Hello lemmings, I've once again come for your advice. I've built a sff system with a dual boot bazzite os. This will be mostly for my kids playing games and media serving from Big picture in the living room. I'm trying to figure out the best way to set up the accounts. Ideally it would be as close to a console experience as possible but I want to make sure each kid can save their own progress. What's my best option here? Does everyone need their own os account that signs them into steam properly? I've never set up a system for multiple users before.
Edit: details
Edit: thanks for all the feedback! I'm leaning towards single system account with multiple steam accounts. Now I just need to figure out how to keep myself signed in on steam so I don't have to put my PW in every time. Thanks a ton!
actionjbone @sh.itjust.works - 3day
If you want each kid to have their own desktop experience, then you'd want to give each one their own system login.
If you only care about them each having different Steam accounts, they don't need different logins. You can add multiple accounts to Steam.
7
warmaster @lemmy.world - 3day
My kids have one Steam account each. That's all there is to it. Super simple, just like a console.
5
RedStamp - 2day
If your kids are only going to be using big picture mode in steam, then one system account will work. The steam deck only has one system user with the ability to have multiple steam accounts and that works great for multiple users, from my experience.
For anyone interested in a great dual use system for regular desktop use and a console-like experience, I recommend checking out nixos and jovian-nix:
https://jovian-experiments.github.io/Jovian-NixOS/
I'm using it on my main PC and it works incredibly well to mimic the steam deck experience using a full desktop on nixos 25.11
3
soulsource @discuss.tchncs.de - 3day
I'd go with different system acounts. That way their savegames are guaranteed to stay separate.
That's because on PC most games just care about the system user when determining the savegame folder, and don't care about steam accounts.
Configure the Display Manager to use that session for their users (In GDM, for instance, it's enough to manually select it once on login - GDM remembers the last-used session per user)
tyrant in linux_gaming
Best multi player steam setup?
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/39957209
Edit: thanks for all the feedback! I'm leaning towards single system account with multiple steam accounts. Now I just need to figure out how to keep myself signed in on steam so I don't have to put my PW in every time. Thanks a ton!
If you want each kid to have their own desktop experience, then you'd want to give each one their own system login.
If you only care about them each having different Steam accounts, they don't need different logins. You can add multiple accounts to Steam.
My kids have one Steam account each. That's all there is to it. Super simple, just like a console.
If your kids are only going to be using big picture mode in steam, then one system account will work. The steam deck only has one system user with the ability to have multiple steam accounts and that works great for multiple users, from my experience.
For anyone interested in a great dual use system for regular desktop use and a console-like experience, I recommend checking out nixos and jovian-nix: https://jovian-experiments.github.io/Jovian-NixOS/
I'm using it on my main PC and it works incredibly well to mimic the steam deck experience using a full desktop on nixos 25.11
I'd go with different system acounts. That way their savegames are guaranteed to stay separate.
That's because on PC most games just care about the system user when determining the savegame folder, and don't care about steam accounts.
So, what I'd do is to: