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There's so many rumors swirling around Valve lately.

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A new Steam controller in mass production? Steam link on Raspberry Pi 5?

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New branding guidelines suggesting powered by SteamOS consoles?

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Is that for handhelds like this one from Lenovo? Or is it for the return of Steam Machine game consoles?

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Either way, it really looks like Valve is ramping up to make a serious challenge

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to Microsoft's desktop dominance. And I sure hope they do.

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Some of you probably remember that Valve's SteamOS started as a response to the threat

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of Microsoft creating a walled garden with Windows 8.

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A threat that not only hasn't gone away, but might be even greater than ever with the consolidation of the Xbox and Windows stores.

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There's only one small problem. As good as SteamOS is, delivering a console-like gaming experience for thousands of PC games,

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even ones that were only ever intended to run on Windows,

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Valve still hasn't made a version that's designed for me to put on my custom PC.

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Or have they? As it turns out, Valve has been working away in the background,

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preparing SteamOS for its promised official wide release.

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So I think now is as good a time as any to see what the experience is like

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if you download SteamOS and throw it on your PC.

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It's also a good time to learn about our sponsor.

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Before you type that comment, yes, I know I don't need to wait for SteamOS to be a Linux gamer.

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But in spite of what your friendly neighborhood neckbeard may claim,

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most Linux distros still involve a lot of manual faffing about to get things working.

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And if Linux gaming is tricky for me, your little cousin Joey Mainstream is going to be screwed.

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That is why we need SteamOS. Projects like HoloISO, Chimera, Bazite,

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and the other one that you're furiously typing in the comments right now

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are glimpses at a beautiful, penguin-powered future that could be.

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But the fact of the matter is that barring some kind of earth-shaking change

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when regular people make the great penguin migration,

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it's going to be on a steam-powered train. Let's see what the setup process is like.

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Now, I'm no Joey, I at least know what a computer is,

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but I want to play my games. And my favorite games include Anno 1800 and tape-to-tape,

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not grub-boot entry simulator. I want it to be actually easy.

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As we're filming this, there are two ways for a non-developer to get SteamOS 3.

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Option one, buy a Steam Deck. Easy, but you're stuck with a Steam Deck.

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Option two, download the Steam Deck recovery image, flash that to a USB key, and install it on compatible hardware.

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Valve is committed to making a proper installer before the full release,

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but that's the way you do it now. Less easy, and it doesn't help that at the time of filming,

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Googling install SteamOS actually leads you to the

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build-your-own-steam-machine page for the old Debian-based SteamOS 2

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from like a decade ago. That's kind of rough for Joey.

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Well, to Valve's credit, at least it links to the page for the Steam Deck recovery image,

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so I think we can figure it out. We used Rufus to image it to a USB drive, booted the live image,

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picked this option to re-image our Steam Deck,

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then we basked in this glorious wall of fast-scrolling text,

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and that's it. We've installed SteamOS on our hardware for a total cost of zero dollars.

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Take that, Microsoft, and thanks, Gaben.

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But does it work? Well, the thing is we won't know until we reboot,

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because everything that you've seen so far can be done even on unsupported hardware.

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What do you mean unsupported Linus? Linux supports like everything, doesn't it?

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Well, yes, but also no. Linux is an umbrella term that we use to describe many distinct computing experiences,

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and it's up to the maintainer of the Linux distribution to decide what it does and doesn't do out of the box.

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And as you'd imagine, the Steam Deck recovery image is developed for,

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well, the Steam Deck first and foremost, which results in some key hardware requirements,

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the Big 2 being a discrete AMD GPU,

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and an NVMe boot drive to install to.

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Also, this is fun, during the setup process,

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there is not any kind of prompt for which driver,

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which partition you'd like to install to. It just assumes that you want to totally overwrite the drive of your Steam Deck,

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so consider yourself warned. While I'm throwing out warnings,

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there's also limited firmware included. Support for Marvell network cards, for example, is mostly missing,

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and there are some special requirements around sleep modes.

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The TLDR, though, is basically use the hardware that you can find

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that is most similar to a Steam Deck, if you want to try this for yourself right now.

