Oh ho ho, no.

The Steam Deck doesn’t use Windows, it is much more functional and stable, hahahah.

I am laughing about this because I was working at MSFT when Win8 was being developed/released and their whole tablet push was going on.

Dear god no, the steam deck is way, way less clumsy and broken to use than a Windows Surface was, oh god.

Ironically, I’ve vaguely followed the same path as GabeN: Used to work for MSFT, now I “secretly,” utterly despise them.

… Yes, I agree, the Win8 UI paradigm and the Surface were indeed massive mistakes.

I vocalized this, at the time, when I was a MSFT contractor, and that is a big reason why I don’t work at MSFT any more, rofl.

The Steam Deck is far, far easier to use than a Surface or Surface Pro.

Well, that’s your preference then.

And the Deck is a handheld PC, not a console.

… Because consoles cannot do all those… PC things.

Part of the whole … appeal/concept, of a handheld PC… is that it is a multi tool, a jack of all trades device.

Its a handheld PC, with a gaming mode, not a console, because it has a PC architecture and has all these other capabilities that consoles don’t.

If that doesn’t fit your use case or budget, then sure, the Switch 2 might have a bit of an edge in terms of game rendering power, has access to exclusive, modern Nintendo games… but price points for everything are… more or less in chaos right now, so I hope you can find something that works well for you!

Also, lots of people dock work laptops to work on bigger screens and have a full mouse and keyboards… thats really common with office and remote work, not sure how doing the same with a Deck is… any more complicated than that but uh yeah… you don’t need all that to use DE mode on a deck. You just hit ‘go to desktop’ and it also all works with the touchpads and such.

Becauase some people like the idea of a single device that is a pretty good lower resolution gaming handheld, and can also basically be used as a low/mid range laptop/tablet as well.

The DE mode uses a very nice onscreen keyboard which works either with your two thumbs on the Steam Decks touchpads, or, the whole screen is also touch sensitive, and you can do it that way.

Or you can just dock it and use an actual Mouse + Keyboard, and/or a distinct monitor, which can handle DE mode at a higher resolution than the Deck’s built in screen.

Also, if you’re into modding games or using emulators, you need to go into the desktop mode to tinker with things.

(I was actually quite surprised to find that a 3DS emulator just… worked, perfectly, with the Deck’s touchscreen, without me even having to manually configure anything… so i could actually use the main controls for the main screen, and just poke the other screen that is usually some kind of inventory screen, or something like that.)

Or if you want to say… check your email.

Browse the web on a fully functional desktop browser (of your choice), watch youtube, go on lemmy or reddit, buy some stuff off Amazon or w/e.

Draw something or do some photo editing in Krita or GIMP.

Do office work style stuff with LibreOffice.

Use Discord, or record your own gameplay with OBS or something, and then edit and upload a (admittedly low resolution, most likely) video to youtube.

I’ve actually compiled from source and run Godot on a Steam Deck.

You can literally develop a game on a Steam Deck, and then test it in game mode, on a Steam Deck.

King of the Hill aired from '97 to '09.

… There are too many episodes for me to be able to pick out exactly which one this is from, what year it aired in…

But uh, fairly commonplace, reasonably affordable smartwatches, with the kind of functionality described… didn’t really become a thing until roughly the mid '10s.

Yes, there were earlier ‘smartwatches’, or things that could be argued to fall into that definition… but they were extremely niche, quite pricey.

Apple’s first smartwatch didn’t come out till 2015.

Smartphones, with touchscreens, did not really even exist at a reasonable price point, with significant numbers of people using them untill the latter third or quarter of KotH’s seasons.

Like I still remember having some clamshell, phyiscal keyboard ‘smartphone’ in 08 - 09.

I can… and I have… and this has resulted in destabilzation.

… This is why I am asking for help, if anyone has figured this out… and why I am not asking for permission to continue to flail about ineffectively.

As far as I can tell, as ludicrous as it seems… setting up a distrobox with an actual mainline fedora build, then configuring it as a dev enviroment, then building an rpm package for i2p, from source inside this container… and then installing that static rpm into actual Bazzite OS…

That would probably at least be more stable for Bazzite as a whole, just feeding it a single, extra, static package, as compared to source dependency hell…

But I have no idea if I2P would… actually compile correctly… and… work.

Although, I have managed to build Godot, a few versions ago, doing this, just as an experiment… and it … seemed to… mostly work?

???

There were lots of fun unique error messages in the console that just did not exist anywhere else online.

Bazzite docs repeatedly say ‘do not do that, it will lead to system instability as we update and improve the feature set of our custom rpm-ostree that is the backbone and fundamental core of what Bazzite is.’

It is supposed to be a static, locked down, readonly core OS, just like SteamOS.

Its just based on fedora instead of arch, and has a bunch of other customizations and tweaks and preconfigured apps and helper tools.

