this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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I plan on trying out SteamOS pretty soon. I have a desktop with all the most compatible bits of hardware for it. I do wonder if I'll be able to get my Intel wifi\bluetooth and my old brother laser printer to work with it.
I would definitely recommend trying Bazzite first. It's basically SteamOS but targeted towards general hardware instead of just the steam deck and steam machine.
For a long time SteamOS didn't have printer drivers because why would a steam deck need printer drivers.
Out of all the users I've recommended Bazzite to generally people waiting for SteamOS or people wanting to escape Windows 11 with a Linux distro that "just works" are the happiest with it.
I'm sure I'd be happy with it. My desktop is like 95% just a gaming and Internet video viewing system. I have a laptop for work stuff and it's been on Linux mint for quite a while. My desktop is still rocking windows 10. I've avoided 11 completely. I'm sure bazzite would do great and it's going to get more popular due to what you've mentioned and that gamers Nexus uses bazzite for their Linux gaming testing rig. But I believe SteamOS will ultimately end up a better choice for gaming and usage between my PC and steam deck.
Also, steamos didn't have printer drivers for the longest time.... Well yeah, but up until like a month or so ago people weren't even supposed to be installing it on a desktop. It wasn't "released" for a desktop PC yet.
I agree 100 percent.
I just swapped my steam deck to bazzite :p
Lol. Do you miss out on all the shader pre caching by doing that? I've played the same game on my steam deck with shader pre caching and without, and there's a pretty noticeable difference in gameplay quality.
No steam still downloads the precache info, at least I've seen it show up the same way in the downloads window in gamescope.
Well that's surprising and cool.