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For our test system, then, we went with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600G on a Nasus Prime B550MA motherboard

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with 16 gigs of DDR4 memory from G-Skill. That's a big Steam Deck.

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Now, we did notice some mentions of NVIDIA in recent SteamOS patch notes,

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so we did try installing with an RTX 3060 GPU,

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but while we were able to boot the USB drive and we were able to clone the image to the NVMe drive,

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we were not able to continue with the setup process and instead got this garbled screen.

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Our mission today does not include troubleshooting drivers

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or the Linux boot process. I don't care if you think it's easy, Joey doesn't.

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So, we listened to Valve and switched back to a Radeon RX 7600,

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where we had a much better time getting through the, actually, refreshingly simple setup.

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Pick a language, pick a time zone, pick a network and let it do its thing.

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Now, I don't know why I get a battery low warning on a desktop,

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but in the grand scheme of things, that's a pretty small issue

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and a few minutes later, we can sign in either with our username and password

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or via the Steam mobile app. After a quick scroll and click,

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we're off to the races in game mode. Now, you've probably all seen the Steam Deck interface at this point.

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Cosmetically, it's basically desktop big picture,

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but Valve tries to squeeze out a little bit of extra horsepower

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by running it on the lighter weight gamescope micro-compositor

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instead of in the full desktop environment that we'll look at in just a moment.

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The UI is okay with a keyboard and mouse,

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but it's really designed to be navigated with a controller from the moment you boot to the moment you finish your last one more round

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and then head to bed. Let's give it a shot. Oh, you got one of my favorite games on here, let's go!

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No way. Is this the new Hori Steam controller? Yep. Definitely a controller.

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These are not even analog triggers.

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Oh, what a terrible shot. I'm filming to him. I know, I know, it sucked.

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Boom, take that. Boom, take that. Oh no.

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I think the most remarkable thing about this gaming experience is that there is absolutely nothing remarkable about it.

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This is exactly what it's like to play this game on Windows.

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Complete chaos. Okay, we got 10 seconds. One last rush, here we go, here we go,

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here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go.

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Barely even getting shot away. You know what? You call it barely, I call it a shot.

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Where's your shot? That's what I thought. Oh, this controller feels really cheap.

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Can I switch over to a different one? I could find something, yeah. It's probably the controller, Jordan.

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It's got to be the controller issue. Is the dongle in there? You have a cable right in front of you you could probably use.

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I mean, that's an option, I guess. Oh, it's an Xbox controller, I mean, sure, yeah, that should work.

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Okay, here we go, here we go. Theoretically, this should just flawlessly work

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because, you know, SteamOS, let's go. Oh, there we go.

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Yeah, no, that makes sense, that makes sense. Yep. All good.

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Here we go. Just shoot, thank you, finally.

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It's such a seamless experience. It's kind of mind-blowing to me.

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Like, I know SteamOS has been out for years now at this point,

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but the fact that this just works so flawlessly,

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so effortlessly, is mind-blowing to me.

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Okay, break up pass, here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go.

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Come on, someone put the bucket in that.

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This is awful. Well, SteamOS won't make you a better gamer, that's for sure.

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All right, let's play something else. Install, what do we got? Hey, how about some vampire survivors?

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Play some casual games.

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Oh, balls. Oh, balls, I'm taking damage. I'm taking damage from bats.

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What am I, the Joker? Nothing, buddy.

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Oh yeah, here we go. Got that King Bible.

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Oh, let's go, here's my King Bible. Boom, boom, boom. Take that, zombies, you got nothing.

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Oh my goodness. What in the Sam heck is going on here?

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Get out of here, you lousy bats. Yeah, I forgot how hard it is when you don't have all the upgrades and stuff,

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and all the better characters and everything. It's freaking hard.

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I need upgrades, I can't get my jewels. I need them.

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Man, I gotta set this up in my living room. Like, I have a Windows install that has Steam on it

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and is configured to launch Steam in big picture mode every time I turn it on, but I never bother with it because it's Windows

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and it's just like stupid and tedious and Windows update

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and just like, it's not a console-like experience

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and that's ultimately what you want in the living room. You don't want to get up and go find your stupid mouse and keyboard

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and like, you can use a mouse and keyboard. We'll talk a little bit more about that later.

