In an IGN interview, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said that “[they] want [SteamOS] to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC”. Below is a transcript of the interview. I tried to clean it up to my best ability.
Just like Steam Deck paved the way for Steam OS on a variety of third-party handhelds, we expect that Steam Machine will pave the way for Steam OS on a bunch of different machines in either similar form factors, different perf envelopes, different segments of the market, and get to a good outcome there. We definitely want to encourage people to try it out on their own hardware. We’ll be working on expanding hardware support for the drivers and the base operating system. Just last week, we fixed something that was preventing us from booting on the very latest AMD CPU platforms. Last month, we added support for the Intel Lunar Lake platforms. We’re constantly adding support and improving performance. We want it to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC, but there’s still a ton of work to do there.
If the embedded video doesn’t take you to the correct part of the video, the correct timestamp is 5:37.
EDIT: Here’s the written article of the video:
https://www.ign.com/articles/valves-next-gen-steam-machine-and-steam-controller-the-big-interview
I hate Microsoft shoving AI down our throats. I will not upgrade to AI Windows. I just don’t want to port over to a new OS because: (1) I like 10’s GUI, (2) I don’t trust an OS that I might not be able to run word or excel on because I do so much on them, and (3) my version of Windows doesn’t have ads on it.
As others have mentioned - and to add my own opinion: In terms of Writer (Word) and Calc (Excel), LibreOffice is by far better than M$ for everyone who isn’t for some reason an absolute fan of searching for buttons that have the function they need by looking at tiny icons.
my version of Windows doesn’t have ads on it.
Windows 7?
My EU Win11 doesn’t show any ads either.
I’d be surprised if that turned out to be the case, but I’ve never used EU Windows 11. Is it a special no-ads version?
Windows 10 definitely has ads - I recall seeing something pushing the Xbox on the lock screen a while back. That counts IMO.
Yeah there’s been loads of threads with surprised Europeans when it comes to Windows ads, because we just don’t get them.
… That is not true. We get app recommendations in the home screen and we get a “news” panel. Those are ads. You can’t disable the recommended apps thing either. Recommended by who? The top payer? Fuck off.
There are alternatives to Microsoft Office like LibreOffice and OnlyOffice. Plus you can still use Office 365 in a browser if it “has” to be Microsoft Office.
Yep, the browser version has been good enough if you’re not working with 500 MB excel files that’s been used since 20 years ago. Even the people at my work has switched to the web version of office.
LibreOffice has been so good. As a non-power user I haven’t even noticed a difference, aside from the lack of bullshit.
I’ve used both Libreoffice and Onlyoffice along with Microsofts offerings. I’ve gone several hours in onlyoffice to only notice when I’m saving that I was using Onlyoffice instead of Microsoft Excel. That’s how similar they look.
I am very excited for steamos, give me my VR capabilities on Linux and I’ll say goodbye to Windows forever.
I might suggest you take a look at Envision and see if that doesn’t get you what you need right now?
I appreciate the suggestion and it does look fascinating, but one of the biggest reasons I’m stuck on Windows is; put simply, I need my computer to function more plug and play as I use a lot of creative programs to make VR content. I’m not as good at the code side of a lot of Linux but know enough to get by.
I get really frustrated when I have to fix XYZ bug or configuration every time I use my computer when I need my machine to make content. Adding more complexity to my processes is just not good for me.
Understandable! Hopefully it gets to that point soon. A lot of people are sick of Windows and I’d love for it to be as smooth a transition as possible for everyone.
I installed cachyOS and love it so far, KDE plasma is nice. Used Linux mint before. Didn’t try vr yet because my GPU died and 1060 3GB won’t run or well but I hope it will run fine thanks to steam.
Valve has news for you
Valve also used Windows 11 on their own demos for VR streaming to the Steam Frame
I do believe they called out that the steam machine is designed to work with the frame, right? I’d have expected to see Linux SteamVR updates leasing up to this, to get it fully fixed up and tested ahead of time, though I might also have missed something…
The ad for the Steam Frame specifically says it’s compatible with the whole Steam family, Deck, Controller, and Machine. I expect Steam Deck will only be a virtual screen, as well as it’s standalone capabilities. If that’s all it can do with the deck, that’s enough for me. If it can do VR as well, even better. Either way, the frame also runs on SteamOS, so that will be Linux, and if they can’t support streaming VR from the Machine they will be crucified.
