Any other Distribution and even Windows would work fine, as long as you set up passwordless autologon as a default user and then put Steam in Big Picture Mode as autostart.
Respectfully, I’m going to have to disagree about stock Windows working fine. There are multiple places where it necessitates having a keyboard and/or mouse connected.
Interacting with UAC prompts and other elevated-permission windows that block synthetic input events.
When a popup hijacks focus away from the game window.
When Steam (or other controller to mouse software) is not open, such as during the logoff screen where you sometimes have to click “Close Anyways”.
After a BIOS update, when the TPM refuses to unlock and you need to enter the BitLocker recovery key within the pre-boot environment.
You can disable UAC (thinking practical, not necessarily security minded - but for an auto login w/o password, what’s security?)
Popups: yes. But then you’d need to actively use other software besides steam. Why would you do that, if using only a controller? Also that can happen in Linux, too. If you mean those desktop notifications - those should be silenced automagically when running games.
For the logoff or shutdown: Set or createHKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\AutoEndTasks to 1 to auto kill hanging/not ending processes automagically. Also you can use WaitToKillAppTimeout there to define how long windows should wait before killing the processes (in milliseconds).
And regarding bitlocker after a bios update: why would you use bitlocker on such a machine (auto login on boot which would allow access to all files anyways)? Anyways, set or create HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BitLocker\PreventDeviceEncryption to 1 to prevent bitlocker from running after an upgrade. With Pro, you could also leverage GPOs for that.
At least for the new Steam Gamepad they announced trackpads to be able to control the mouse with the gamepad, so clicking away a popup or sich shouldn’t be a problem.
Any other Distribution and even Windows would work fine, as long as you set up passwordless autologon as a default user and then put Steam in Big Picture Mode as autostart.
Respectfully, I’m going to have to disagree about stock Windows working fine. There are multiple places where it necessitates having a keyboard and/or mouse connected.
You can disable UAC (thinking practical, not necessarily security minded - but for an auto login w/o password, what’s security?)
Popups: yes. But then you’d need to actively use other software besides steam. Why would you do that, if using only a controller? Also that can happen in Linux, too. If you mean those desktop notifications - those should be silenced automagically when running games.
For the logoff or shutdown: Set or create
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\AutoEndTasksto1to auto kill hanging/not ending processes automagically. Also you can useWaitToKillAppTimeoutthere to define how long windows should wait before killing the processes (in milliseconds).And regarding bitlocker after a bios update: why would you use bitlocker on such a machine (auto login on boot which would allow access to all files anyways)? Anyways, set or create
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BitLocker\PreventDeviceEncryptionto1to prevent bitlocker from running after an upgrade. With Pro, you could also leverage GPOs for that.At least for the new Steam Gamepad they announced trackpads to be able to control the mouse with the gamepad, so clicking away a popup or sich shouldn’t be a problem.