Or ‘do worse than’.

I think I like this one as well. Basically, as you’ll see later on, the expression is (probably) best translated as ‘to be inferior’. Combined with the negation that’s brought with “don’t”, we could rephrase the sentence as ‘Honestly, in terms of ease to play, SteamOS (or clones like Bazzite) aren’t inferior to Windows.’.

‘steamos doesnt under-do windows in terms of gaming’

Another one that I like 😜. But, the double ‘do’ is indeed a bit awkward.

Mind if i ask what language the expression ‘do under’ is from?

Sure! It’s an expression found in Dutch. Heck, to be more precise, it’s a verb that can be split: ‘onderdoen’, but also ‘doen onder’. The literal translation would be, as you’d expect ‘underdo’ or ‘do under’. Here’s the (English) wiktionary entry.

Also agree with everything you said about OSes. I had tried linux in the past but mostly stuck to windows for gaming, then i got a steam deck and ill never install windows ever again.

Valve has truly outdone itself. While I only started using Linux after Proton’s release, the horror stories from the pre-Proton era still send shivers down my spine.

Excellent write-up!

Though, it’s a pity that a great ambassador of OpenBSD has stopped using it.

It doesn’t get much better than Digital Foundry’s coverage on the matter.

We were able to, up until Riot chose to mess it up for everyone (including us).

Apologies. Allow me to clarify.

I meant that it’s not harder than Windows, when it comes to playing games. And I even made that claim stronger by proclaiming that it’s probably even easier.

Edit: SteamOS is the operating system found on the Steam Deck. It’s basically Arch Linux (btw), but with Valve’s (very) special sauce. It’s what you’d expect from your average game console; which is a good thing*.

Honestly, in terms of ease to play, SteamOS (or clones like Bazzite) don’t do under fall short of Windows. Heck, I’d argue they might even be easier.

The real issue is anti-cheat. But that’s just the next hurdle we’ll have to overcome.

Edit: TIL that the expression “to do under” has no place in English.

Initially, I was drawn to KDE Plasma for familiarity. Therefore, when installing Linux for the first time, I chose a distro with KDE Plasma. Which happened to be Fedora Kinoite 35, a very new distro at the time. It was clearly buggy and after fiddling with it for some time, I just had to rebase to Silverblue (and GNOME) for the lack of alternatives.

Thankfully, I actually happened to really like GNOME. This was on a laptop and GNOME’s touchpad gestures just felt very satisfying and intuitive; much better than anything else I had experienced before. Its (intended) workflow also made a lot of sense that way.

GNOME has really grown on me ever since. And while I’ve revisited KDE Plasma to see what I was supposedly missing out on, I simply stuck to GNOME as it felt cleaner and more elegant.

With all due respect, the biggest takeaway would be that you should never recommend a distro before you’re comfortable with it yourself.

Maybe PikaOS?

But, IIRC, they are not innovative like CachyOS is; CachyOS actually tries to push performance enhancements forward. PikaOS, on the other hand, only implements the improvements found by others (like CachyOS).

Thank you for the kind words 😊!

Though, in retrospect, I hope the recommendation for Linux Mint works out for their issues regarding ACPI power states. Perhaps a bigger departure from Ubuntu (if at all) would have been beneficial here.

My go to back in The Day was just Ubuntu because I was lazy.

So we have a bias towards Debian-based distros.

it’s not been playing nice with my Zen 4 desktop when it comes to ACPI power states (no sleep, doesn’t reliably turn the power off when i ask it to turn off, etc).

However, a newer kernel is definitely preferred.

is also something based on a normal distro that most people write guides for because I am a smoothbrain.

And finally, healthy access to documentation.

Based on the above, I would not pick:

• Debian Stable or any distro based on it. They ship with the 6.1 kernel, which launched only a couple months (January 2023) after the launch of Zen 4 (September 2022). I’m aware that access to newer kernels is possible. However, at that point, why even bother with Debian Stable to begin with?
• While both of Debian’s Testing and Sid/Unstable branches have access to newer kernels from the get-go, distros that ship the latest kernel by default (e.g. Arch, Fedora, openSUSE Tumbleweed and their derivatives) are simply better for offering an end-user product.
• Arch, Fedora, openSUSE Tumbleweed and their derivatives are primarily dismissed for not being based on Debian. Though, the fact that they’re more towards the rolling release side of things does play a minor role as well. By their very nature, they will change. Hence it’s less ideal for “set-and-forget” setups.
• Pop_OS!’ team seems to be primarily focused on delivering their upcoming COSMIC DE. For this reason, the distro has been in relative limbo. Therefore, I can’t recommend it.
• TUXEDO OS is dismissed for being relatively unpopular. Lots of other Debian(/Ubuntu) derivatives are dismissed for various reasons.

Let’s get to the actual recommendation, Linux Mint seems to be tailor-made for your use case:

• Based on Ubuntu, but without Snaps. While you can choose to use Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) instead, that one doesn’t come with the latest kernel. So the recommendation is for (standard/vanilla) Linux Mint.
• Their forums are full with up-to-date and (relatively) well-written guides; while the excellent ArchWiki is arguably better, Linux Mint isn’t a slouch either. Furthermore, as Linux Mint is very popular, you can simply expect to find solutions to most things that might come up.

Thanks OP; now I need this 😜.

For the last year or so, I’ve been using Vimium and mouseless. For the latter, I’d probably use warpd or wl-kbptr instead if I could get them to work on Fedora Silverblue.