I suppose the thing I’m worried about is more general Linux SteamVR support than the streaming itself… But duh, the headset can run games on Linux standalone, so they’ve gotta have SteamVR working well. The only question is, am I behind on the news, or have they been holding back the updates internally?
I hope it was just them working out the hardware required to meet their goals, and the software required to make it work. Fingers crossed. I don’t plan on buying one on release, at least not before I’ve seen a number of reviews.
Well I hope the new one isn’t limited to ARM chips…
You can run it streaming from a PC. The architecture of the source PC can be anything that’ll run SteamVR, assumedly.
Yes, the question is will SteamOS ARM (or whatever they call it) be limited to the Steam Frame.
@artyom@piefed.social I saw a headline that they’re open to other vendors using it. With the Deck it took them a long time and there’s still not any kind of public build process AFAIK though.
Strange that they’re working so hard on this but Bazzite and similar will run on anything…
I wouldn’t considered this strange. Bazzite definite has some downsides that involve tinkering to get things working on some hardware.
Valve is trying to deliver both a hardware product that just works, and a software product that just works without that tinkering. They’re trying to bring Linux to your mom who wants to play terraria and you uncle who plays overwatch with his kids. They want them to have an experience that’s console like in how easy/intuitive it is to use, without anything that’s finicky or confusing.
Every time I do an update on bazzite it breaks deckyloader for me and I have to go in and fix it. I’ve had to change controller type on bazzite to get certain games to work.
I have back buttons on my device that still don’t map reliably in bazzite. This is not the experience valve want their customers to have.
They’re shooting for a seamless experience.
I wouldn’t considered this strange. Bazzite definite has some downsides that involve tinkering to get things working on some hardware.
Almost never. Whereas SteamOS almost always just won’t work, regardless of tinkering.
Every time I do an update on bazzite it breaks deckyloader for me and I have to go in and fix it.
This is not a Valve product. I can tell you SteamOS will be the same because they’re not developed together.
I have back buttons on my device that still don’t map reliably in bazzite.
That’s nothing to do with Bazzite, that’s entirely done in Steam.
In steam on windows the devices onboard controller actually works as intended. I dual boot so I’ve tested this extensively.
Your experience of “almost never” and my experience of “happens sometimes” create a bill, my friend. This is what is called anecdotal evidence.
None of that anecdotal evidence (yours or mine) actually undermines the main point which is that bazzite started out telling users to install their skew of fedora at their own risk on hardware they didn’t directly provide a guide for. And that’s part of the fun of Linux for some people.
But there are a lot of people who don’t do PC gaming full stop specifically because they don’t want to fiddle with anything, they just want to play a game, and steam is courting those people. That’s my point. They don’t want to give those people a bad experience, and they are spending time attempting to make their experience as clean and positive as possible.
In steam on windows the devices onboard controller actually works
Sure but we’re not talking about Windows. The Linux Steam client is not the same as the Windows one, obviously.
bazzite started out telling users to install their skew of fedora at their own risk
That was a long time ago.
But there are a lot of people who don’t do PC gaming full stop specifically because they don’t want to fiddle with anything, they just want to play a game, and steam is courting those people. That’s my point.
What does your point have to do with SteamOS vs. Bazzite?
You brought up bazzite like it and steam OS are the exact same thing. So you tell me what it has to do with bazzite.
I did not. I brought it up like they serve a similar function but only Bazzite, with their team of volunteers, seems interested in improving compatibility across various hardware.
So what you’re saying is that you don’t think steam has any interest in providing compatibility across various hardware?
Having a company like Valve behind it is major, getting people on Linux is the important first step, then once familiar they can try other distros.
Don’t you think better hardware compatibility with their first party OS is important for getting people on Linux?
What do you think they are doing???
I just explained that they’re not doing a good job at that.
Strange that they’re working so hard on this but Bazzite and similar will already run on anything…
You said it’s strange they are working so hard on it. Are you lost?
JFC, that’s what they said, not me. Are you lost?
Even if I did, hard work is not the same as good work.
No, I’m not lost, that’s literally the comment you made that I responded to.
