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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • SteamOS is not a good general purpose distribution for random PCs. Internationalization is basically non existent. For an external keyboard the layout is hardcoded to US in Game Mode and for people who don’t know where to look it’s basically impossible to find where to change it in Plasma/Desktop Mode. Language files including spell check dictionaries are unavailable for anything but English, presumably to save storage space everywhere for the 64GB Deck.

    If you manually set the system language to anything but English, you end up with a weird mishmash of languages because the .desktop files still contain all translations, GUIs of bundled apps stay English, and Flatpak apps respect the language setting.

    The sole thing SteamOS has over other distributions is the fact that you can order a Steam Deck and everything is already right there. Once installation on random PCs comes into play, SteamOS loses against Fedora and alike hands down because those have the wizards to set up language, encryption, dual boot, etc.