You could try flashing the recovery image and re-imaging your deck. https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2BB3

I’d contact valve support if that doesn’t work, they’ve always been great whenever I’ve interacted with them.

Oh yeah, they’re free to decide, I just disagree with them! I get the decision though, and if I were on charge of a large distro, I’d probably make the same choice (until plasma is on a normal release cycle)

Yeah, like I’m all in favor of having an opinionated design, but their dominance makes their bad decisions actively harm every other de. Stuff like refusing to compromise on cross-desktop protocols

Their whole attitude towards development is similar, down to not working with other dekstops and insisting on doing things the way that works best for them regardless if it’s worse for the linux ecosystem overall.

Nah, GNOME is worse mostly because it’s the default on a ton of distros, so them having this attitude actively get’s in the way of cross-desktop development instead of just being annoying.

Yeah, KDE’s basically at the point you don’t need GNOME imo, it’s so customizable you can make it basically look/function the same as GNOME without having to put up with GNOME’s dumber decisions

Nobody hears about them shutting down oil factories, attention getting stuff is why those are talked about.

They never do any actual harm either, like Stonehenge was cornstarch, it’ll all be gone the next time it rains. They paint the glass in front of paintings, not the paintings themselves.

My only concern with nobara is that Fedora 41’s dropping x11 support, and I’m not confident nvdia drivers will be in a good enough state to recommend to a beginner.

Yeah, I’ve heard it’s getting better, but I have an amd card, so not really sure where it’s actually at. X would probably be better for nvdia for a while, especially on pop_os, but idk what the actual state is.

The basic recomendations I’d give for distro is something popular based off Ubuntu or fedora. Both are pretty friendly distros, and most things based off them aren’t going to make too many changes to how core systems work.

If it’s based off one of those I’d argue the more important question is what user interface (called a desktop environment) you like. Watch a few videos of each distro in action and pick what you think looks best.

A lot of big distros have “spins” or varieties that have different desktop environments. So if you

Some specifics I’d recommend:

• Linux mint: a distro based on Ubuntu that’s designed to be easy to use, without much setup. Most stuff will just work, but being based on Ubuntu, it’s a stable distro, so updates will be a bit slower, and there won’t be any major changes in the same version. (I would reccomend this over standard Ubuntu personally because the company behind Ubuntu has made decisions I don’t like (like prioritizing their own way of installing programs that, in my opinion, is a inferior to other methods))

Slightly less highly recomended:

• Fedora: takes a quicker approach to updates, but isn’t as focused on being friendly to new users. It has a variety of spins: https://fedoraproject.org/spins/ if you go with fedora, I’d recommend GNOME (the default, more similar to Mac), KDE (similar to windows), or cinnamon (what linux mint uses, similar to windows).

• nobara: I’ve heard good things about nobara, but I’m not super familiar with it. It’s basically fedora KDE with some extra patches added to better support gaming. The one negative I’ve heard is the maintainer is very busy, so ocasionally updates will be delayed vs fedora. It’s more of a hobbyist distro, but the maintainer seems pretty dedicated, and they also maintain a version of valve’s proton (one of the things that lets you play windows games on linux called proton ge that includes additional patches)

In order I’d recommend pop_os, linux mint, fedora, nobara. If you look at KDE and decide you like it, then I’d go withth fedora or nobara.

The main reason I’d recommend pop_os or mint is because you have an nvdia graphics card. Nvdia drivers have tended to be worse on linux, especially under a newer protocol called Wayland, which fedora is moving over to in it’s next release. Mint and pop_os slower update cycles are more likely to stay on x11 (the older protocol, but better supported by nvdia cards) until everything’s very solid.

Fedora’s trying to push linux forward, which is good imo, and most things should be fine with nvdia, but there will be more bugs. (I’ve heard it’s gotten pretty good, but I have an amd card and don’t want to recommend them without warning until I know for sure there aren’t issues)

1. I’d recommend pop os over bazzite because it’s a more standard distro, bazzite is immutible (update entire system at once instead of individual apps, and part of the filesystem are read only. It’s harder to break stuff on an immutible distro, but they’re less common and most resources online are for normal distros). It isn’t hard to get nvdia drivers working on pop os, so I’d just google it after you get it set up.

2. I’d make sure your windows drive is unplugged before installing, so you don’t accidentally wipe it! I’ve never dealt with swapping what drive the os is on, but I’d expect some stuff to break because the filesystem is pointing to unique IDs that no longer match. That shouldn’t be hard to fix by googling the errors, but I’d watch out for it.

3. Windows updates like to mess up bootloaders sometimes, I’ve never had that happen, so I don’t have any advice there. Unplugging the windows drive when you instsl should help, and just make sure the default is to boot into linux, that way any auto restarts won’t get into windows to mess stuff up unless you let it.

c/pop_os@lemmy.world

c/linux@lemmy.ml

Could also be good places to ask

They’re probably on windows

When you normally delete a file, it doesn’t actually delete it, to save time it just marks the space as free, so any new files can be written into that part of your drive.

But the actual data just remains there until a new file is written to the storage.

SecureErase does the second part without making an actual file.

Normal delete:

File: 01010101 -> no file:01010101

Secure erase:

File: 01010101 -> no file:00000000

That’s the fun part though

Android introduces far more incompatibilities, and the kernel mods are more impactful than the vast majority of other systems. Userspace incompatibilities are basically negligable for most distros.

It’s differences are substantial enough that I think it makes sense to treat it as a separate os.

Eh, it depends how you define Linux. Android uses a modified Linux kernel, but most of what’s above that is different. By the point you’re at the application layer they’re basically completely incompatible.

Is it technically Linux? Yeah but it’s so different from a user’s perspective it’s best to treat them as separate imo.

Yeah, your overall point is 100% correct and well made. Just a few things that don’t really matter to an end user they were complaining about

That was probably Atlas, it disables a bunch of security features as part of debloating, so I wouldn’t recommend it unless it’s an offline device

That just guarantees tech support lol