Along similar lines, I’d say Snikket. I feel XMPP often has quite a bad reputation based on the user experience from 10 years ago, but it’s come such a long way and projects like Snikket make it very easy to get started.

I’ve had good fortune converting some family and friends to use XMPP.

People always mention fragmentation, and while there is some truth to it, it can be massively minimised by choosing blessed clients and servers for them to use.

In my case, I run my own server, and thoroughly test the clients (especially the onboarding flow) that I expect them to use, so that any question they have, I can help them out with quickly. Since we’re all on identically configured servers, it minimises one whole class of incompatibilities.

There is still unfortunately a bit of a usability gap compared to Signal - particularly on the iOS clients. But they have come a long way and are consistently improving.

Gotcha. Now I understand a bit more about the way input is locked down, it looks like I would need OpenSD to allow for more sophisticated controller input without using Steam.

Thanks for the reply, this is really helpful!

If you don’t, the Steam Deck will essentially behave as a Xbox 360 controller.

I see, this makes sense and I guess the “Xbox 360” experience will depend on whether the games themselves have native support for controllers or a very flexible input scheme.

the touchpads will not behave correctly

This is interesting, do you know what would be the difference between using the touchpads on other distros vs through SteamOS? Are they not just seen as a regular mouse input device by both OSs?

Thank you for writing up such a detailed response!

I run Debian on my laptop and tend to install FOSS games through the regular package manager. However, I don’t spend as much time playing these games as I would like, so when I was looking into the Steam Deck I was hoping that it would let me have a very similar setup, but as a portable device.

I see through your reply that, if I want automagic compatibility out of the box, this is crowdsourced and implemented through some intermediate Steam layer. I was hoping there might be some way to bypass Steam and treat the trackpads as regular mouse input, and map the other buttons as if they are keyboard buttons or generic controller inputs, without having to go through Steam.

I guess this would mean the FOSS games I’m interested in playing would need controller support natively implemented, which I’m not too sure on for the games I’m interested in. Probably time to dust off an Xbox 360 controller and see how they perform!