They are working on it, a major software company with the means and funds to infinitely back Linux.
If you prefer Bazzite or some other OS, that’s great, but Valve building and supporting their own distribution is a good thing for more mainstream adoption of Linux.
Maybe English isn’t your first language, so you didn’t mean exactly what you said?
They have a unique opportunity here to capitalise on Microsoft’s mistakes.
I’d say it’s even more unique than a valuable competitive mistake/opportunity.
Valve has the chance to grow the brand and make a bunch of money and all the other standard goals for a company, sure. But they also have the opportunity to benefit the world in subtle but significant ways while getting richer.
A normal megacorp might not give a shit about that last part. But a company that is majority owned by one individual who is already a billionaire that looks like santa claus and presumably cares about his legacy and maybe even other people… it might just be possible!
It’s even still a valid course of action if there’s literally no interest in making the world better.
They’ve potentially found a way to make their nearly omnipresent e-commerce platform share a name with the operating system, which is coincidentally mostly developed by others. They get to associate their name with a few tens of billions of dollars of development effort for a fraction of the cost.To be clear, this isn’t bad or anything. It’s quite literally what a lot of the people doing all that legwork want. It just doesn’t require any altruism from valve. They make money selling games, and they sell more games when people think it’s easier to play them. A desktop with the ease of a console is a big selling point for a lot of people.
I am hoping that Gabe someday creates a PayValve service, to let perverts and LGBTQ+ customers to have a True Neutral transaction processor. Just a 1% fee would let Valve get a little bit of profit from everyone who doesn’t use MasterVisa - including competing game stores, or other markets.
A friend’s response to me yet again trying to push Linux on them, all unprovoked:
“Windows is getting increasingly shit. I’ve had a login problem for most of the year on my work machine where the cloud stuff won’t sync. I can’t even use Notepad now because it’s cloud-connected. I have to use Excel in the browser for similar reasons. I’d love to be able to move to Linux for everything, but I also cannot be fucked to maintain a Windows machine let alone a Linux one haha.”
This is exactly the kind of person SteamOS is going to capture, I think. The same way, Mint helped kill that whole “my operating system is my hobby” vibe.
I’ve not used SteamOS as a desktop. I own a Steam Deck, but I do think SteamOS is nearly there as an everyday user platform. It’s just a bit more aggressive with settings resets and data overwrites compared to something like Bazzite, which makes it not great for full desktop use yet. I’ve deep dove into nix this month and been making my own tools to bounce off the way NixOS works, like tests before switches and auto uploading to GitHub made a little webui control center etc. I could see Valve doing something similar with their OS to overcome current SteamOS’s issues and improve things for an end user
Why do you think Bazzite isn’t great for full desktop use?
You mis-read or I wrote it badly, I think Bazzite is awesome for everyday desktop (see my post history) Steamos isn’t as it stood when it was an unofficial release as it was purely designed for the deck so it would do things like overwrite settings when it updated. Bazzite was the steamOS for normal everyday desktop and non-deck builds for me.
it’s fine for average users but if you really want to use it for something other than browsing or gaming you really have to use it with Distrobox. And that’s fine, bit of extra work to set up but honestly if you’re going to use something that is beyond web browsing, streaming, and gaming you’re probably going to go with a different distro anyways.
I feel like I see this comment every time immutable distros are mentioned (of course Bazzite most of all).
Sorry but you’re wrong.
please, tell me why I’m wrong. I’m not a fan of immutable distros as I feel they’re limiting but I’d love to be convinced otherwise.
With immutables you can do pretty much everything you do on a normal distro. I code, flash microcontrollers, design and print 3d parts, write documents, draw, manage my servers, consume media… What exactly do you think you can’t do? You can install pretty much anything, actually with distrobox you can install more stuff than you would without it: you can install packages for one distribution that may not be available on some others. Flatpak works, and you also have AppImages of course.
The biggest limit with Bazzite & C is that you’re limited to KDE or Gnome mostly, but if you really wanted you could layer something else on top of the base image.
Distrobox isn’t really an option I went with for day to day, I’d use it to keep my projects and dependencies under control. Flatpak was fine, app image was fine, I actually spun up my own template after a bit https://github.com/Sirico/bazzite-dev. Beyond adding a couple of programs and theming, I couldn’t see why I’d need to be in the files silverblue/ublue lock off.
