Makes a ton of sense the do this. MS has completely dropped the ball on PC gaming, essentially turning their operating system into malware AI slop. Once again Valve could step up to benevolently steer the trajectory of gaming towards greener pastures.

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I find it really unfortunate valve decided to mix adult content in with their normal catalog. Steam is something kids and teens use and the last thing they need more of these days is accidental exposure to highly taboo material during their formative years. They should really just release a red light client under a different name with real age verification. As a dad, I don’t even feel comfortable letting my kids browse steam on their own anymore.

On the topic of censorship via payment processors: they shouldn’t have this power, nor should the cloud hosts or the dns and name registrars. But they do and as a faceless blob they will cave to any pressure. There is definitely content that should be illegal, however it shouldn’t be up to payment processors at all.

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Anyone know of the steam input support on this one works over 2.4ghz? The steam input support on other 8bd controllers have only been Bluetooth only.

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Does anyone recommend a good workflow for dealing appimage apps in kde? I know you can just download them and execute, but it would be nice to have them install somewhere standard with automatic launch menu integration and whatnot. Anyone recommend anything available on discovery for this?

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Valve has a large, loyal customer base. They can keep making hardware, focusing in the priorities they want and it will sell well, even if it's not top spec hardware. Raw benchmarks isn't the issue in this space. As noted by the video, software and hardware integration with that software was the blocker. MS failed to address this over 10 years. The other major development is steam input which none of this would work well without.

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Been running 3.7 on desktop AMD hardware since I was tipped off it had broad device support. Wrote up the project here:

- Build Notes: https://bret.io/blog/2025/you-can-just-build-a-steam-machine/ [External Link]
- Install notes: https://bret.io/blog/2025/its-time-to-install-steamos-3.7/ [External Link]

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They need steam input over 2.4Ghz (native gyro, and native Botton mapping for all buttons). If they can do this, they will have a near perfect steamOS controller and could completely corner the market.

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Watch, Microsoft will launch a handheld without gyro aim and continue failing.

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People should definitely also check out SteamFork. It takes over where HoloISO left off, and they are doing a way better job of pushing forward the concept of a downstream from steamOS distro. It tends to be fairly bleeding edge, so compatibility might be narrower, but in general, if you want the true deck experience on non-deck hardware, it's your closest bet.

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The original steam machine failed because proton support wasn't there. Games just ran slower given the cost of the hardware at the time. Since then, proton has matured and works as good (and sometimes better 🤔) than windows.

You can just build a steam machine now though. Here is the one I built last year https://pcpartpicker.com/b/h7QD4D [External Link]

Getting SteamOS on it can be finicky: the official recovery ISO is tuned for the deck and finicky on non-deck hardware. SteamFork [External Link] is the cleanest directly downstream project from SteamOS at the moment. There are also OSs others to choose from that are not downstream, but similar like ChimeraOS or Bazzite. The further away you get from upstream, the more differences you run into, so what you choose comes down to preference.

The only real missing piece is a Steam Controller 2 (the deck, in controller form). The next best thing is the DualSense edge, but cost is prohibitive.

Anyway, I recommend trying out a build!

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