Most things should work with mainline kernel. According to archwiki the OLED models still need steams kernel patches to get wifi and bt working but older models work fine.
Steam Deck
A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
Mainline is also missing some OLED patches around changing the panel refresh rate and audio cutting out when switching from desktop back to game mode, last I recall. Those are the issues holding me back from installing Bazzite on my OLED.
OLED was tempting me but the idea of not having bazzite makes it easier to hold back.
It's still usable, for sure. The Bazzite team back ported the WiFi and BT patches, so those function. But if you rely on reducing refresh rate to save battery like I do, that can be a big one.
The audio issue isn't too big of a deal, you just have to do a full reboot to go back into game mode. Just takes a few extra seconds.
But if you already have an LCD, I see the wisdom in waiting for the team to iron out OLED support.
I have Bazzite on my OLED, and the audio issue is maddening. That alone is making me consider switching back to Steam OS simply for the QoL experience.
That's fair if you go into desktop mode a lot.
Note that I haven't done it, yet, because I still really like Bazzite 😅. I think I'm just holding out hope that it will get corrected sooner than later.
Awesome! Gimme some energy and I will try to run OpenSUSE on there.
I really hope those patches make their way into the other distros. I've got a few Linux machines and the Steam Deck is the only one that wakes from sleep without locking up. It's also the only one that allocates VRAM for the iGPU automatically when a game needs more.
For the life of me, I can't figure out the search terms I need to find what I'm looking for. On top of that, I'm beginning to think I heard it on a podcast. But I seem to remember an interview with someone at Valve talking about how they were upstreaming EVERYTHING they were doing. I would assume that meant kernel work as well.
I feel like I remember a Bazzite dev saying that at least some kernel improvements are upstreamed.