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But you don't have to, you can just be ready to go.

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That's the Steam OS experience and I'm loving this.

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What about all the just like, special like, Steam Decky stuff, like hardware monitor and stuff like that.

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Like, can we do any of that? Yep, the button's on that controller actually.

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The button's on that. The three dot, oh, sorry, wrong controller. Oh!

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Hit Xbox. No, no, no, I'm going back to the, I'm going back to the Steam controller.

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Okay, so I got my three dots here.

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It's all there. Okay, that's, that's kind of cool.

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If you don't have a Steam controller, Xbox button and A, we'll bring that up.

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Okay. It's Xbox button and A.

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All right. Hey, cool. Well, let's disable the frame limit.

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What do we have any of that for? Performance overlay level. Oh, cool.

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So that's just that like 60 FPS counter that we've got. The normal counter thing you would get in Steam Deck.

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Oh, we can enable HDR. I wonder if it's going to work though.

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We can try and do maternal. Let's try it and do maternal. Why does it not look that HDR-y?

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It's just- Oh, because the game's not nice to share.

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Okay. All right. Well, that'll help. Cool.

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Let's go with ultra and no matrixing.

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That's probably a better bet. Valve has done some work on getting HDR to work in Linux with the Steam Deck OLED.

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What I don't know is how well it's going to work on a TV. This TV also, not the brightest HDR TV,

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so maybe not our best case scenario for testing.

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In fact, honestly, it looks not great.

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I do wonder how much of it is the TV though, but everything thinks it's HDR.

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Maybe this is one area where there's a little bit of room for improvement here.

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Hey, the game's running great though. Getting 163 FPS and HDR is something where the Xbox and the PlayStation

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are going to give you a just works experience.

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Then again, like I said before, I don't know how much of the problem is just the fact that this TV is not very good.

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Ugh, I'm not playing this game with a controller really.

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You could always keep working mostly. Oh, right.

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What am I even doing right now? Oh, let's go.

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All of a sudden, you got good. Right? It's almost like there is a superior control scheme.

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No, couldn't be. Bet. Oh, what?

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Where'd you go? Oh, no. There we go.

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The bottom line is that for living room gaming, most of what I would need is here.

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The 8-bit dough controller we tried worked out of the box with its dongle,

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or failing that any modern wired or Bluetooth controller should pick up without too much trouble.

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And I didn't have any issues with networking or sound,

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though your mileage may vary there a little bit, like I mentioned before.

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I would say that one glaring problem is that games launch at the Steam Deck's

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native 1280 by 800 resolution. But this can be fixed by manually setting the system resolution in the settings,

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and then games should pick that up. Between Proton and native Linux versions of games,

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there is a huge library now. Like, man, compared to the last time we did a gaming on Linux video,

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there is an enormous library of games that just work now.

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And while there have been some regressions, notably for online competitive titles,

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where the developers don't want to maintain their anti-cheat on Linux,

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game compatibility has mostly been growing steadily.

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I think with the right hardware, I'm pretty much ready to say that building a SteamOS game console for your living room is

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pretty awesome. However, I can totally see why Valve has held off on saying the same.

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Most gamers demand more than just my Steam game works.

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And there are some essential tools that can't simply be added from inside game mode,

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like Discord and alternate game stores like GOG and Battle.net.

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And, hey, this is a PC, right?

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What if I need to get some actual work done? How is desktop mode coming along?

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I guess now's a great time to continue using the mouse and keyboard that I've got right here.

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Power and switch to desktop.

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That was quick. It looks like pretty much any other Linux desktop,

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although it isn't quite. SteamOS 3 is what's known as an immutable operating system.

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If you already know what that means and you have strong feelings about it, SteamOS is probably not meant for you.

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If you don't know what that means, the oversimplified TLDR is,

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it means you can't screw it up too badly because it locks down critical system components

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and it will reset itself when you reboot. That doesn't mean you can't install software.

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It just means that you're effectively limited to what's available in their flat pack-based Discover Software Center.

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These flat packs might not be as efficient as if you installed VA Package Manager,

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but what it shows is that Valve learned very well from their community's love of,

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hey, how do I fix X and Counter-Strike, press F10,

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trolling that has taken place over the years. They've made SteamOS pretty hard to bung up too badly because, think about it,

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realistically, poor Joey would almost certainly fall for the old

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RMRF asterisk trick at least once.

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Now, to be clear, there are ways outside of their

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all applications list here to install software. We even found this script on GitHub that allows us to install dozens of non-Steam stores.

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But for the joeys out there, here's a standard disclaimer about running scripts

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that you find on the internet all willy-nilly. I'd recommend that you stick to the Software Center.

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The question is, if you do that, can you get any real work done here?

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Let's see. Are browsers... Oh, internet. There.

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Okay, web browsers. Weave, Vivaldi, Brave, just the Chromium web browser.

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Man, there's a ton of options here. This is great. And if you consider how much of it you do in a web browser these days,

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there's a good chance that we can get a lot of what we need to do done.

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What about Discord though? We mentioned Discord earlier.

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Hey, there it is. Four stars. Boom, install.

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Shameless plug for the LTT commuter backpack. We've got a lot more information available on it now,

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but in a nutshell, great backpack, 150 bucks.

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Go for it, LTTstore.com. What else we got here? Oh, dude!

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Oh no, we've lost them forever. Space cadet pinballs in here!

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Here we go, here we go, here we go. Here we go, let's go.

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Ba, really? Ba, come on!

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Come on!

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Oh, come on! Come on!

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Come on! Okay, coming back to Discord.

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Realistically, if you want to be able to use it while you're in game mode,

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you need to add it as a non-Steam app in desktop mode first.

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It's not a big deal, but it is the kind of thing that could trip up a less informed user.

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You can also do that with other apps like non-Steam games and browsers.

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Browser can really come in handy over time in game mode. Now, of course, it is worth noting that since you're not concerned about conserving battery life

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and squeezing every last drop of performance out of mobile hardware,

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you don't actually need to go back to game mode at all.

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Steam works just fine here on the desktop.

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And as much as I love touchpads and joysticks, sometimes a keyboard and mouse is just plain a better way to use a computer.

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With standard peripherals, I can happily use my browser and apps

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just like I would on Windows, macOS, or any other Linux.

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The slash home folder is persistent, so you don't have to worry about losing your files when you reboot.

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It just resets the system files so that the turn it off and turn it back on

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really does work to fix most things. And other than that, it pretty much just works like I would expect a computer to work.

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Pretty much. We did run into a funny scenario a little while ago. We were trying to get an old printer working with generic drivers,

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and I had a brainstorm that went, oh man, Linux.

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I bet Linux will work. I'll just grab a Steam deck. That already has Linux on it.

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Yeah, that's when I learned that SteamOS does not include support for printers out of the box,

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and you might come across similar gotchas over time.

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Let's see if they've added it. No, they have not.

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Neat. So SteamOS. It's pretty great right now,

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but it's clear that there's a bit of work to be done. So what about those rumors we were talking about?

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Could new Steam machines be announced and released at any time?

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Absolutely. And I think we're due. Valve has spent years getting SteamOS to the point where it's at.

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They've made some hard decisions along the way, but overall it works great on the right hardware,

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and it keeps getting better. And the playable game library is huge now with no signs of slowing down.

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With that said, is SteamOS 3 ready to dethrone Windows?

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Not yet. There's enough prickly edges that keep it from being a totally smooth experience,

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and you can make the argument that Windows has a lot of prickly edges too,

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but the difference is that so many more people know how to troubleshoot it.

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So here's what I'd say is on Valve's to-do list. They need a simple installer,

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they need out-of-the-box support for a lot more hardware,

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and just one or two more passes of spit and polish.

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Also printer support. I do believe that they're going to get there though,

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especially if Microsoft decides they want to risk their market share by forcing their store on everyone,

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or if they keep making unreasonable hardware demands.

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Now I think all that's left is to unreasonably demand that you hear this message from our sponsor.

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If you guys liked this video, maybe check out our last video on Steam features that you might not know about.

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There's some really cool ones in there.