NixOS on the Steam Deck! (dual boot)

[@WhyDoesNothingWork]

Some things i didnt mention in the video: 1. A lot of steps take a while be mindfull of the battery if you arent using a dock make sure to charge up fully before install 2. If you arent using a dock make sure to use ssh and have your deck connected to power during the rebuild with the jovian modules that takes an hour and will make your cpu work the entire time. And thanks for watching!

[@Niklas2516]

I would love to see a tutorial about the different maintenance things one should do. Garbage collection and those kind of things.

[@WhyDoesNothingWork]

Thats a good suggestion, I'll probaly do that soon, but by soon i mean eventually now that the school year is coming to an end I will be a lot busier with family stuff so videos will be a lot more intermittant

[@Niklas2516]

@@WhyDoesNothingWork No problem! Thanks for the great tutorials.

[@WhyDoesNothingWork]

With any luck I will have this video done in the next couple of days, got most of it done just gotta put it together

[@asdfghyter]

nice! i’m very tempted to do this. i’ll just have to buy an sd-card first. what’s the experience like post-install? have you encountered any issues?

[@WhyDoesNothingWork]

I have been using it i think about a month now and have noticed 2 things. 1. The wifi is better (i had a lot of issues with wifi performance and being slow to connect before) this is all gone. 2. The battery icon sometimes doesnt update when i plug or unplug power, and when that happens the estimate is also innacurate, putting it to sleep and waking it again seems to do the trick.

[@asdfghyter]

@@WhyDoesNothingWork oh, that's nice! the battery icon issue is somewhat surprising, but doesn't seem like a dealbreaker.

[@WhyDoesNothingWork]

Yeah it's so minor I haven't been bothered to look into it, it's not all the time either

[@Styloboyness]

Thanks for the tutorial! Weirdly my steam deck doesnt recognize the built in wifi, neither during the install nor in the installed os. Did you do anything to get wifi working? Or perhaps you have the lcd model?

[@WhyDoesNothingWork]

I have the LCD model, I didn't have to do anything

[@Styloboyness]

@@WhyDoesNothingWork Oh I see, that might be the reason. According to the arch wiki, archlinux works. So I guess it's arch linux for now :')

[@Styloboyness]

After some research, it turns out the drivers for WiFi and Bluetooth are already upstream in the Linux kernel. Setting boot.kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxPackages_latest in the config and rebuilding updates the kernel, which enabled WiFi and Bluetooth.

[@mateowoetam]

This is dope, I wonder how it interacts with Chaotic Nyx's pkgs like the CachyOS kernel and some of those other modified packages.

[@WhyDoesNothingWork]

I haven't tried, I'm not sure if it would be worth it for the kernel this already uses a pretty well optimized kernel for the tasks but it would be fun to try

[@gabe_dunn]

As an avid linux/nixos user, is there any reason to dual boot over just using nixos? I'm currently using bazzite without a dual boot, but the nix support there is rather sub-optimal.

[@WhyDoesNothingWork]

Not really, i just showed it this way so people could try it who may not want to commit to it fully

[@kyledupont7711]

What exactly is Nix os? I think it has something to do with proton but what distro is it and what benefits does it have compared to the base distro

[@WhyDoesNothingWork]

NixOS is a linux distrobution of its own. if you are just intending to use the steamdeck in steam ui to play games, stick with SteamOS this is for people who just want to tinker or even use it in desktop mode regularly as a normal PC The best summary i have found is this video kzbin.info/www/bejne/eajJfJ-OaNd0bKc by @NoBoilerplate but here's an over simplified summary The main advantages NixOS has over other distrobutions is 1. the largest package repository of software of any linux distro 2. Reproducability, you can simply transfer your configuration.nix to another machine and rebuild it and have the same setup. 3. stabiity,every time you modify your configuration and rebuild the system it creates a 'generation' which is a sort of restor point.

[@kyledupont7711]

@@WhyDoesNothingWork Interesting. I actually installed Steam OS on my laptop recently, It worked quite well but, I wanted more control of the OS so I switched to Fedora. These Os are pretty cool as it seems like Steam Os is built in a manner that your average person can use it without it being so Linux Tricky.. I'm hoping in the Future Linux or Steam Os become more like android. What is good about android is, nearly every thing you ever need is available on the Google Play store, and can be installed and uninstalled effortlessely, where with Linux, none of the repository are complete, the Discovery store doesn't even have an official version of Steam. Its crazy that android is based on Linux, yet it is easier to use in almost very way, I would even say android is easier to use than Windows, that is what we need for the masses to get away from Windows

[@bearfm]

it... has nothing to do with proton. its a reproducible (mostly), declarative, atomic distro.

[@alexandrustefanmiron7723]

What's the point of NixOS? Edit: so all that work and used space for what exactly?

[@WhyDoesNothingWork]

The benefit to NixOS in this case primarily comes if you use your steamdeck in desktop mode, it has the largest package repository of any linux distro and provides a rollback function that makes it really easy to restore the OS to a previous state if you do something that breaks it. If you're someone who just wants to use the steamdeck as a steamdeck and has no interest in NixOS then there is no real benefit I wanted to show people how to install it along side steamos so people intersted in nixos or who just like to tinker can try it out with fully committing.

[@smiletolerantly]

This is an older comment, but to add on: I have quite a bit of custom config for my main game (addon manager, the addons themselves, reshade,....) which is all a bit more involved to set up. I have already set it up on my desktop, which also uses NixOS. Instead of having to go through all the setup again, I can just include my config (which is the "recipe" for how to install and configure all of that) in my Nix config for the steam deck. One "nixos-rebuild" command later, and all of that is set up and working on the Deck. Note that this is much faster, far less work, and importantly also FAR less error prone than either configuring by hand or even copying over all of the individual config files.

[@cristianinujazznight3044]

Ufff, ufff, thank you.

[@WhyDoesNothingWork]

You're welcome, hope you found it helpful and or interesting