Preface For years, I’ve wanted to build a Steam Box: a generic PC, repurposed into a Steam-powered gaming console. Prior to the advent of the Steam Deck, there had been two long-standing issues that kept me from making this happen. The first blocker was Linux game compatibility. Plenty of ink has been spilled already on Proton and how it has changed the Linux gaming landscape; I don’t think I need to add to that.

In spring of 2021 I migrated my laptop configuration over to NixOS, a stateless Linux distribution backed by the purely functional package manager, Nix. My configuration is split between two repositories: a base NixOS config that contains all of my core utilities, and my home-manager configuration, which has all the graphical tools, scripts, and quality-of-life tweaks that I rely on day-to-day. Note: These two repos are loosely coupled, as my dwm build (which is included in the main configuration) has bindings for several of the scripts and programs that are bundled in my home-manager config.