German mag pcgameshardware (translation):
Following the excitement surrounding the surprise announcement of the Steam Deck OLED, which has now been officially released, more questions have been raised about the possible release of SteamOS for other systems. Several Valve developers commented on this topic to the website Gizmodo and said that SteamOS 3.x for other systems would be “at the top of the list”.
…
The developers also announced that the free operating system, which is based on Arch Linux, known for its timeliness, and the highly customizable desktop KDE Plasma, will be released first for other handheld PCs and only then for other systems such as desktop PCs and notebooks.
We’ll probably start by making it [SteamOS] available for other handhelds with a similar Gampad controller. And then beyond that, for any device.
- Lawrence Yang, Valve -
The background is basically self-evident, SteamOS in its current form is customized for handheld PCs in general and the Steam Deck in particular. Most of the work is on the drivers for hardware support, which is one of the reasons why Windows 11 is still struggling with handheld optimizations.
I think the biggest issue is driver support and making sure it works on every PC it lands on.
- Lawrence Yang, Valve -
Source (German): https://www.pcgameshardware.de/SteamOS-Software-258049/News/SteamOS-auf-anderen-Systemen-1434178/
Sounds like Microsoft needs to be watch out. They stand to lose a significant chunk of the gaming market to Valve if they’re not careful.
For now Deck and Deck-alikes are still somewhat niche nerd products, but the software side of things is rapidly getting polished and in another year or two will be close enough to a plug and play console experience that they’ll be attractive to the masses.
From there if Valve revived Steam Boxes with the new SteamOS, I think it’d be wildly successful — how many people are interested in PC gaming but don’t care to deal with the baggage that comes with that? For them, a box roughly equivalent to a PS5 or little better (running a similar APU), basically being a console that can double as a computer sold at office PC prices (~$500) would be huge.
Will any of this happen? Who knows, but the potential is there.
Honestly the biggest deal from it is it could do the one thing that sorta stopped linux from having a bigger share for years.
A single ‘unified’ distro that people tend to default to for the general public
Honestly? If MS get Game Pass working on SteamOS, then they could stand to get a bunch more subs from people who convert over from PS and Nintendo devices. So it could be a lose a little, gain a lot kind of situation for them.
Think that’s wildly optimistic personally. For Steam games it should be better, but anything that requires a launcher will still have issues, as will other storefronts. SteamOS just won’t have the market share to encourage everyone to really focus on Linux support. They need to get to the stage where it’s like Windows and everything works, and I just don’t see it.
As far as I’m aware there’s nothing that even remotely matches the PS5/XSX APUs, so Valve would likely have to have their own order. Microsoft and Sony are losing money on those systems too, and that’s with 25-50x the projected sales of any Steam system. Valve would have to swallow massive losses to make those even remotely viable. They also lack the USP of the Deck in that it’s portable. People like playing their games portably, and that helps look past some of the inherent issues that PC gaming has. There’s nothing special about a wee PC in a box, it’s literally just a more inconvenient gaming platform at that point for most.
For those of us who are technically inclined, sure. We can toss together a custom PC with great bang for buck in our sleep or if strapped for time, find a semi-competent prebuilt on sale and fix whatever inadequacies it has in short order.
For those outside that sphere however getting into PC gaming is more daunting than one might think. To them PCs are an unintelligible soup of acronyms, with the sheer number of price points, options, and manufacturer gimmicks/marketing being daunting and making it difficult to ascertain value. You see it all the time in peoples’ posts on Reddit and elsewhere asking about those things, and the ones who post are a small percentage of a much larger group.
This doesn’t even get into how lately MS has been turning everything it touches in Windows to shit, which leaves an increasing number looking for alternative or how some newcomers to PC gaming get bitten by overpriced low-spec gaming PCs that perform far worse than their price would suggest.
If Valve can manage to produce an SteamOS-based settop/desktop device that’s console-like but with the flexibility and freedom of a PC at a reasonable price point with a large library of games vetted to work, they’ll have a healthy market with this group.
Are we thinking of the same Windows? 🤔
Windows has its fair share of issues, but in terms of compatibility it’s clearly better than SteamOS. I’ve had more issues with games through SteamOS than I’ve had on Windows in the 15+ years of primarily being a PC gamer.
I’m running the Steam Deck UI on my Legion Go. I still don’t have all the Linux stuff set up, but it runs way better than the Windows 11 install that came with it.
What needed to be done with Steam Boxes is limit the number of versions to just 3: Entry lvl, Mid-tier and Top-end. And SteamOS wasn’t quite ready to go against Microshit at the time.
3 is already to much, people are complaining about the series s and series x destinctions in the current console market
1 version or max 2: One targeting full hd and one targeting 4k tvs