Oh how I wish there was some distro that was just debian based, but preconfigured to work on a handheld PC, not sanboxed and containerized to all hell.

The entire design paradigm of Bazzite is ‘sandbox the custom core fedora architecture, give the users a milliom kinds of containers for everything else, so they won’t break the custom core architecture’.

Bazzite does not come with java.

As… far as I am aware… you cannot install Java via flatpak or appimage or any other methods Bazzite says are safe to install things by/with.

To install java, in Fedora, you are told to use dnf, but Bazzite has disabled dnf because they use rpm-ostree to maintain a controlled and static core os.

To install java using rpm-ostree would likely lead to dependency conflict hell, and destabilize Bazzite… because the entire point of Bazzite is to enforce specific rpm-ostree build recipes, to provide maximum stability for officially supported stuff.

You could potentially set up distrobox container, set up java there, install i2p in the container… but that container is isolated from messing with systemctl, which i2p must do (as far as I can tell?) to actually function properly… so this also seems like it would not work.

There is an unofficial build in COPR, maintained by… some random person? …but nothing mainline.

And its instructions tell you to install with dnf, which i think at this point is literally disabled by Bazzite… because they rely on rpm-ostree, and if you muck about with rpm-ostree, you can run into dependency conflict hell.

But at the same time, i2p needs to be able to directly mess with systemctl… which… as far as I can tell… can’t be done by having i2p installed in some kind of container… because the entire point of a container… is to isolate the core system.

please excuse me while my head implodes inside of my head imploding inside of my head imploding

Yes, I have read the wiki.

As I said, flatpak no worky because you don’t have a system level install option.

Flatseal might help, but I do not know what I’d have to custom configure.

Ujust has no helper commands for i2p.

Homebrew might help for setting up the daemon, but i wouldn’t know how to connect it properly to a firefox or librewolf container tab, within bazzite.

… Quadlet.

Ok. This didn’t exist the last time I looked at the wiki a couple months ago, goddamnit.

I2P does have a docker set up guide… this might actually work, if it can direcrtly fuck with bazzite’s systemctl.

That being said: I have never use cli docker before so… wheee!

Uh other than that:

Distrobox is basically a very fancy docker container… maybe if I set up a whole distro, with I2P, and its own version of ffox, lwolf… that would work?

…afaik there is no official i2p appimage, and even if there was, its containerized, same problem as a flatpak.

… and finally, rpm ostree, the big no no… yeah, there is no official .rpm for i2p.

… I… guess… i could set up vanilla fedora… in distrobox… and try to compile it from source… and then… either install that rpm in the fedora-distrobox… or… bazzite itself?

… its mid night, im going to bed rofl.

Ah well I gueas thats fair if you… have indeed already fucked your ostree uh, raw, i think that was the word you used.

It is kind of annoying to not have that direct control, i get that, and i too am super used to debian based distros and apt after about a decade of being in debian or derivatives.

Yes, this did happen, but also, they fixed it, and owned up to and totally explained their mistake.

https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/important-announcement-regarding-system-updates-action-needed/2689

they should alias

ujust repent-and-seek-absolution

to some script of thoroughly robust set of rpm ostree conflict identifiers and reset/rollback commands, lol

EDIT: why distrohop, you have distrobox, Do ThIng There, LOL

Well uh, godspeed i guess, rofl.

It is good at least that rpm ostree has ways to view and manage such conflicts, and rollback to the bazzite image preset (keeps flatpaks and such intact, i think).

So I realize this is a meme community but why not, its on topic:

… How is one supposed to install say, I2P, I2PD … on Bazzite?

I have tried the flatpak but it doesn’t work properly because it only installs at the user level via the app store/flatpak… not the system level.

I have tried to figure out how to set it up in a distro box and am apparently too stupid to figure this out.

I am also apparently too stupid to figure out which of the like 8 different kinds of ports I2P uses for one thing or another… I actually need to forward in my router.

help plz

They do specifically, multiple times, in multiple places in the wiki… tell you that you really, really shouldn’t use rpm-ostree unless you absolutely know exactly what you are doing… because you can run into dependency conflict hell, and then the tree build will fuck up.

Bazzite updates to a newer version of a shared dependency, but something you manually added… has not?

Or visa versa, your custom thing requires a newer version, or some dependency that is for whatever reason just a conflicting fork of an existing dependency?

Something is gonna break, potentially lots of somethings.

My FNV is through Steam… but… i think Limo does support GOG… I… would think you would, yes, have to set up your own filepaths, point it properly to where the game dir is, and it… should work?

You can launch a game from Limo, like, I do test runs of that in desktop mode on my Deck…

But the way the deployer system works is that you click deploy… and the even if you launch the game from some other way, like via Steam, in game mode on the deck, or… presumably via Heroic… it just now is the modded game. To revert, undeploy in Limo, and then either play vanilla, or swap to another modset profile and deploy that.

