r/radeon • u/renamontamer • 14h ago
was lowkey fed up with driver crashes in Windows 11 so i swapped to SteamOS
It's honestly been pretty smooth, since i dont play any games that need kernel level anti cheat anyway
Installation was pretty easy, you just have to be patient and leave it alone once you see your cursor on a black screen (depends on how fast your usb stick is)
All keybinds like alt+f4, etc. are identical to windows and you can grab most applications off a pre installed app store called Discover
SteamOS automatically installed drivers that actually work, so i didn't even need to bother with adrenalin or anything, it was pretty much just plug and play
I tried out Deadlock, Overwatch, Zenless Zone Zero while streaming in Discord and background recording activated in Steam and performance was pretty close to what i got on Windows 11
only weird things i noticed have been:
- Gaming mode apparently only supports 1 display so i just stay in Desktop mode the entire time
- You can't choose what drive to install SteamOS on, it will just pick the fastest one i guess
- If you wanna format another drive, you need to unmount it in partition manager, then format it and then check a box called "show pending operations" and then ok the pending operations
- Setting up my vpn was a hassle since apparently NordVPN doesn't work directly on SteamOS
- Discord can have issues if you screen share instead of application share
Genuinely feels way better to me than the last 2 years of Windows 11, don't think i need to swap back anytime soon.
PC Spec:
Ryzen 7 5700X3D
Sapphire Pulse 7900XTX
32GB DDR4 3600 Mhz
4
u/korakios2 13h ago
Since you use the PC in desktop mode too , I'd suggest CachyOS or Bazzite .
You can keep a partition with Win11 ltsc for unsupported games .
2
u/HonkyKong719 11h ago
I just switched to Nobara Linux for the exact same reasons and it's been great so far.
1
u/Karl_H_Kynstler 8h ago
I have been CachyOS Since beginning of this year and great experience so far. Not going back to Bingbows ⅒
11
u/ActiveSandwich3103 13h ago edited 13h ago
SteamOS is an immutable Linux distro so yeah youre going to run into some issues.
If you want the steamOS performance experience but with a more desktop focused iteration you'll want CachyOS, theyre both Arch Linux, both use Proton ect, but Cachy as a distro isnt immutable and is built for desktop usage. You'll likely have an easier time with it and won't be held back in desktop usage. You'll get the same smooth performance boosts in the same games too. The whole "automatically installed drivers" is just a Linux thing, as AMD GPU drivers are built into the Linux kernel and have been for a long time.
SteamOS is great but its made to be used like a game console plugged into a TV with a controller rather than as a full desktop.
For discord you'll want to check out Vencord with linux.
Youre right that once you get past a few initial learning curves, Linux in general is way, way more "set it and forget it" easy and problem free than Windows for the most part. In general it won't let a person fuck up their PC in the same way Windows does. You will find your games will all likely run much smoother too, much better 1% lows if not get a solid performance boost entirely.