Monday, November 15th 2021
Valve's Arch Linux-based SteamOS 3.0 to be Available to Public as a Standalone Distribution
As Valve is preparing to launch its handheld gaming console called Steam Deck, the company is investing a lot of resources into the software side of things. Powering the console is the company's custom SteamOS distribution, a modification of Arch Linux in today's form. In previous releases, Valve has been pushing its SteamOS as a modification of Debian Linux. However, that version didn't get updated in over two years, and the last release happened with version 2.195. When the Steam Deck console lands in the consumer's hands, we are supposed to see a new version of SteamOS, called SteamOS 3.0, become available for the public to download as any standalone Linux distribution.
With the release of 3.0, the company is switching to a rolling release OS embedded with bells and whistles to make gaming on Linux a viable option. All that is needed to fire up Steam and start gaming is already pre-installed, and you can get the same Steam Deck experience on your PC or any device that can run Linux. The moment this becomes available to the public, we will update you with more information.
Source:
via 9to5Linux
With the release of 3.0, the company is switching to a rolling release OS embedded with bells and whistles to make gaming on Linux a viable option. All that is needed to fire up Steam and start gaming is already pre-installed, and you can get the same Steam Deck experience on your PC or any device that can run Linux. The moment this becomes available to the public, we will update you with more information.
41 Comments on Valve's Arch Linux-based SteamOS 3.0 to be Available to Public as a Standalone Distribution
KDE + Wayland isn't ready yet. It is quite useless atm you have to use raw betas, that are unstable also. The combinations of what works and doesn't. The video driver binary blobs.. ugh... it looks ugly tbh.
While AMD has released UEFI CPPC2 CPU driver code in September, it ain't really shipping into mainstream kernel yet... Linux doesn't know which cores to boost it you have Ryzen 5000+ CPU.
AMD open-source drivers are amazing, and I'm getting better average FPS than on Windows 11 / 10. I'm glad they switch to Arch, pacman AUR is the way of the future, and giving users the option to choose kernel is great. I prefer KDE over gnome as well, although any user could download gnome DE if they choose.
For Linux beginners, there are some advantages to apt based because of the vast documentation out there. Pop_OS! is a great Linux distro to start with, the strict systemd approach they take will drive some crazy for not using grub.
It was based on Debian in the past but i partially died off because valve gave up on developing it. For the Steam Deck they changed it to being arch based.
Valve has not given up on development, 3.0 has been in development since mid 2019 at least. The repositories were being updated with Clockwerk since that time.
At current point, I cannot even boot a stable LIVE image release of my distro, I've used Fedora for years and currently KDE+Wayland+nvidia even on nouveau cause me system freeze. I had to fall back to Gnome. So the Steam OS release kinda surprises me. Well I don't know... maybe it doesn't use Wayland and it is safe... for a while at least. But as the Ryzen 5000 aware scheduler is still MIA, putting it on the real deck HW would be a disaster at current moment. I haven't poked my eyes for upstream changes in upcoming kernel thou, maybe it is included.
I wouldn't touch Ubuntu, it had made me sad so many times in the past... IMHO Father Torvalds even never had installed it, he was joking that almost once had to do it... almost.