Perhaps the real Steam Machine was the friends we made along the way… is what enthusiast Matthew Brunelle might’ve said after realizing he already had one at home. Instead of buying Valve’s new console for a frictionless experience, Matthew decided to turn his existing PC into the perfect couch-gaming setup, made possible by a really long HDMI cable, a Steam Controller 2, and, of course, Bazzite.
For the expectedly tech-savvy audience reading this, you might already be making fun of this dude for discovering cables, but hold on a second. Matthew’s computer sits in his own room, where it serves as a desktop for work, while his TV sits in the living room. The easiest way to bridge that gap is actually wirelessly, streaming the games over Moonlight or Sunshine, or even Steam’s native remote play functionality.
There will be a noticeable latency penalty with this setup that may or may not bother you depending on what you’re playing. Moreover, you’re just mirroring your PC’s screen this way; it’s not actually a console-like experience where the device wakes up and goes to sleep seamlessly. Not to mention, Matthew is running NixOS, so he has to manually hook up the cable and change the sound and display outputs each time.
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In comes Bazzite — Matthew installed the Linux-based OS on a third SSD and plopped it into his computer. Inside, in Steam’s “Big Picture” mode, Bazzite automatically handles outputs upon rebooting, switching to the correct display, which is his TV, and remembers to use the HDMI out for sound. This still wasn’t enough, however, until two more things came along.
First is the 50-foot-long fiber-optic HDMI 2.1 cable that can carry the signal over long distances without degradation or latency. It costs $75 and sits there, running along the molding of the house. On the other end, it plugs into a TCL Roku TV that’s limited to 60 Hz, but Matthew plans to upgrade to an LG C5 OLED really soon, which should help saturate that cable’s bandwidth, especially now that HDMI 2.1 officially supports AMD GPUs on Linux.
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The last piece of the puzzle is the new Steam Controller, which ticks all the boxes for our resident MacGyver. It features symmetrical sticks, large touchpads, back buttons, and excellent compatibility with Steam and Linux. Matthew even mentioned that the DualSense was already good enough for him in this regard, but the Steam Controller 2 is even more comfortable and more reliable, since it doesn’t drop the connection at all.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
With everything in place, here’s how the setup works. Matthew still has to boot his PC and select Bazzite in the boot menu. From that point, Bazzite automatically outputs to his TV in the living room and uses the living room speakers for sound. When Matthew is done with a session, he puts the system to sleep, and it wakes back up right where he left it. Sleep states on Linux-based gaming distros feel just like a console.
When it’s time for work, he restarts his PC and boots back into NixOS, but Matthew finds himself leaving his computer in Bazzite more and more since it’s so seamless. He even suggests switching to Bazzite’s built-in desktop mode for work if he can’t find a convenient solution to the dual-boot dilemma. Speaking of which, the blog post mentions that he is trying to set up hibernate-to-disk on Bazzite.
If he gets that working, Matthew could save his exact game state, reboot into NixOS to do desktop work, and then reboot back into Bazzite later right where he left off. There’s still a manual element, but the transition becomes much more seamless as everything within Bazzite no longer needs to be shut down. Matthew still recommends the Steam Machine for an out-of-the-box experience similar to his, but for him, “a 50ft HDMI cable will do.”
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