I’m now on nix because I have a lot of stuff to do at work that I was playing about with bluefin for, but nix has more support etc. Knowing that hitting the power button will get me to the desktop every morning bar a hardware issue is for me the biggest win. Making something I can just update throughout a whole fleet and doing it all within GitHub or code is a game changer. So for me immutable are no different to convent distros great for basic stuff like you said browsing etc and good for the high-end stuff it’s this middle ground where people have to learn a new way of doing something it feels like it falls apart I think.
I put SteamOS on my handheld and turned it into my main PC. I haven’t missed Windows even slightly.
I really hope they sell the GabeCube in retail outlets. It’ll be a Linux machine you can just plug in and use. A lot of people will buy it as a console and then realise it works fine as a PC. That’s the kind of promotion Linux needs right now.
I fear for this too but because I live where steam hardware is never sold, I have to rely on scalpers or stores who sell it for triple it’s value. I want the controller (tbh I want the vr controllers, but not the steam frame) but I don’t want to pay around $2,000 MXN for it.
I have to rely on scalpers or stores who sell it for triple it’s value. I want the controller
The 8bitdo Ultimate 2 series of controllers are fine pieces of hardware. Yes, they don’t have the trackpads but they have TMR sticks (probably the very same model as Steam Controller 2) and they are even compatible game consoles.
The biggest problem is that there are four very similarly named controllers (“Bluetooth” is the highest end and compatible with all BT devices even phones) but that’s it. No need to throw money at scalpers if good alternatives exist.
PS: If it behaves like Steam Deck’s controller, it’ll be useless without Steam running and merely acting as mouse.
Why not use a reshipping service?
When it comes to this i personally tend to agree with what Brodie Robertson always says in his videos about SteamOS. It’s kinda silly to keep waiting for an official release when things like Bazzite exist, but if the SteamOS release helps with more people making the switch, then that’s still a good thing in the end.
For sure, I’ve been running Linux as my daily driver since… 2005? Fuck… and ran it on the side even before that. And I’ve been trying bazzite on my gaming PC and it’s been pretty cool. But I’m still pumped about SteamOS, not because I’m planning on running it, but because any success SteamOS has will be likely directly applicable to Linux desktop gaming in general.
Every game that adjusts something to test on SteamOS will make it better for me off SteamOS. Every peripheral that is built to work with SteamOS, all the user demographic numbers that set priorities withing the gaming industry, are all great.
I’m excited for the year of the Linux desktop.
Year of the Linux couch.
I mostly agree with that, but the problem with Bazzite and CachyOS is that they are made by small teams. Distributions made by small teams might die because of some small problem, like a key member of the team being unable to continue with the project. Bazzite team, for example, earlier this year said that they would stop maintaining the OS if a proposed change to Fedora would go through, because their team wouldn’t be able cope with the change.
SteamOS on the other hand, being developed by a company with a lot of money to throw into things, is much more resilient OS, and I think that makes it better for larger masses of users.
I agree.
But as a sidenote, a few interesting facts:
- Debian is older than Google.
- Arch (2002) and Fedora (2003) both have outlasted more than 298 Google projects.
Those are silly comparisons.
How many distros have failed? How many Linux projects in general? (Since we’re comparing random shit)
I am comparing random things, yes. If you don’t find this trivia interesting, please ignore it.
This is a big reason why I would prefer a SteamOS Desktop over Cachy and friends. Also, documentation that is designed for people who don’t have an interest in becoming masters of the terminal. My general impression of Linux as an intermediate user, is a Tower of Babel situation, everyone having different procedures for how to resolve the same issue.
It’s a matter of priorities. A large portion of Linux users don’t actually care about adoption. They’re not selling the os, so the docs aren’t designed for anyone who isn’t already a user.
Valve on the other hand is paying people for documentation and good ux. That’s enough to significantly boost the quality.
I find the archwiki immensely useful.
True, but anything running Bazzite could just as easily run Fedora atomic instead and basically no one could tell the difference. Fedora is sponsored by one of the largest tech companies on the planet.
