There's so many rumors swirling around Valve lately.
A new Steam controller in mass production? Steam link on Raspberry Pi 5?
New branding guidelines suggesting powered by SteamOS consoles?
Is that for handhelds like this one from Lenovo? Or is it for the return of Steam Machine game consoles?
Either way, it really looks like Valve is ramping up to make a serious challenge
to Microsoft's desktop dominance. And I sure hope they do.
Some of you probably remember that Valve's SteamOS started as a response to the threat
of Microsoft creating a walled garden with Windows 8.
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.
There's only one small problem. As good as SteamOS is, delivering a console-like gaming experience for thousands of PC games,
even ones that were only ever intended to run on Windows,
Valve still hasn't made a version that's designed for me to put on my custom PC.
Or have they? As it turns out, Valve has been working away in the background,
preparing SteamOS for its promised official wide release.
So I think now is as good a time as any to see what the experience is like
if you download SteamOS and throw it on your PC.
It's also a good time to learn about our sponsor.
Before you type that comment, yes, I know I don't need to wait for SteamOS to be a Linux gamer.
But in spite of what your friendly neighborhood neckbeard may claim,
most Linux distros still involve a lot of manual faffing about to get things working.
And if Linux gaming is tricky for me, your little cousin Joey Mainstream is going to be screwed.
That is why we need SteamOS. Projects like HoloISO, Chimera, Bazite,
and the other one that you're furiously typing in the comments right now
are glimpses at a beautiful, penguin-powered future that could be.
But the fact of the matter is that barring some kind of earth-shaking change
when regular people make the great penguin migration,
it's going to be on a steam-powered train. Let's see what the setup process is like.
Now, I'm no Joey, I at least know what a computer is,
but I want to play my games. And my favorite games include Anno 1800 and tape-to-tape,
not grub-boot entry simulator. I want it to be actually easy.
As we're filming this, there are two ways for a non-developer to get SteamOS 3.
Option one, buy a Steam Deck. Easy, but you're stuck with a Steam Deck.
Option two, download the Steam Deck recovery image, flash that to a USB key, and install it on compatible hardware.
Valve is committed to making a proper installer before the full release,
but that's the way you do it now. Less easy, and it doesn't help that at the time of filming,
Googling install SteamOS actually leads you to the
build-your-own-steam-machine page for the old Debian-based SteamOS 2
from like a decade ago. That's kind of rough for Joey.
Well, to Valve's credit, at least it links to the page for the Steam Deck recovery image,
so I think we can figure it out. We used Rufus to image it to a USB drive, booted the live image,
picked this option to re-image our Steam Deck,
then we basked in this glorious wall of fast-scrolling text,
and that's it. We've installed SteamOS on our hardware for a total cost of zero dollars.
Take that, Microsoft, and thanks, Gaben.
But does it work? Well, the thing is we won't know until we reboot,
because everything that you've seen so far can be done even on unsupported hardware.
What do you mean unsupported Linus? Linux supports like everything, doesn't it?
Well, yes, but also no. Linux is an umbrella term that we use to describe many distinct computing experiences,
and it's up to the maintainer of the Linux distribution to decide what it does and doesn't do out of the box.
And as you'd imagine, the Steam Deck recovery image is developed for,
well, the Steam Deck first and foremost, which results in some key hardware requirements,
the Big 2 being a discrete AMD GPU,
and an NVMe boot drive to install to.
Also, this is fun, during the setup process,
there is not any kind of prompt for which driver,
which partition you'd like to install to. It just assumes that you want to totally overwrite the drive of your Steam Deck,
so consider yourself warned. While I'm throwing out warnings,
there's also limited firmware included. Support for Marvell network cards, for example, is mostly missing,
and there are some special requirements around sleep modes.
The TLDR, though, is basically use the hardware that you can find
that is most similar to a Steam Deck, if you want to try this for yourself right now.
For our test system, then, we went with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600G on a Nasus Prime B550MA motherboard
with 16 gigs of DDR4 memory from G-Skill. That's a big Steam Deck.
Now, we did notice some mentions of NVIDIA in recent SteamOS patch notes,
so we did try installing with an RTX 3060 GPU,
but while we were able to boot the USB drive and we were able to clone the image to the NVMe drive,
we were not able to continue with the setup process and instead got this garbled screen.
Our mission today does not include troubleshooting drivers
or the Linux boot process. I don't care if you think it's easy, Joey doesn't.
So, we listened to Valve and switched back to a Radeon RX 7600,
where we had a much better time getting through the, actually, refreshingly simple setup.
Pick a language, pick a time zone, pick a network and let it do its thing.
Now, I don't know why I get a battery low warning on a desktop,
but in the grand scheme of things, that's a pretty small issue
and a few minutes later, we can sign in either with our username and password
or via the Steam mobile app. After a quick scroll and click,
we're off to the races in game mode. Now, you've probably all seen the Steam Deck interface at this point.
Cosmetically, it's basically desktop big picture,
but Valve tries to squeeze out a little bit of extra horsepower
by running it on the lighter weight gamescope micro-compositor
instead of in the full desktop environment that we'll look at in just a moment.
The UI is okay with a keyboard and mouse,
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
and then head to bed. Let's give it a shot. Oh, you got one of my favorite games on here, let's go!
No way. Is this the new Hori Steam controller? Yep. Definitely a controller.
These are not even analog triggers.
Oh, what a terrible shot. I'm filming to him. I know, I know, it sucked.
Boom, take that. Boom, take that. Oh no.
I think the most remarkable thing about this gaming experience is that there is absolutely nothing remarkable about it.
This is exactly what it's like to play this game on Windows.
Complete chaos. Okay, we got 10 seconds. One last rush, here we go, here we go,
here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go.
Barely even getting shot away. You know what? You call it barely, I call it a shot.
Where's your shot? That's what I thought. Oh, this controller feels really cheap.
Can I switch over to a different one? I could find something, yeah. It's probably the controller, Jordan.
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.
I mean, that's an option, I guess. Oh, it's an Xbox controller, I mean, sure, yeah, that should work.
Okay, here we go, here we go. Theoretically, this should just flawlessly work
because, you know, SteamOS, let's go. Oh, there we go.
Yeah, no, that makes sense, that makes sense. Yep. All good.
Here we go. Just shoot, thank you, finally.
It's such a seamless experience. It's kind of mind-blowing to me.
Like, I know SteamOS has been out for years now at this point,
but the fact that this just works so flawlessly,
so effortlessly, is mind-blowing to me.
Okay, break up pass, here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go.
Come on, someone put the bucket in that.
This is awful. Well, SteamOS won't make you a better gamer, that's for sure.
All right, let's play something else. Install, what do we got? Hey, how about some vampire survivors?
Play some casual games.
Oh, balls. Oh, balls, I'm taking damage. I'm taking damage from bats.
What am I, the Joker? Nothing, buddy.
Oh yeah, here we go. Got that King Bible.
Oh, let's go, here's my King Bible. Boom, boom, boom. Take that, zombies, you got nothing.
Oh my goodness. What in the Sam heck is going on here?
Get out of here, you lousy bats. Yeah, I forgot how hard it is when you don't have all the upgrades and stuff,
and all the better characters and everything. It's freaking hard.
I need upgrades, I can't get my jewels. I need them.
Man, I gotta set this up in my living room. Like, I have a Windows install that has Steam on it
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
and it's just like stupid and tedious and Windows update
and just like, it's not a console-like experience
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
and like, you can use a mouse and keyboard. We'll talk a little bit more about that later.
But you don't have to, you can just be ready to go.
That's the Steam OS experience and I'm loving this.
What about all the just like, special like, Steam Decky stuff, like hardware monitor and stuff like that.
Like, can we do any of that? Yep, the button's on that controller actually.
The button's on that. The three dot, oh, sorry, wrong controller. Oh!
Hit Xbox. No, no, no, I'm going back to the, I'm going back to the Steam controller.
Okay, so I got my three dots here.
It's all there. Okay, that's, that's kind of cool.
If you don't have a Steam controller, Xbox button and A, we'll bring that up.
Okay. It's Xbox button and A.
All right. Hey, cool. Well, let's disable the frame limit.
What do we have any of that for? Performance overlay level. Oh, cool.
So that's just that like 60 FPS counter that we've got. The normal counter thing you would get in Steam Deck.
Oh, we can enable HDR. I wonder if it's going to work though.
We can try and do maternal. Let's try it and do maternal. Why does it not look that HDR-y?
It's just- Oh, because the game's not nice to share.
Okay. All right. Well, that'll help. Cool.
Let's go with ultra and no matrixing.
That's probably a better bet. Valve has done some work on getting HDR to work in Linux with the Steam Deck OLED.
What I don't know is how well it's going to work on a TV. This TV also, not the brightest HDR TV,
so maybe not our best case scenario for testing.
In fact, honestly, it looks not great.
I do wonder how much of it is the TV though, but everything thinks it's HDR.
Maybe this is one area where there's a little bit of room for improvement here.
Hey, the game's running great though. Getting 163 FPS and HDR is something where the Xbox and the PlayStation
are going to give you a just works experience.
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.
Ugh, I'm not playing this game with a controller really.
You could always keep working mostly. Oh, right.
What am I even doing right now? Oh, let's go.
All of a sudden, you got good. Right? It's almost like there is a superior control scheme.
No, couldn't be. Bet. Oh, what?
Where'd you go? Oh, no. There we go.
The bottom line is that for living room gaming, most of what I would need is here.
The 8-bit dough controller we tried worked out of the box with its dongle,
or failing that any modern wired or Bluetooth controller should pick up without too much trouble.
And I didn't have any issues with networking or sound,
though your mileage may vary there a little bit, like I mentioned before.
I would say that one glaring problem is that games launch at the Steam Deck's
native 1280 by 800 resolution. But this can be fixed by manually setting the system resolution in the settings,
and then games should pick that up. Between Proton and native Linux versions of games,
there is a huge library now. Like, man, compared to the last time we did a gaming on Linux video,
there is an enormous library of games that just work now.
