Is SteamOS ready to replace Windows? I installed it so you don’t have to

The release of Steam Machine has been a strange one, to say the least. Even at its announcement it was met with scepticism over its price, which has only worsened now with the $1049 / £879 starting price as it goes on sale, but the launch of this new hardware has brought with it a shining silver lining for Valve as more and more people are curious about installing SteamOS on their own systems instead. So, is SteamOS ready to replace Windows for PC gaming? I decided to try it for myself and find out.

And what did I find out? Well, to be quite blunt, no it’s not. Even from Valve’s standpoint, SteamOS is in beta for all but the Steam Deck, Steam Machine and Lenovo Legion Go S, and even with that, they only note that a clutch of other handhelds and PCs with AMD GPUs are compatible. At the last count just 19.13% of the Steam userbase has an AMD GPU of some description, with the market still dominated by Nvidia at 72.42%.

A big part of this is how GPU manufacturers handle Linux. There’s broad support for AMD with open source drivers, which Valve has been working on and contributing to so that they’re good enough for gaming, but for shipping Nvidia support, they’re having to work more closely on the proprietary driver stack. Other Linux distros, such as Bazzite, have their own workarounds for this, but a company like Valve really needs to work directly with Nvidia.

Luckily for me, I land within that 19%. My main PC has a Ryzen 5900X and Radeon RX 6800, and the other has a Ryzen 5700X3D and Radeon RX 9060 XT, which lives next to the TV and would be most ideal for a big screen SteamOS experience. So, I quickly downloaded the SteamOS bootable recovery installer and, as instructed, used Rufus to zap it onto one of the thousands of USB sticks I have in my house.

But while I was doing this I read up and discovered another quirk of SteamOS as it stands. Yes, Valve has always given tacit support for dual booting on Steam Deck, but any new install of SteamOS using their installer insists on completely wiping the NVMe SSD first. Valve’s support documentation also seems far too minimal and sparse or their own devices, let alone custom SteamOS installs. For something that “just works” it will help weed out basic issues before contacting support, but not great for DIY PC gamers who just want to dip a little toe in and see if this is for you.

Thankfully, there’s been enough people already tinkering with SteamOS over the past few years, both with other handheld gaming PCs and with their own desktop PCs, that this is a solved problem. Following Josh5’s github guide, I was able to quickly run through tweaking BIOS and Windows settings for compatibility, to then shrink my Windows installs, and then to boot into the USB flash drive (it’s just a portable version of their Linux OS, has a bunch of full utilities and features) and use Josh5’s command line scripts to install SteamOS.

Josh5 has now created a GUI utility to run the script in the last few days, though I found the command line worked more consistently for me…. once I learnt the different copy & paste keystrokes – to confound you these seem to be application dependent. And upon the next reboot, I was shunted, not into Windows, but into SteamOS and its setup utility. Nice and easy, I thought.

But then, after selecting language and time zone, the downstairs PC didn’t display any networks for me to join. Strange since, firstly, it had internet through the USB flash drive installer, and secondly, it’s connected via Ethernet and doesn’t have WiFi built in.

My other PC seemed to fare better, showing both the wired Ethernet and WiFi networks, and was able to start a small SteamOS update… only to fail and complain about lacking network connectivity right at the last second.

We’re already further down the rabbit hole than 95% of PC gamers would likely want to travel. Partitioning drives? Tweaking BIOS settings like “Secure Boot”? Command line scripts? Potentially deleting Windows outright? This isn’t really for your average John or Jane Gamer, and it’s proof enough that something like the Steam Machine is a valuable part of the PC gaming community. I can absolutely see the likes of Lenovo or Asus producing direct Steam Machine rivals, while boutique PC builders can sell semi-customised SteamOS boxes using MicroATX boards and cases (just without the lower power consumption and whisper quiet fans). French retailer LDLC has already revealed the “Stim Machine” which offers a much better GPU, for example.

Back to the networking problems at hand, I was able to overcome them both, with a bit of persistent DuckDuckGo-ing – no AI was used in my scouring of the internet for solutions. Sure, I had to claw through some of the Steam Deck specific support, and past resolutions related merely to OS updates as opposed to fresh installs, and skim past queries and forum posts from the original SteamOS era, but I eventually found the key solutions I needed.

Let me break it down what my issues were:

For the upstairs PC, I simply needed to push through a SteamOS update via the command line. For the TV PC, the lack of a Wi-Fi card on the base B450 Tomahawk Max causes issues such that the network stack doesn’t load…. which can also be fixed via the command line.

And here’s what I had to do:

Access the command line with ctrl-alt-F4 – switching back to Steam’s main GUI uses ctrl-alt-F1.

Within the command line, it will request a user, which defaults to ‘deck’. There is no password here (you would need to set that separately if you need superuser access), so just type in ‘deck’ and hit return.

To force an update, simply run the following command:

steamos-update

When this is done, revert to the Steam UI with ctrl-alt-F1 and carry on.

With the “No Network Found” error, check the networking status with:

systemctl status NetworkManager

Look in the readout to see if the device is reported as ‘inactive (dead), and if the logs finish by saying the system ‘Stopped Network Manager’. In this case I could simply run the following to restart the process:

systemctl start NetworkManager

Recheck the status, and with an active network I would suggest then running steamos-update from the commandline as well.

Thanks to BabarasBartBarbier for the steamos-update fix, and to niekez and julienchabanon for helping strangers on the internet with Network Manager.

Since getting SteamOS installed, I’ve only just started to explore what it can do as a gaming platform. For my living room, though, SteamOS has immediately injected a more console-like element to gaming on PC. I can push a couple power buttons, pick up a pad and sit on my sofa and immediately have a gamepad-friendly UI to interact with.

The Steam Machine can go further than this with HDMI-CEC, and you can jury rig Windows with an isolated local account (for security reasons) to do the same, but it’s nicer to have this be the intended way for a gaming machine to run. Straight to the games, not to a login screen.

So, is SteamOS ready to replace your Windows install? It might be for a certain kind of gamer, but it’s still fraught with concerns and worries if you’re not a confirmed tinkerer and DIY PC builder, and aren’t sure if you want to completely ditch Microsoft. Command lines bring the unfamiliarities of 1980s computing to the 2020s, and there were some hiccups along the way that needed researching, but really the “scariest” part of all this is if you decide to go back to Windows and need to delete half a dozen partitions to do so.

Tags: Steam Deck, Steam Machine, SteamOS, valve