of BTRFS snapshoting with zypper and GRUB and system in general so you can easily boot from the last known working snapshot before the problematic update. And I would also say they have the best integration of KDE Plasma and KDE software of any distro out there. so yeah for these reasons I also consider openSUSE the bets GNU/Linux distribution out there.