You’re right. But they already started keeping their internal dev branch private this year, which hinders everyone else working on the AOSP, including GrapheneOS. While in theory AOSP is still FOSS, they are doing everything they can to gain more control and keep rom developers and other stakeholders out of date.

And even though Android is FOSS, more and more Android device manufacturers are locking down their bootloaders, thus leaving no option to switch to an alternative.

We need a viable alternative to Android. Google has clearly shown that it’s a terrible steward for anything under its wing. Even if they somehow backtrack, they will continue pushing anti consumer practices in the long term. It’s been a couple of years now that I can’t install an apk that is unavailable in my country, because they’re somehow verifying my country with Google Play services. I’ve managed to ditch Chrome this year after 16 years and I’m not looking back, I wish I had done this earlier. If only there was an open Android alternative I could jump to.

Same experience as Steam Deck. It boots to a sort of Big Picture mode, and in the Power Menu you have an option to “switch to desktop”. They are separate modes and I believe you get logget out from either in order to switch to the other. It’s fast though.

Note that there are a couple of iso download options depending on what experience you want with Bazzite, I chose the one that most closely resembles the Deck’s.

Before this I had tried Ubuntu and I had lots of issues out of the box, with VRR, crackling sound and other stuff. Bazzite worked out of the box, and required nrarly zero setup. There are minor issues, but nothing even close to a dealbreaker - for instance the default audio device on boot was always the PS5 controller’s speaker, so I disabled it (I’m sure there are better solutions), or Steam always shows there’s an update (even though you might be on the latest version).

I only used windows on my desktop for gaming. Having a Steam Deck, I was really eagerly waiting for an official SteamOS distro for my desktop. And then I tried Bazzite. I have been playing games on Bazzite for a couple of months now and I’m super happy. So glad to get rid of Windows’ constant nagging and Microsoft’s worsening practices. Every time I booted my desktop there was a new shitty surprise either to make my local login profile into a cloud one, forcefully update to win11 or some other unwanted bad UX. Bye bye Microsoft, at long last!