Rakqoi

I can’t help but feel like Valve has somewhat dropped the ball by not releasing it yet, at least for other handheld manufacturers to use in their own devices. As it is, the Steam Deck is the only handheld PC that I know of that uses linux, and all the companies jumping on the bandwagon with competition are all using windows. It feels to me like Valve’s attempt at making linux the de facto standard handheld OS for gaming devices has slipped away by now, which is really unfortunate.

Of course, the Steam Deck is still the most popular handheld gaming PC (in large part I’m sure due to low cost and the convenience of SteamOS) so it’s not like it has been a failure at getting more gamers on linux, but I’d guess that if they released SteamOS 3 alongside the Steam Deck it would have made a much bigger dent in the market.

I chose Garuda for this reason and I love it. the automatic snapshots have saved me several times, plus I like all the built-in tools for configuring a ton of things that I’d have no idea how to configure otherwise. The preinstalled software is also super useful. The only thing I didn’t like about it is the gaudy default theme but that’s easy to change.

There is/was a fan made version of this in development! I don’t know the status of it currently, and I heard that development was rocky for a while… and they haven’t posted on the blog since 2020. But take a look anyway!

https://seaofgreed.com/