ChimeraOS – one of my favorite gaming-oriented distributions – just got a big update today. Proton has been re-enabled for Windows-based games (for some reason it wasn’t before), several bug fixes have been addressed for the Steam Deck UI, Proton, and Bluetooth, a UI has been added for formatting external hard drives, “ChimeraOS Verified and Playable” games have been added to the Deck UI, and plenty of other improvements! In addition, the typical set of software packages have been updated:

Since the Big Picture Mode session is now using the Deck client, this should mean that switching between interfaces will be smoother and not require Steam client updates. Steam Input is now activated globally.

I have personally tested this distro on the Deck and can confirm I can get into the Steam Deck UI by opening up a terminal with CTRL + ALT + F3 and running chimera-session gamepadui. The framerate limiter works, but lowering the refresh rate causes the screen to tear. Unfortunately audio won’t work on the Deck until this patch gets merged into the kernel, which we should hopefully see in 5.20/6.0. For the time being though you can use Bluetooth audio.

chimeraos on Deck

For more info, see the patch notes on Steam.