Valve working on SteamOS for general release — company collaborating with Nvidia to ensure compatibility, hints at dual-boot capabilities in the future

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Adding Nvidia and dual-boot support will certainly make SteamOS a much more appealing solution for gamers who don’t want multiple hardware or only have a single device for both work and play.

Valve Steam Machine
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

While the coming availability of the Steam Machine is stealing headlines about Valve, the company quietly announced that it’s also working on SteamOS to give it wider compatibility. Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the engineers Tom’s Hardware talked with to dig into the details of the upcoming console, told The Verge that the company is collaborating with Nvidia “very closely” to develop support for Team Green GPUs. Additionally, he mentioned the possibility of dual-booting SteamOS with Windows or other operating systems in the future. The measures would allow users to build their own DIY Steam Machines in future.

SteamOS 3.0 was built from the ground up for the Steam Deck, which uses AMD hardware. For years now, enterprising users could install the operating system on other systems that feature Team Red hardware. However, if you use parts from other brands like Intel and Nvidia, you’re going to run into a lot of complications. One enthusiast made SteamOS work with an Intel Arc B580 desktop GPU, but it required a lot of advanced steps and troubleshooting that would certainly turn off more casual users.

Valve released the latest version of the gaming operating system, SteamOS 3.8.10, just last week, and it comes with compatibility updates for Intel and AMD platforms, including upcoming Intel-powered handhelds. While support for Nvidia graphics cards isn’t expected to arrive this year, Graiffais told The Verge that “it’s certainly something that we’re working on in the background.” He also mentioned a SteamOS installer that would make it easier for users to wipe an existing operating system and replace it with SteamOS. While it cannot partition a drive for dual-booting yet, Pierre-Loup hinted that the feature might eventually arrive in the future.

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Windows is still the most dominant OS for gaming, and we can see this in the latest Steam survey results, with Windows 11 getting nearly 70% of the market share. However, Linux, especially through SteamOS, is quickly gaining ground. Although it still has a negligible 3.99% share (compared to Windows’ overall 93.85%), it has already overtaken macOS’s 2.16%. This result is likely driven by the popularity of the Steam Deck, despite its recent price hikes, and we expect this to jump even higher once gamers get their hands on the Valve Steam Machine in the coming weeks.

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Jowi Morales
Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • ezst036
    Nvidia's support of Linux is legendarily poor. Mostly it revolves around the fairly new Wayland system.

    Wayland is 18 years old. But in 18 years, Nvidia simply hasn't been able to produce a decent driver for its GPUs.

    For mainstream users who simply play a few games here and there and do not do much you can find plenty of properly working Nvidia usage. However, for the edge cases, and they are legion, you get weird graphical glitches strange font displays, strange other things. Just general unexplained behavior.

    That's the Nvidia driver that does this. This sort of bizarre behavior never happened for users of X11 X.org server, leading people to falsely believe that Wayland was extremely poor programming when it was Nvidia's official driver all the time.

    AMD users and Intel users never had these issues except for the very, very very beginning. These issues were quickly sorted out because the drivers were open source and didn't have any one company standing in the role of gatekeeperism.

    This is why "working with Nvidia" is such a prime problem which is in fact a hard blocker for a general SteamOS release. Nvidia keeps failing to put in place a proper QAQC regimen for its Wayland supporting driver.

    Otherwise, a general release is exciting. But instead. Because of Nvidia. Because Nvidia has now been refusing Wayland for like 15 years. We are waiting.
    Reply
  • Joomsy
    ezst036 said:
    Wayland is 18 years old. But in 18 years, Nvidia simply hasn't been able to produce a decent driver for its GPUs.
    I disagree. I've used Linux for 20 years now, with a mix of Nvidia, AMD, and Intel graphics configurations spread throughout, and Intel always offered the worst experience. AMD was a mixed bag, with the worst of it typically being tearing on the desktop, and issues related to vaapi. Nvidia, though, was always the most user friendly, and made configuring Xorg to fix things like tearing incredibly simple since they were the only ones who bothered to create a management application. That said, when Wayland started to become the standard, I had just moved to an RTX 3060, and the experience was abysmal until driver 555 released. Even with that, though, I still had unacceptable problems, like crashes caused by moving a window across monitors. This, however, was due to GNOME, and not explicitly Nvidia. Once I moved to COSMIC, all of these problems disappeared, and under this environment, I've not had any apparent problems as a result of using Nvidia.

