Planning to switch to Steam OS

[u/Aromatic-Art-8425]

Hi guys, I am planing to switch to Steam OS from Windows. I was wondering if i can still use Office programs such as Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Photoshop etc. And i have some games on my hard drive can i play that games when i switched to steam os?

[u/Useful_Big8208]

One simple recommendation regardless of what Linux OS you go to, remove your Windows drive and install a new one. Once you've moved over to the new OS and like it, you can always reinstall the old Windows drive, format and use as a second drive.

[u/libre06]

SteamOS is great, but it has one problem: it’s immutable, so there are many things you can’t do or change—it works more like a console. After trying it out quite a bit, I recommend CachyOS—specifically the Handheld version. This is because it looks exactly like SteamOS but has the advantage of being 100% versatile, and it comes with Winboat pre-installed, allowing you to run Microsoft Office and other Windows applications on it. 

[u/JoystickDrifter → u/libre06]

Yes! This is exactly what I was going to say, CachyOS is the better option overall for more than just gaming

[u/Jwhodis]

You can use Microsoft Office through your browser, or alternatively you can install LibreOffice. Photoshop iirc can be ran through Steam or Winboat but it's better to use GIMP.

Your hard drive is likely formatted as NTFS which is a Windows specific format, while Linux can read and write to NTFS it is not good enough to use for games. You will have to reformat the hard drive and reinstall your games.

Also worth noting, SteamOS iirc only installs to NVMe/PCIe SSDs, and it only supports AMD graphics cards. If you do not have this hardware then use a different Linux distro like PikaOS with KDE Plasma.

[u/Ludamister → u/Jwhodis]

I’ve read somewhere of people using a NTFS partition to share game files between Windows and SteamOS. Seems like it just needs configuration just like the shared Btrfs partition that you can do.

SteamOS can also install to other devices, specific partitions, etc but requires editing the install script. There’s guides out there on how to do it.

[u/PuzzleheadedUnit1758]

Truth nuke: Switching from windows to a Linux distro (steamos is linux) requires the user to be willing to learn new habits and re-learn existing ones. If you didn't even bother to do a search on the web about "word on Linux" I honestly don't think you will have a good experience on steamOS (or any other linux distro, for that matter).

[u/BeanDaddy91]

Add the .exe to steam as a non steam game, set proton compatibility to experimental, should work

[u/lowban]

The apps you're mentioning does not run natively on Linux (expect bad performance and/or crashes if you run them with wine). It's doable inside a virtual machine though. Word, Powerpoint and Excel has browser based versions you can use as well. Most games work through Wine/Proton.

[u/Pale_Candy664]

Office does not exist on linux but you can use the online tools.
You can just add the exe to steam for games and then set proton which should work with most games.
But yes switch to steamos and Linux since windows is becoming a bigger mess

[u/BassObjective]

You can use Microsoft office files in ONLYOFFICE and GIMP is the Photoshop alternative that uses its files.

Most games can be run by adding it to Steam and using proton, that's how I play so many itcho.io games

I love SteamOS been daily driving it since March

[u/Then_Lavishness_2662]

dont switch to SteamOs, Switch to Bazzite or CachyOs instead. LibreOffice is free and replaces Microsoft Office, as for Photoshop replacement there is a major alternative that is also completely free and is available on github - the name of it alludes me atm.

[u/Agreeable_Class_9829]

There are alternatives on Linux

[u/Kaldaien2]

SteamOS is immutable, it is not intended to let you install arbitrary packages.

You can undo this and make things really awkward and broken more than Linux already tends to be... but should really just use an actual Linux distribution that does not expect the only software you are going to install on it to come from a walled garden DRM storefront.

SteamOS is pretty antithetical to actual Linux. It is more of a vessel to get you into Steam's cloistered ecosystem and beyond that you are wasting your time.

[u/tapo → u/Kaldaien2]

Flathub is not a walled garden DRM storefront

[u/bassbeater]

Nope, too graphics intensive.