If you don’t get lucky with Valve’s Steam Machine reservation system, you can make your own Steam Machine instead. Valve says that “starting with the SteamOS 3.8 release, you can put together your own Steam Machine using whatever PC parts you want.” SteamOS 3.8.10 launched last week with a slew of updates, including “improved compatibility with recent Intel and AMD platforms.” Alongside that improved compatibility, Valve is giving gamers the green light to install SteamOS on their own desktops.
In an interview with The Verge, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said Valve has been “rolling out improvements to [SteamOS] so it’s more compatible with desktop hardware,” including eventual support for Nvidia graphics.
Griffais says Valve has “a growing team” working on Nvidia driver support for SteamOS, adding, “We’re collaborating with Nvidia very closely.” While he mentioned that Nvidia support might not come this year, Griffais emphasized that “it’s certainly something that we’re working on in the background.”
It’s technically been possible to run SteamOS on your own hardware for a while now, but compatibility has been mostly limited to AMD systems. So far installing it has also required using a Steam Deck recovery image, a process that, speaking from experience, is much less straightforward than the installation process for most other Linux distributions. Trying to run SteamOS on Intel or Nvidia hardware has not been easy so far.
According to Griffais, Valve is working to change that, which could mean that down the line, you’ll be able to run SteamOS on just about any gaming PC hardware you want, including Nvidia.
For the more immediate future, Griffais says SteamOS in its current state should offer a “good experience” on console-like PC setups: “If you have something that is similar to the use case of a Steam Machine, where you have a PC that’s gonna be plugged into a TV, and has a single hard drive that you’re not going to try and dual boot […] you can put SteamOS on there, and you’ll have an experience that is very similar to a Steam Deck docked or a Steam Machine, with some caveats, of course,” like a lack of HDMI-CEC support. But “the core bits of the experience are there. The SteamOS graphics driver, the shader precompilation […] you can get at all of that with the SteamOS.”
While Griffais mentioned a “SteamOS installer,” he also said it’s not designed for dual-booting alongside another OS just yet. “There’s not yet an install wizard where you can easily, you know, move another OS out of the way and partition your hard drive.”
The current SteamOS installation process is still intended to put a fresh OS on a new PC, but Griffais says he imagines “a time where it’s a better experience to install on your desktop and have it coexist with a different operating system.”
Building a gaming PC right now will probably be at least as expensive as a Steam Machine due to the ongoing RAM shortage. But if you don’t want to wait for a Steam Machine reservation, the DIY route is now an option. You can also install SteamOS on an existing gaming PC that’s running Windows or a different operating system, but you will need to wipe your drive in the process (so back up everything beforehand).
There are also other gaming-focused Linux distros to try if you’d rather wait for more improvements to the SteamOS desktop experience, like Bazzite or Nobara.