Bazzite is downstream from fedora, which i’ll remind you is partially handled by red hat, aka a large ass company with “a lot of money to throw into things”. The bazzite developers only handle a smaller portion of the maintenance that distributions require, and really only as much as they want and are confident in handling.
And yet, as demonstrated by the kerfuffle earlier, they can’t survive if Fedora makes a swing too big for them.
I am not waiting for it because I personally want to use it. I’m excited for the industry shaping power a Linux OS released by Valve will have.
As much as I appreciate Valve’s contributions to the Linux gaming world: If I wanted a computer with an Operating System dedicated to / optimized for gaming, I would buy a console instead.
I do believe that an operating system by steam for anything but the SteamDeck is a bad idea. It might leech market share of other linux distros, and trigger less well maintained generic linux compatibility - and at that point, Valve could get procured by one of those parasitic megacorps and the enshittification thumbscrews will be tightened HARD. With the end result throwing Linux gaming back a decade in favor of proprietary hot garbage.
If it works on SteamOS, how difficult can it be to make it compatible with other distros?
SteamOS isn’t even on the latest kernel. If anything, everything on SteamOS is already compatible with other distros. It’s just Linux.
Valve isn’t getting acquired any time soon. They’re a small-ish group that basically gets 30% of nearly every PC game sold. They’re private, so finances aren’t published, but I have a hunch they have a healthy amount of cash on hand to do whatever the fuck they want for decades, and they might in fact be closer to the size of those mega corps.
It’s built on FOSS software, Valve is a main contributer to a bunch of Linux-specific frameworks like Proton, AMD FOSS drivers, and others. This means that the FOSS world benifits from their contributions, regardless of Valve’s future contributions.
That’s the beauty and power of FOSS, it can’t be restricted or locked away, everybody gets to enjoy everybody else’s contributions, big and small.
Even if Valve totally enshitifies and tries to restrict their tech, the community will fork their projects, take the code and continue building cool stuff.
Look what happened with Terraform, the largest infrastructure as code platform in the world. They tried to close down their codebase by changing the license to a more restrictive one, and the community rebelled and forked Open Tofu, which not only has 100% backward compatibility with Terraform, but has newly developed features that terraform doesn’t have.
Same thing with Red Hat, a multi-billion dollar corpo owned and controlled by IBM, which tried to lock out devs from their codebase recently unless they were building code specifically for Red Hat Linux. Rocky and Alma Linux not only survived, but still thrive.
I could go on, but the point is that right now Valve is a fantastic force for Linux and FOSS development in the gaming space, and because they started with a largely open platform and ecosystem, that protects the community at large from future enshitification.
I’m slightly worried that games on Linux will end up targeting Steam os, instead of just running great on any distribution.
And I’m fine running SuSE and Fedora. Also they run my games just fine and I wish it stayed that way.just running great on any distribution
Just running great on some Bob’s distribution for which Bob made sure no game will ever run on it…
that is what I was trying to say - in more words and with a couple of typos ;)
Well in that case I agree with you!
I have a pretty beefy gaming PC and a separate middling mini-PC for my linux workstation. I enjoy the separation of concerns and distractions and would love to install a gaming-focused OS on my gaming PC.
It’s got a use case. I mean, I know not everyone has a dedicated gaming PC, but some people (myself included) do. I don’t keep any personal info on it, it’s just for gaming. I have a separate mini-PC for general use. It’s a good option for a “consolized” PC at the TV for gaming, in lieu of the typical gaming console. Many already use Bazzite for the purpose.
Either way, I’m glad to see it as an option. And that’s all it is. I doubt I’d use dedicated SteamOS (I like my gaming rig to be fully up-to-date on the latest kernel so I use Endeavor), but it’s a simple and straightforward choice. There’s Bazzite, Cachy gaming, and plenty of standard and immutable distros, SteamOS is just one more.
The compatibility bit is actually not a major problem here, because the target environment for software on SteamOS is actually a portable container environment and not the OS itself.
You can make the Steam Linux runtime work on any distro with Kubernetes or equivalent as long as they support the container image format and dependencies like Vulkan
So much for the “I’m still running Windows because I game a lot” crowd. No more excuses, ditch Microsoft and switch to Linux!
