"You can get it in any color you want, as long as it's black."

My thoughts exactly.

I'll admit something slightly embarrassing.

This has kinda sorta been the case for quite a while now, people have been installing Steam Deck versions of SteamOS on various AMD machines with various levels of success. It was also acknowledged by Valve, with an "at your own risk" policy.

But idiot me thought "AMD platforms" means the CPU needs to be AMD. So just FYI to anyone in the same boat: no, Intel CPUs should work just fine. The only thing they meant is that the GPU has to be AMD. All the other components can kind of be whatever the heck you want. Including CPU, as long as it's x86-64.

But actually, I understand they now also support Intel GPUs. I think I've read that somewhere. So at this point it's pretty clear that you can use anything expect nvidia.

I have been dealing with NVIDIA driver issues on my Linux PC because my 1080 was good enough to play my favorite games. A very sincere fuck you to NVIDIA.

The single biggest advantage of Bazzite over SteamOS is that it has the option to install programs from the normal software repos. If something you need isn't available as a flatpak/appimage/etc, you can install it anyways to a package layer, and it will be available after a reboot. This is also really nice for programs that need better system integration, for example getting a flatpak password manager to integrate with a flatpak web browser often doesn't work.

I mean Bazzite probably still has better hardware compatibility, as they've been doing it forever. Also look into 'ujust' commands because they're super underrated, along with crazy easy software installations with Homebrew and whole-system single-click upgrades (and even automatic background upgrades) with Topgrade.

There are plenty of reasons not to like it as well but this is not a review.

I'm also torn. Currently running bazzite but I've got it set up the way I want it so I'm probably going to procrastinate on SteamOS for a bit.

I'm also interested in people's thoughts on this. Also compared to nobara? I'm on nobara now, and I'm happy with it but unfortunately it was enough work messing with gamescope and hdr settings that I couldn't recommend it to the non-tech savvy yet

Wellll... yes, but actually maybe. Nvidia support on Linux is there, but it's essentially black box drivers and therefore hard to address issues around them when they arise, and they do. It's a lot more finicky.

Edit: Plus, Nvidia drops Linux support for older video cards that still work (like the 10 series), so the distros effectively need to drop support as well.

That's pretty much everything since around 2010 from memory.