You can now install SteamOS 3.8 on your standard gaming PC (with AMD GPU)

SteamOS 3.8 has been released, and Valve now says that you can install their Linux-based gaming operating system on your own PC hardware. There’s just one catch, which is that you will need to have an AMD GPU in your system – Nvidia GPUs are not supported at this time.

The latest SteamOS update has come today alongside the pricing reveal and order reservations going live for the Steam Machine – head here for all the details on Steam Machine pricing and the pre-order lottery – and with the debut of their own desktop hardware, Valve are also opening up support for your own.

Valve writes:

Thanks to the openness of the PC platform, there are lots of options for devices that will allow you to run games natively or streamed to your TV. There are many PC sites and communities out there that can help you with that. For our part, 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: ​

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/65B4-2AA3-5F37-4227 . Right now, only AMD GPUs are supported, but we’re working on expanding support for the future.​

From that support page, custom installs are still noted as being in beta. Only the Steam Deck, Steam Machine and Lenovo Legion Go S have official ‘Powered by SteamOS’ status, while others like the ASUS ROG Ally Ally X, the original Legion Go, and other AMD-powered handhelds having beta support status. New for the list is “AMD discrete GPUs”.

It’s likely that SteamOS on custom hardware will remain in beta for a long time, given the wide variety of different system configurations are possible. A lot of systems will be eminently compatible with the Linux base for SteamOS, but there could be unusual ethernet or Wi-Fi chipsets, sound cards and more that throw out weird issues. AMD GPUs also have great support within Linux, though the best results with SteamOS might be with the RX6000 cards, which share RDNA 2 with the Deck, and RX7000 cards, which share RDNA 3 with the Machine.

There’s also further fussy issues, such as needing to deactivate Secure Boot, which is a firmware lock in to validate Windows boot up, and this is part of the reason why SteamOS cannot support kernel level anti-cheat systems as used by EA, Activision and others.

As good as it is to see arrive for all, SteamOS is just one option for Linux gamers. With Valve having taken their time to build out SteamOS itself, other distros have sprung up, such as Bazzite, which is able to latch into the various features of the Steam client and its gaming mode, It has much deeper support documentation and support (with caveats) for Nvidia GPUs too.

Source: Valve

Tags: Steam Machine, SteamOS, valve