For NVSE, I just literally did the old school method of go into the real game dir, rename the main exe to .exe.old, and then rename the NVSE exe to the proper FONV game exe’s name.

That and manually install the dlls and other files that come with NVSE into the real dir.

This isn’t much of a problem with older games, but with newer games, that method would potentially be undone by ongoing update patches.

This is the kind of ‘some mods you just have to manually install’ thing… but in fairness… most of the time those mods are the same way on Windoes as well, unless some kind of mod manager goes far out of their way to specifically support that exact mod.

To add in about game modding on Linux:

https://github.com/limo-app/limo

https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.limo_app.limo

Limo is a universal mod manager that is linux native.

And I do mean universal. It’ll work with literally any game, you just have to take a bit of extra time to configure things for games that do not yet have a supported preset configuration out of the box… but at this point, that includes most games that are generally reliant on some kind of mod manager type program on Windows, to keep track of 10s or 100s of simultaneous mods.

It works very much along the same lines as something like Mod Organizer 2, though there are some differences, read the wiki.

It sets up a virtual file system that allows mods to be set up outside of the main game directory itself, and will override them such that the mods actually load, but they can be ‘undeployed’ to revert back to vanilla, you can set up different profiles of different mod configurations and deploy/undeploy what you like.

It can also manage load orders, supports formats such as fomod and similar for games like Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim, you can set up tags and category groupings, and it also shows you conflicts between mods down to the specific files, showing you a chain of overwrites to the final file from the final loaded mod.

It doesn’t support things like LOOT, which purport to autogenerate correct load orders… but frankly, thats fine, because shit like that doesn’t even work properly in situations you’d use it in on Windows 90% of the time.

EDIT: Wow, apparently it does support LOOT now, it did not a few updates ago.

…

I have successfully gotten FONV working using Limo to set up uh… there’s a variant of the Viva New Vegas mod setup guide aimed at Steam Deck users, but it tells you to set up Mod Organizer 2 on the Deck… which you can do, but its rather input laggy and there are other inconveniences…

Here it is, Mirelurked Viva New Vegas:

https://ashtonqlb.github.io/mirelurked-vnv/intro.html

I had to alter a few steps from this to get it working with Limo, but they were basically just… set up Limo instead of MO2, and you have to handle NVSE a bit differently, because it literally replaces/overrides the entire main game exe.

…

I have also used Limo to mod Cyberpunk 2077, works with more in depth frameworks like CET, RedExt, etc, as well as using the Decky Framegen plugin to insert FSR 3.1 Upscaling and Framegen into CP77, which gives better quality and fps than the official FSR 2 and 3 implementations that come with the vanilla game and are vanilla supported on a Deck.

You basically just have to launch the vanilla game via the normal launcher first, check the ‘enable mods’ switch, fully load the game…

Then you can set up the Framegen mod, which adds a custom command in steam to the launch parameters… and then you can also setup the ‘skip intro’ mod, which is reliant on both the mod being present, as well as additional command line parameters…

There are a bunch of reddit posts complaining that the FrameGen mod doesn’t allow other additional launch arguments, but they are wrong.

All you have to do is append those additional launch args … at the end of the FrameGen mod’s launch arg. This just doesn’t seem to be explicitly documented anywhere, by anyone… I may have been the first person to figure this out?

Anyway, after that bit of silliness, setting up other mods for CP 77 using Limo is fairly straightforward.

…

… I am doing all this on Bazzite on a Deck, but you could do it on… presumably any linux distro that supports flatpaks and proton (the translation layer that allows Windows games to run on Linux).

There will always be a few ‘weird’ mods that are just totally reliant on a whole bunch of Windows specific things to work, or just cannot be made to work without actually overwriting some core game files in the main, real directory itself…

And, some of these mods will require a windows component dependency, like vc_2017 or vc_2022, you set those up with something like ProtonTricks or SteamTinkerLaunch to modify the proton config per game, instead of trying to install the exe system wide as 99% of the windows oriented mods will tell you to do…

But so far, I have found either my own solutions for these cases, or someone else already has, or someone has just made basically a linux compatible equivalent for such a windows reliant mod.

… You can also just choose to run MO2 on Linux, it will work, its just… buggy, and overlycomplicated, imo, you’ve got to set up a custom wineprefix for the MO2 UI to not do dumbshit, give it thr dependencies it needs, and then you’ve got to do this for each different game you want to mod with MO2.

I found that Limo is sufficiently capable and much less hassle to use once you take the time to understand its differences from MO2.

EDIT:

Also, for anti virus, ClamAV exists. I… think it is literally the only AV for linux?

They’re climbing up from B6 to B2 or B1 lol.