    ezst036 said:
    For mainstream users who simply play a few games here and there and do not do much you can find plenty of properly working Nvidia usage. However, for the edge cases, and they are legion, you get weird graphical glitches strange font displays, strange other things. Just general unexplained behavior.
    Could you please provide examples? I'm definitely not a mainstream user, and I hate when people make these claims without backing them up, because it's really disingenuous. It assumes that only those "mainstream users" are reading them, and won't question them since they'll just go "yup, that lines up with my experience". I use Linux in both casual and professional settings, though, and I'm a tinkerer and sysadmin before anything else.

    ezst036 said:
    That's the Nvidia driver that does this. This sort of bizarre behavior never happened for users of X11 X.org server, leading people to falsely believe that Wayland was extremely poor programming when it was Nvidia's official driver all the time.
    Yes, prior to driver 555, this was the problem, but that driver was released over two years ago at this point, and it's only improved since. So, it's kinda moot to even bring this up. All of the commonly used environments shouldn't be experiencing these issues any longer. Except maybe GNOME. I've not used it since 48, but they seem averse to implementing Wayland protocols that help the Nvidia driver function as it should (explicit sync is a good example, which took them much longer to adopt than other environments), and to this day would rather make more hacks for Mutter.

    ezst036 said:
    AMD users and Intel users never had these issues except for the very, very very beginning. These issues were quickly sorted out because the drivers were open source and didn't have any one company standing in the role of gatekeeperism.
    This is just outright false. I had problems with AMD all the way up until I moved to my new machine in 2023, and AMD users as a whole didn't have HDMI 2.1 support up until very recently thanks to licensing disputes. ProtonDB is also a good place to get disillusioned toward this, as that has a ton of documented AMD bugs. Also, AMD has never had an open source driver. This is a misconception brought on by a misunderstanding of Mesa. It's just a wrapper for propriety, closed source binary blobs. Nvidia is now doing the exact same thing with the "open" version of their driver. All AMD did was shift focus from their Catalyst driver, start contributing more to Mesa's wrapper, and provide the blobs for it. Them being treated as some FOSS darling is so tiresome to see, because this has been falsely parroted for over a decade now. And again, Nvidia is doing something similar for FOSS these days by contributing to both Mesa and Nova (the Rust based replacement for Nouveau). For example, DLSS support just made it into Mesa a couple of days ago, and this is thanks to the contributions of an Nvidia engineer. I imagine this is probably what helped further stoke Valve to work with them.

    Your entire comment just reads like fanboyism, and a regurgitation of the misinformation bred by places like Reddit. Kinda makes you sound like one of those "mainstream users" you spoke of, as I constantly see these exact points almost verbatim from people who are new to Linux, and saw someone else making these claims before moving over to it without ever verifying them. This is what happens when you're more concerned with sounding correct, rather than being correct.
    Reply
  • usertests
    Joomsy said:
    I've used Linux for 20 years now, with a mix of Nvidia, AMD, and Intel graphics configurations spread throughout, and Intel always offered the worst experience.
    What's Intel's deal? I've had a pretty good experience with Intel's iGPUs. iGPUs that didn't change from 6th to 10th gen aside from some 7th gen decode/encode support and slight clock bumps, resulting in many millions of well-supported, nearly identical CPUs to choose from.
    Reply
  • ezst036
    Joomsy said:
    I disagree. I've used Linux for 20 years now, with a mix of Nvidia, AMD, and Intel graphics configurations spread throughout, and Intel always offered the worst experience.
    That puts your experience outside of the norm then. Let us all not forget, you are replying to me in the context of Valve is working with Nvidia to resolve Nvidia woes. Valve doesn't even use Nvidia hardware in their Steam machines/Deck............... That's how bad Nvidia is here. Valve has to step in as the adult in the room and say to the child "Nvidia, mop up your mess here. What are you doing?"

    Additionally, here is LTT talking about their Nvidia woes. This is the reality. Nvidia is probably now Linux's biggest problem. Nvidia is now Linux's greatest blocker to a more mass adoption.

    6ezE7hq0p1oView: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ezE7hq0p1o

    It is Nvidia.

    Nvidia is the problem. They make the best hardware. That's not a question. They make the absolute worst driver.

    Do you remember the Linus Torvalds middle finger for Nvidia? Our situation is basically still the same after all these many years.
    Reply