And while there have been some regressions, notably for online competitive titles,
where the developers don't want to maintain their anti-cheat on Linux,
game compatibility has mostly been growing steadily.
I think with the right hardware, I'm pretty much ready to say that building a SteamOS game console for your living room is
pretty awesome. However, I can totally see why Valve has held off on saying the same.
Most gamers demand more than just my Steam game works.
And there are some essential tools that can't simply be added from inside game mode,
like Discord and alternate game stores like GOG and Battle.net.
And, hey, this is a PC, right?
What if I need to get some actual work done? How is desktop mode coming along?
I guess now's a great time to continue using the mouse and keyboard that I've got right here.
Power and switch to desktop.
That was quick. It looks like pretty much any other Linux desktop,
although it isn't quite. SteamOS 3 is what's known as an immutable operating system.
If you already know what that means and you have strong feelings about it, SteamOS is probably not meant for you.
If you don't know what that means, the oversimplified TLDR is,
it means you can't screw it up too badly because it locks down critical system components
and it will reset itself when you reboot. That doesn't mean you can't install software.
It just means that you're effectively limited to what's available in their flat pack-based Discover Software Center.
These flat packs might not be as efficient as if you installed VA Package Manager,
but what it shows is that Valve learned very well from their community's love of,
hey, how do I fix X and Counter-Strike, press F10,
trolling that has taken place over the years. They've made SteamOS pretty hard to bung up too badly because, think about it,
realistically, poor Joey would almost certainly fall for the old
RMRF asterisk trick at least once.
Now, to be clear, there are ways outside of their
all applications list here to install software. We even found this script on GitHub that allows us to install dozens of non-Steam stores.
But for the joeys out there, here's a standard disclaimer about running scripts
that you find on the internet all willy-nilly. I'd recommend that you stick to the Software Center.
The question is, if you do that, can you get any real work done here?
Let's see. Are browsers... Oh, internet. There.
Okay, web browsers. Weave, Vivaldi, Brave, just the Chromium web browser.
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,
there's a good chance that we can get a lot of what we need to do done.
What about Discord though? We mentioned Discord earlier.
Hey, there it is. Four stars. Boom, install.
Shameless plug for the LTT commuter backpack. We've got a lot more information available on it now,
but in a nutshell, great backpack, 150 bucks.
Go for it, LTTstore.com. What else we got here? Oh, dude!
Oh no, we've lost them forever. Space cadet pinballs in here!
Here we go, here we go, here we go. Here we go, let's go.
Ba, really? Ba, come on!
Come on!
Oh, come on! Come on!
Come on! Okay, coming back to Discord.
Realistically, if you want to be able to use it while you're in game mode,
you need to add it as a non-Steam app in desktop mode first.
It's not a big deal, but it is the kind of thing that could trip up a less informed user.
You can also do that with other apps like non-Steam games and browsers.
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
and squeezing every last drop of performance out of mobile hardware,
you don't actually need to go back to game mode at all.
Steam works just fine here on the desktop.
And as much as I love touchpads and joysticks, sometimes a keyboard and mouse is just plain a better way to use a computer.
With standard peripherals, I can happily use my browser and apps
just like I would on Windows, macOS, or any other Linux.
The slash home folder is persistent, so you don't have to worry about losing your files when you reboot.
It just resets the system files so that the turn it off and turn it back on
really does work to fix most things. And other than that, it pretty much just works like I would expect a computer to work.
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,
and I had a brainstorm that went, oh man, Linux.
I bet Linux will work. I'll just grab a Steam deck. That already has Linux on it.
Yeah, that's when I learned that SteamOS does not include support for printers out of the box,
and you might come across similar gotchas over time.
Let's see if they've added it. No, they have not.
Neat. So SteamOS. It's pretty great right now,
but it's clear that there's a bit of work to be done. So what about those rumors we were talking about?
Could new Steam machines be announced and released at any time?
Absolutely. And I think we're due. Valve has spent years getting SteamOS to the point where it's at.
They've made some hard decisions along the way, but overall it works great on the right hardware,
and it keeps getting better. And the playable game library is huge now with no signs of slowing down.
With that said, is SteamOS 3 ready to dethrone Windows?
Not yet. There's enough prickly edges that keep it from being a totally smooth experience,
and you can make the argument that Windows has a lot of prickly edges too,
but the difference is that so many more people know how to troubleshoot it.
So here's what I'd say is on Valve's to-do list. They need a simple installer,
they need out-of-the-box support for a lot more hardware,
and just one or two more passes of spit and polish.
Also printer support. I do believe that they're going to get there though,
especially if Microsoft decides they want to risk their market share by forcing their store on everyone,
or if they keep making unreasonable hardware demands.
Now I think all that's left is to unreasonably demand that you hear this message from our sponsor.
If you guys liked this video, maybe check out our last video on Steam features that you might not know about.
There's some really cool ones in there.