Steam Frame and Steam Machine will be another good boost for Flatpaks and desktop Linux overall too

With the Steam Frame and Steam Machine launching with SteamOS Linux this year, we're going to again see a nice boost for Flatpaks and desktop Linux overall.

Linux has, historically, been quite messy when it comes to software distribution. We have various distribution-specific packaging formats like .deb (Debian / Ubuntu), .rpm (Fedora) and the list just goes on and on. Canonical also went their own way with Ubuntu for the likes of Snap, but the real winner is going to end up being Flatpak and the main Flathub store.

Thanks to the Steam Deck releasing, Valve kept Flatpaks with Flathub as the way to grab extra software in the full KDE Plasma desktop mode. That was already a nice big boost, and soon we're going to see the same again with the likes of the new Steam Frame and Steam Machine.

UploadVR have a very nice article up that's worth a read as they were one of the few invited to actually try out the Steam Frame. Their excitement over it, and about learning about Flatpaks, and how they're going to load up their Steam Frame with lots of things has seriously rubbed off onto me too now. As both the Steam Frame and Steam Machine will have that same full KDE Plasma desktop mode that the Steam Deck has, and again for some this may very well be their first introduction to Linux and gaming together.

I really can't wait to see more people discover Linux thanks to new devices coming with SteamOS, and for hopefully more developers to get their apps up on the likes of Flathub - because then everyone on Linux will benefit from easier access and easier updates.

If you take a look at Flathub's own 2025 year in review, it shows some impressive stats too with 438.2M downloads. However, something to keep in mind is not everything on Flathub supports Arm, we'll probably end up seeing more software get updated to support both x86_64 and ARM64. You can see what packages support when you scroll down on a Flathub app page as it will note something like:

Available Architectures
aarch64, x86_64

We've seen how the Steam Deck has pushed more people to try Linux on other devices too, and I expect that only to continue after the release of Valve's new hardware.

Valve's support of open source and having a more open platform continues to be amazing and it shows with the Linux user share on Steam once again hitting an all-time high.