SteamOS for the rest of us?
2025 is already shaping up to be a great year for gamers who prefer SteamOS over Windows on their handhelds. In May, Lenovo will ship the Legion Go S Powered by Steam OS, and Valve promised an installable beta of the Linux operating system for other devices before then. But with all this positive news comes pressing questions: What about people who want to install SteamOS on their desktop computers? What about systems with Intel and Nvidia components?
At the moment, SteamOS runs as a flagship on the Steam Deck, which features a semi-custom AMD processor. And in the near future it will run smoothly on another semi-custom AMD processor — the Ryzen Z2 Go — inside the Lenovo Legion Go S. But Valve’s messaging has been deliberately vague when discussing SteamOS expansion beyond these handhelds. AMD power.
Valve and Intel work together in support
However, there is very hopeful news on the horizon. A recent interview between French newspaper Frandroid and Valve designer Pierre-Loup Griffais – a key and vocal figure behind the development of SteamOS – reveals a lot about Valve’s plans and its progress towards delivering SteamOS to the rest of us.
On the subject of Intel support, Griffais says “[…] on some platforms, support is still very basic. Intel is working a little better than before, but our leadership teams and Intel are still working on it.”
The first, then, is that Valve and Intel are collaborating to address this, which is encouraging. With the powerful integrated graphics performance of Intel’s Lunar Lake, this paves the way for SteamOS support on MSI’s Claw 8 AI+ and future devices that will adopt Intel processors.
4 Valve engineers working on the open source Nvidia driver
But the big elephant in the room has always been Nvidia. Unlike Intel and AMD, Nvidia’s proprietary GeForce graphics driver is not built into the Linux kernel, although Nvidia is moving towards that.
“With NVIDIA, the integration of open source drivers is still in the early stages,” says Griffais. “There is still a lot of work to be done in this direction. So it’s a little tricky to say we’re going to release this version when most people wouldn’t have a good experience.”
Griffais also revealed that Valve has four developers dedicated to working on Nvidia’s open source driver. “It’s just that there’s still a lot of work to be done,” Griffais says.
OK! So draw #2 is that Valve is clearly committed to supporting SteamOS on Nvidia hardware — work that will likely benefit the entire Linux gaming system and open source community.
Part of the reason Valve is taking graphics driver development under its wing is so it can optimize games for SteamOS “without having to wait for a manufacturer to take care of it.”
We’ve seen this approach yield positive results on Steam Deck – and by extension Linux – as far back as Elden Ring in 2022, when Valve released a patch that solved the game’s horrendous stuttering. In fact, at the time, it ran better on Linux than on Windows.
While there’s no solid roadmap or timeline (rarely for Valve), it’s refreshing to see confirmation that Valve is hard at work building SteamOS support for the wider PC gaming ecosystem.
I encourage you to read (and translate) the entire interview. It’s a fantastic and insightful discussion that also touches on Linux distributions like Bazzite and Nobara, Valve’s future hardware efforts, and the very long road Valve has taken to get to this point.
