Since I wiped my main workstation/gaming PC the other day in a bout of frustration with, well, everything, I’ve been having fun OS-hopping. I have a fallback workstation that I can use for work purposes and to get me by while I’m noodling around in my main rig. My initial intention was to run OpenBSD for a few weeks to see the state of things on the desktop (I have a few devices running OpenBSD but all headless) but I ran into a weird USB storage bug. Just to see if it’s a hardware thing or an OS thing, I tried FreeBSD 15 and it was even worse.
I have a tiny portable NVMe drive the size of a typical flash drive, that can achieve speeds approaching the limit of a 10Gbps USB 3.2 connection. It does exactly that on pretty much all Linux distros and on Windows. However, on OpenBSD it only runs at about 100Mbps (about 10MB/sec transfer speed), and on FreeBSD it doesn’t even enumerate so that I can mount it. Somehow, my motherboard’s USB 3.2 ports are barely supported/not supported in BSD.
Since I can’t do my day to day stuff without reliable and fast USB storage, I shelved the BSDs for now and I’ve been exploring Linux distros that aren’t Void, my faithful and reliable standby.
Slackware was a fun blast from the past, but that is its Achilles’ heel as well. Running it today feels clunky and uncomfortable, and maybe I’m spoiled by Void’s balance of hands-on and automated administration, but I grew tired of all the manual tweaking needed to get it to work well for me. I definitely forgot how frustrating it can be when doing Slackbuilds and missing a dependency here or there, or simply having a build error out over a condition that was met but the build decided it wasn’t. Also, EFI booting with Slackware is confusing and a lot more work than traditional BIOS booting. Since I run EFI only on this computer, that was another nail in the coffin of Slack. Praise BOB, but sadly the world has moved on.
The latest Elementary OS is as beautiful and functional as ever, though there’s this weird bug where the user account is disabled and I couldn’t log in until I rebooted the computer. As with the last time I ran Elementary, there’s a ton of tweaking and potential breakage involved in getting it to handle my workflow, so again I moved on.
And that brings me to now; I’m typing this from, of all things, Desktop Mode in SteamOS. Yes, the very same SteamOS that runs on my Steam Deck! It installs and runs on my desktop PC as if it was made for it, which is sort of true. My CPU is a Ryzen 5600GT, more or less the full fat desktop version of the Deck’s custom AMD APU. My video card is a Radeon 7700 XT, again from the same generation as the Deck’s APU only with an order of magnitude higher performance.
Am I going to stick with SteamOS for a while? Maybe! Gaming performance on this hardware seems to be slightly better than with Void and regular old Steam. Given how much tweaking and optimizing Valve does to SteamOS to eke out every scrap of performance from the handheld’s relatively limited hardware, that’s no surprise. If this machine’s focus was at or near 100% gaming then I’d leave it on there and be done with it. However, its desktop mode, while phenomenal on the Deck, is not quite what I need for daily use. Don’t get me wrong, I like KDE almost as much as Xfce, but the reliance on Flatpaks for software management means I lose some flexibility when it comes to the applications I can install and use on it. I will say it runs like a dream, on par with KDE on Fedora, which I consider the gold standard of a portable computer experience. This isn’t a portable computer though, and I don’t need all the fancy whiz-bang cutting edge features offered by KDE. I need a traditional, familiar, and I hate to say it, non-Wayland desktop to support my workflow. Sorry Wayland, I still believe in you and I know you’ll be great some day, but you’re just not quite there yet.
So I’m going to kill some zombies and demons and other nasty critters in my favorite games for a few days, then I’m going to move on to the next fun-sounding distro, and so on and so on. My prediction is that once I tire of this bout of distro hopping, I’ll settle back into Void for the long haul once again. There’s simply nothing better for me at the moment, unless I am pleasantly surprised on this journey.