I'm not familiar with SteamOS and Valve hardware in general. Could I play something like Overwatch on this, and connect keyboard and mouse? Could I play other PC games like World of Warcraft?
I'm not familiar with SteamOS and Valve hardware in general. Could I play something like Overwatch on this, and connect keyboard and mouse? Could I play other PC games like World of Warcraft?
Yes you can connect keyboard and mouse; Overwatch (https://www.protondb.com/app/2357570) and WoW (https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...) should both work well, as do the vast majority of single-player games. Some multiplayer games with particularly invasive anti-cheat may not, so if you have anything else in mind best to check before buying.
It's just a Linux box, you can do anything that you can on any other Linux machine (including install Windows).
Linux more or less runs most Windows games. The ones that don't run are ones where the developer is going out of their way to make them not run - mostly with kernel-mode anti-cheats that just find themselves staring at the wrong kernel.
Steam makes that pretty seamless and Steam games "just work". For non-Steam games you need to do some tinkering, it's stuff that most people browsing this forum can do.
Note that the "just" is overlooking that it's more locked down than a typical Linux box, in that the OS filesystem is read-only and all app installs live in userland (though you can turn off the read-only behavior). For what it's worth I'm very much a fan of it as a default for a mass-market machine, but you'll run into weird gotchas if you want to do "programmer stuff" with it.
That's how a lot of modern Linux distros are because immensely better. Updates on an immutable OS are massively more reliable, it doesn't prompt you to merge diffs in config files, it never breaks, you never have to reinstall.
I've run Bazzite on my desktop for the last year and every update has just been hitting the "Apply" button in the settings page with my xbox controller. While on mutable distros it's always involved going in to the terminal and running a series of commands or opening the repo list and manually replacing the release name for Debian. I know there is a GUI software store to do it but it literally never works because some error will show up that isn't handled and you just get a generic error message.
"Locked down" is an incorrect way to look at it.
It follows a different philosophy. I've been using atomic systems for the past year or so as my main driver.
If you want to install something that needs superuser access, you do it inside a container. This protects your OS from breaking.
The number of times I've accidentally installed something which broke my window manager or compositor is now zero
Dual-booting SteamOS for gaming and some regular Distro for daily work would be neat.
It's pretty good for daily work. You can use Distrobox to do any software dev without dual booting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633563