Stefano Prenna

I would say around 15 years ago, it was Windows XP

But it did MOST of the times…

Oh, I don’t know how it is nowadays, I have switched to Linux since many years ago…

Very often sfc /scannow will ask for an installation media, which, in a corporate environment, means sending the machine to onsite support for either “fixing” or “reimaging”. It’s basically the command you should try first if you don’t want to help someone fixing the issue. “See? There is something wrong with your installation, you should fix that before doing anything else…”

I used that trick a few times myself to get rid of poorly behaving people.

The Steam Deck is a PC…

So, I’ve been using my Steam Deck as my main driver for more than a year. While there are options to install software without having those removed when you update (steamos-btrfs, nix, distrobox), you can just boot another OS from an external drive.

I have WinesapOS on a SD card so I can use SteamOS without restrictions (and there are other options like Bazzite that others have mentioned).

So far, I have not found anything that was not possible on my machine, because, well, it’s a computer with an Arch distro on it!

Something that I read elsewhere, not in this thread, is about limits when it comes to work with external peripherals. Now, I can tell you that I use an external Bluray player, printer, scanner, drawing tablet, floppy drive reader (to make images of floppies), azeron pad, programming esp32, work with sound with a Creative GC7, and I’m not sure I’m missing anything. My SteamOS is great!