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Run Steam from console?
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this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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FWIW the SteamDeck running official SteamOS does have a full desktop environment, it's just hidden by starting Steam in Big Picture mode.
So... you could benchmark the "gain" but I doubt it's significant, if any.
Also if you do like to play with hardware for gaming across networks checking Selkies or Moonlight to stream from your machine to your machine, no intermediary, little latency or overhead.
I am not sure that is fully true. Or at least not fully explained. The Steamdeck has a full KDE environment installed and it uses this when in desktop mode. But steam is not running in big picture mode in front of this.
KDE is not running at all when in the game mode of the Steamdeck. In that mode it uses a compositor written by valve called gamescope. Switching between these is effectively logging out and back in again to switch the compositor.
Also it now has a way to run the desktop as a nested session in game mode but that is winning kwin inside gamescope.
I haven't tested this myself but I assume one could benchmark both and see if there is noticeable performance loss.
Thanks for the advice on gaming over networks! :)
Yeah, I also don't think there is any noticeable gain to be had here.