Still waiting for Wayland to allow global hotkeys since I use those a lot
I didn’t realize that was an issue. I used to use f13-f24 on my qmk keyboard for that but that was before wayland and I’ve been using a generic cheap trash kb after somehow losing the other one.
There are still excuses.
I love gaming on my Steam Deck, but I’m not ready to make that PC switch yet because I don’t have the time anymore to sit and fuck around trying to get a game to run.
That chart means nothing if all the games you play work fine. I have tons of hours on MH Wilds for example and that’s the only game where I had to do tinkering in the last 3 years, but we all know that wasn’t a OS specific issue right? PoE 2 crashed in Vulkan for the first week, worked fine on dx12. Now works fine on Vulkan and I’m having a much better experience than some of my buddies on windows with game crashes.
I would track the performance of your games instead of the overall.
Protondb has a lot of old information on its thats not relevant anymore thanks to updated proton releases.
So there are a lot of games that suggest tweaks/tinkering that dont need it anymore… but people like me(random idiots that don’t have IT/Sysadmin experience to know everything about linux) still might do, because the reviews from 18 months ago say its necessary, because there arent many reviews and the one from 18 months ago is still only like 5 places down from the top.
So polls like that should be taken with a heavy grain.
That’s interesting, is there a way to filter only on “new reviews”? Actually, I’d expect proton to already be doing that, given that you have to specify which proton you’re using when rating the game
On a game’s page, it orders them by most-recent first. There’s also a filter query field at the top, but I’m not sure what the syntax for it is and I can’t seem to find information on that, but at least you’ll automatically see the newest ones first.
But what does the chart look like after you assign weights to AAA games?
And if you play popular MOBAs then Windows is it.
What MOBAs other than League of Legends are incompatible with Linux?
Im okay with keeping moba players, fortnite and roblox people, and kernel level anticheat gamers off of linux if it means compromising on Linux’s part :)
Nah, Dota runs natively on Linux. And no other MOBAs exist, amiright.
It’s not an excuse when your favorite game only supports kernel-level anti-cheat on Windows.
If enough people stop buying those games because the developer refuses to infect your computer for you, they’ll change their tune. Money talks bullshit walks.
Many of these games are free-to-play. At least, mine is. I’m open to alternative games, but none of them scratch that itch.
Yeah at this point the anticheat of the multiplayer military fps genre really is the opiate of the masses keeping windows at the top of gaming market share. Because no OS besides windows would ever allow for something so wildly insecure.
I play the genre, in fact PUBG is one of my favorite games (Judge me as you will), but I made the decision a few years back that my control over my own computer, my privacy and security in my own home, my ideological rejection of the stranglehold microsoft has over the home PC, were all more important than my ability to play a handful of violent, samesie, DoD-funded military apologia.
I have zero regrets. I do miss PUBG from time to time. But no, in the end it wasn’t really an excuse to not switch.
Guy who owns the online, PC version of Gamestop: “What if we took on Microsoft and kicked those mfers in the balls?”
Nvidia please make a dedicated driver team for Linux. IIRC one of the biggest stumbling block for a general SteamOS release is subpar Nvidia performance on DX12 games that can get around 30% performance degradation. Even Valve assigned a team of engineers to work on this specifically.
Obvious solution: Build a D3D12 to D3D11 translation layer, kinda like DXVK but in reverse
That’s significantly more difficult than the opposite since many DX12 features are not in DX11
Nvidia’s shit Linux support is why I’ve been stuck with Windows despite how badly I want to switch to Arch. You get no Nvidia Control Panel, no Nvidia App, no ShadowPlay, no RTX HDR, no 3D Settings panel; basically the only thing you can do with an Nvidia GPU on Linux is render 3D graphics. Which is fine if all you do with your PC is CAD or non-competitive SDR gaming. But I paid for all these extra features and so I’d like to use them.
Can’t even switch to an AMD GPU, either, because I like Ray Tracing too much, so I’m stuck waiting on Nvidia to get their shot together (or AMD to finally release a GPU that can handle RT @ 4K120) before I can finally ditch Microsoft for good.
There is a fix coming for the Nvidia performance problem. It’s going to take some months for all the pieces to fall in place. See this video for more about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpXINAMaljA
Been waiting years at this point. Hope it happens soon.
Do it goddammit!
Cool, me to.
