Nefyedardu

Ok, not a typo. Other than the title of these patch notes, is it referred to as "Steam Deck OS" anywhere else? On Preview branch the distro still says "SteamOS Holo".

The fact is that they are rebranding it to Steam Deck OS.

As far as I know they've said nothing about that. It's reasonable to say that the title is a typo for a couple reasons.

1. They've stated they want SteamOS on third-party devices before
2. There's also the rumored VR headset running SteamOS as well

Two use cases for the OS that have nothing to do with Steam Deck, so "Steam Deck OS" makes no sense as a name. I personally think they are waiting for Plasma 6+HDR support+VR support before they ship a desktop version, it's important to have feature-parity with Windows out the gate for good word-of-mouth.

"SteamOS" is mentioned twice in the actual patch notes

*and make it optional. Like REmake

I used to just seed Epic exclusives. Now there aren't any Epic exclusives*. Coincidence? I think not.

*Other than Kingdom Hearts grrr

You are talking about hardware deficiencies more than anything, you can get those on PC too if you just run low-powered hardware. I'm more talking about bugs. Maybe it's changed since I used Windows years ago, but I remember having issues from time to time with PC games. Crashing, weird behavior from alt-tabbing, some games just running at low GPU usage for no reason even though framerate is uncapped, and various glitches. There's a reason there has been a growing interest in sandboxing for software with docker, etc. Software is deterministic, if you give it a consistent environment it will do the same exact thing every time.

It's the principle of "do one thing and do it well". There's nothing wrong with running games in a desktop but there are limitless ways of customizing a PC and it's impossible for developers to account for everything. It would be nice if you could just write some code and have it work flawlessly for everyone's setup but that's not how it goes. For the use case of the Steam Deck where you are dealing with a low-TDP gaming device it makes more sense to have something like gamescope which can just cut out all non-gaming processes entirely. Maximize performance and battery life with a nice interface to boot, and the desktop is still there if you need it. At the very least it makes troubleshooting super easy when stuff does go wrong because there's very few external things to factor in.

Why don't tech reviewers every talk about gamescope? Gaming on PCs has always been finicky because PCs have to serve so many use cases at once and games often have to compete for resources. Gamescope completely circumvents all of this overhead by being solely meant for the purpose of gaming. It's the closest you can get to a "PC Console". Third parties can never make something like gamescope for Windows, Microsoft themselves would have to ship it and maintain it.

going into a menu on windows to change some settings once is a bridge too fucking far

"Once". Yeah right.

AMD has clearly had a hand in making sure this performs better on their GPUs

NVIDIA's entire business model is brand-exclusive proprietary software. Last I checked you can use FSR on NVIDIA but you can't use DLSS on AMD.

If you minimize a window, it goes into a list of "Background Apps" in the charms menu where the only option you have is to close it. There's no native systems tray.

I just don't get the vendetta GNOME has against background processes. GNOME devs just don't use email clients, cloud sync applications, chat clients...? GNOME treats my Nextcloud sync app (which I NEED to be running at all times) as if it was malware or something.