KDE, Cinnamon and MATE. Instruction to install on SteamOS

[Epsilons]

I want to try different Desktop environment on SteamOS. I like Gnome but i want to see what Linux has to offer to me.

Could someone on this forum make a Step-by-step to install KDE or Cinnamon or MATE please ?

Will be much much appreciated, since instruction on debian forums about how to do that does'nt seem to work well for me :/ But i was able to install XBMC no problem...

Thanks for helping.

[lev258]

I don't say it's impossible, but "i want to see what Linux has to offer to me". For that, you should try different distributions, not just graphical interfaces. The best part is, you can try these distributions without installing them.

[directhex]

SteamOS isn't really designed as a general purpose kitchen-sink distribution. If you want to experiment with Linux, you should really use a different distribution which makes it easier to try these things out. You can still run Steam and any SteamOS games!

[Tchakizera]

I would sugest installing other Linux distributions in a separated partition. So you can still have your current windows/SteamOS installed. For that you will need a small partition, something like 5Gb can be sufficient if you won't install lots of applications in it.
Other option, if you just want to try different Desktop Environments, is getting Live-CDs with the DEs you want, put it on a pen-drive and have a little fun.
Linux Mint[www.linuxmint.com] is a decent distribution and they have some differend DEs.

[DJ_Edyo]

guys, don't discourage him, all he asks is to know how to install another desktop interface working under debian8 on a pre-installed SteamOS system, i would like to know how too because honeslty all i dislike is speificly the GNOME desktop.

[DJ_Edyo]

for you budd, google is a freindly tool:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_UK5vNp7fQ

[DeltaHL]

Steam OS is actually just like Debian and since it's Debian-based, just google how to install Gnome, Plasma Desktop, Budgie, Cinnamon, KDE, MATE, LXDE, Deepin, XFCE, i3, OpenBox and other desktop environments on Debian.

[jonbitzen]

I created a post-installer to bolt the SteamOS session/compositor onto Ubuntu 18.04 / LinuxMint 19 (Cinnamon) 64 bit. You can find it here:

https://github.com/jonbitzen/ConvergenceOS

Once you're done, it boots right into the SteamOS session just like SteamOS. Advantages:

- SteamOS session uses the steam compositor, which is better for video games (?)
- The underlying Linux distros have full driver selection. I've already cherry-picked nVidia drivers to work around Proton issues
- In the desktop session, there is an icon to start the Steam desktop client as the "steam" user; so you can configure a lot of stuff about your SteamOS client that you couldn't do (or may have been tedious) before - such as which version of Proton to use, choose an alternate game storage folder, etc. All the settings made this way will be honored by the BPM/steamos-session.
- you can more easily make your Steam Machine do double-duty as a home server

In the long run, I want to add a greeter to allow other stores (Lutris?) to be launched as well as Steam. Note that at this time KDE and Mate aren't supported. Maybe I could in future if there's enough interest in this thing at all :)

Hope someone finds this useful!

jonbitzen