I haven’t used SteamOS so I’m speculating. But, it’s probably possible to boot to a desktop instead of to Steam. It’s probably easy to install Firefox (or Chrome) and Thunderbird. I would expect that Valve has made the desktop experience easy to use.
So, why install SteamOS for a family member? Because you have a desktop OS that’s easy to use that a big, rich commercial company is spending a lot of R&D effort to make as good, easy and smooth an experience as possible. Even if the primary use case is playing Steam-based games, if you have a family member who just wants an easy-to-use OS that just runs their web browser, an email client, and a few other odds and ends, that might be the easiest way to do it.
It’s immutable (you can’t break the core OS, there is no deleting system32). You can’t install packages (like you would from AUR), but have access to flatpaks.
Firefox is preinstalled, but anything from flathub is also available.
So yes, it has all the things most people need from a desktop OS, and is harder to break, and is supported commercially.
It has a desktop mode, I’ve never looked into whether you can boot to desktop by default. But I would imagine if they released a desktop friendly version, that would be an option.
Yeah, so it sounds like a good choice for a relative who isn’t a gamer but wants a hard-to-break simple OS that runs basic things like a web browser, email client, etc.
It’s probably too soon now, I just checked and it doesn’t quite sound like it’s very stable yet (as in, they’re still tweaking it). But, maybe by the time Windows 10 is no longer supported it would be a good option.
I haven’t used SteamOS so I’m speculating. But, it’s probably possible to boot to a desktop instead of to Steam. It’s probably easy to install Firefox (or Chrome) and Thunderbird. I would expect that Valve has made the desktop experience easy to use.
So, why install SteamOS for a family member? Because you have a desktop OS that’s easy to use that a big, rich commercial company is spending a lot of R&D effort to make as good, easy and smooth an experience as possible. Even if the primary use case is playing Steam-based games, if you have a family member who just wants an easy-to-use OS that just runs their web browser, an email client, and a few other odds and ends, that might be the easiest way to do it.
It’s immutable (you can’t break the core OS, there is no deleting system32). You can’t install packages (like you would from AUR), but have access to flatpaks.
Firefox is preinstalled, but anything from flathub is also available.
So yes, it has all the things most people need from a desktop OS, and is harder to break, and is supported commercially.
It has a desktop mode, I’ve never looked into whether you can boot to desktop by default. But I would imagine if they released a desktop friendly version, that would be an option.
Yeah, so it sounds like a good choice for a relative who isn’t a gamer but wants a hard-to-break simple OS that runs basic things like a web browser, email client, etc.
It’s probably too soon now, I just checked and it doesn’t quite sound like it’s very stable yet (as in, they’re still tweaking it). But, maybe by the time Windows 10 is no longer supported it would be a good option.