GoKawiilIt turns out that a _very_ long HDMI cable, a Steam Controller 2 and Bazzite on a second drive was all I needed to get a comfortable couch gaming experience.
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You can now pre-order Valve's Steam Machine! Fortuitous timing as I drafted this as a follow up to my post from December where I wrote about using Linux for PC gaming. At that time Steam ran well on my desktop and I chipped away at lighter games on the Deck.
I ended that post by saying:
I don't think I'll buy a Steam Machine, but I'm very happy it will exist. I've been testing out dual booting Bazzite on my desktop and I'd love to replace that with SteamOS proper. If I can pick up a controller and play a game on Steam with my TV as easily as the PS5, then I won't need to boot that up as much.
I underestimated that last sentence.
The Desktop to TV experiment
Initially I ran a 20ft HDMI cable across the floor to my TV so I could play games from my NixOS install. The setup was fiddly though. Each time I wanted to play a game I had to hook the cable up, change sound outputs/display, etc.
I installed my Steam games on their own NVME drive separate from my NixOS install. So I added a third NVME drive and put Bazzite on that.
In Big Picture mode Bazzite figures out the correct display to use and remembers to use the HDMI out for sound. That meant I could reboot and play games without any setup. Yet I stopped using that setup and went back to docking my Steam Deck. As silly as it sounds, two additional changes have made the new setup stick for me:
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