Valve greenlights SteamOS installs on normal PCs with AMD GPUs, so you can go make your own Steam Machine if you don’t wanna fork over $1,049
Mostly what I do here at PC Gamer is wait for my colleagues to post about their tech issues in Slack and tell them to install Linux in response. Webcam broken? Linux. Frame drops? Linux. Distant relationship with your father? Linux can fix that. I am unfathomably, incandescently popular and no one wants me to be quiet.
A common response to my implorations goes something like this: “I’m waiting for SteamOS.” Well, stop waiting for SteamOS. SteamOS is here. Amid the hubbub of yesterday’s Steam Machine hardware announcements, Valve slipped in a surreptitious little software note too: as of SteamOS 3.8, you can now officially stick Valve’s Linux distro on whatever hardware you want, with the caveat that it’s gotta be running an AMD GPU, at least for now.
This was not, to be clear, a rank impossibility before yesterday. In fact, our Dave James stuck an older version of SteamOS onto a Framework laptop last year. But now you’ve got Valve’s actual, official blessing, and hopefully a slightly easier time of it.
The notice was tucked in at the end of the Steam Machine’s FAQ, where Valve writes, “we are continuing to work toward enabling SteamOS to be used on more hardware than just ours. In fact, with the newly-released SteamOS 3.8, you can run the same code and operating system as Steam Machine on your own living-room PC using whatever PC parts you want… Right now, only AMD GPUs are supported, but we’re working on expanding support for the future.” Valve’s working on support for additional GPUs, though, but I suspect we might have a fair while long to wait.
As any Nvidia owner on Linux (hello, that is me) will know, team green drivers can be a bit of a faff. Where pretty much every AMD owner on Linux will default to using the very good, open-source Mesa drivers—you usually don’t even have to do anything; they’ll just install by default—Nvidia’s driver situation for its modern cards is a hybrid of open-source and proprietary tech. While there are totally open-source Nvidia drivers out there—the Nouveau project—they’re not up to snuff for games.
The short and tall of which is that I and my RTX 4080 are gonna have to wait to take SteamOS for a test run (you can always install Bazzite, with its out-of-the-box Nvidia support, for a similar experience), but hey—if you’re an AMD user, you can check out Valve’s guide to installing SteamOS right now, and embrace the sunlit uplands of Linux on the desktop.
