SteamOS Linux 3.8 released as stable | Hacker News Reader

SteamOS Linux 3.8 released as stable

store.steampowered.com

225 pointsjrepinc73 comments

A very fine sense of timing to release this one year after KDE 6.4 was released! https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.4.0/ . Here in 2026, KDE 6.7 just dropped.

I'm still super excited for this release. KDE 6.4.3 from 6.2.5 is a nice jump. I'm very excited to get Wayland here, which is my normal baseline.

Maybe this time I'll try to get Niri running on this desktop. This is one of my daily driver systems, with a monitor plugged in. I'm typing on it now. I've been holed up on on 3.7.14, build id 20250701.1, since I don't want to lose the desktop, but this one seems worth losing my desktop for. Nothing but respect for Valve for working on ruac, a very nice A/B system image switcher, that powers all these updates, even if it means I'm about to lose this desktop. https://github.com/rauc/rauc

I'd kill for KDE 6.4 crying in my work laptop with Ubuntu 24.04 with Plasma 5.27 :)

Are you not permitted to bump to current LTS on work laptop?

Not until it's rolled out by our IT team. It's a managed installation.

At least you have Linux.

I got a beefy mac laptop to rdp into a windows vdi with 2cpu/8gb to do my actual work.

That non-steam-deck section is glorious.

I tried installing SteamOS on a couple machines last week. One pain point is that their install scripts are just that - non interactive scripts that are designed for gaming handhelds such as the steam deck. The main issue being it expects to be the only OS installed, it will clobber your entire physical volume with its new partition layout and file systems. Not a big deal for a dedicated gaming machine but not what I want for my laptop.

Sadly, the main gaming specific competitor distro- bazzite, has a similar issue. You can install it to a partition (with limited options) but it has some compatibility issue with other EFI bootloaders, the quick fix for me was to install refit and use that to boot while I tested it

Manually installing steamos is on my might todo list, but I feel like someone, maybe Valve, will release an interactive installer soon as the momentum grows. I understand the reasoning, most gamers are not Linux power users, most of these desktop installs are probably gamers recycling old PCs not compatible with Windows’s latest requirements. Still, it would be nice to have some properly labeled footguns on the install media for those of us that want to participate in the testing and now rapidly growing community.

Steam, the app, its protondb/wine compatibility tools, etc all still work fine on my Mint setup, so there’s not much need for me to pursue this but I am curious about how their distro feels, and how well it would work as even a daily driver distro

It really is not hard to install a Linux operating system manually. "Linux power users" should easily be able to handle bespoke installations.

Becoming a "Linux power user" is a harder task than one might suspect, though. More so nowadays, where distros like Ubuntu just work, and you can use it as a daily driver without debugging issues.

It's not anymore. Any issues you run into you just paste into your LLM of choice and it will give you the fix in a couple of back and forths 99% of the time.

A couple of days ago I told Claude to just go ahead and install the android development stack on my arch Linux laptop, and it went though and installed all the packages needed through pacman, download a few packages from Google and extracted them the right spots and added all aliases to my configs files as needed. Took about 10 minutes total and I had a basic android app going in about an hour with its help.

I've recovered some systems I b0rked by dding from a healthy system or a livedisk to a machine I updated incorrectly, I could have tried just copying from the disk fine and figured it out I'm sure, but I didn't want to open another rabbit hole with the SteamOS update and config. SteamOS has duplicate /, /var, and /boot partitions, and I assume there's some part of the install configuration that sets the active and inactive sets.

Really I was just after testing/listing included bt drivers on some specific hardware for some wonky controllers I have, installation was a secondary thought.

Very cool. As a Linux Mint user, I'm starting to get interested in SteamOS. So maybe someone with experience can answer my question:

How good is SteamOS as a general distro for a desktop machine? What are the Pros and Cons?

It's good if you use Distrobox and it comes with it.

Thank you so much! For some reason, I didn't even know about Distrobox!

I installed Antigravity with Codex in Distrobox Ubuntu. The Agents happily use sudo without care that it is a container. It's great when I run random scripts from the web that I don't even know how to uninstall and never worry about gunking up the main system.

It might be fine for just avoiding clutter, but be warned that distrobox defaults to very weak separation between container and host (e.g. default mounting your real home into the container). Good organizational tool, bad sandbox. (This is not a fault, just a matter of what the tool is optimized to help you do.)

I like that as a feature because I can use it like a normal root system. I have a pretty easy time seeing what goes in my home folder. It isn't esoteric to explore like system folders. If I had something I needed to keep private from Distrobox I could put it in my SD Card since it isn't mounted in the home folder on SteamOS and is in /run/media. You could also install QEMU in Distrobox or the virt-manager flatpak for a full sandbox.

I found it very annoying and restricting. Most significantly being restricted to flatpak. For example I failed at installing whonix and couldn't get rust and vscode to work together.

If I didn't plan to get rid of by steam deck, I'd install a different distro in it. I definitely wouldn't install it on a desktop, support for the deck's keyboardless form factor is the only reason I might choose SteamOS over a normal distro.

Though I didn't know about distrobox then, perhaps that works better.

For development work you could try using toolbx or distrobox.

You can also use Nix or Homebrew to install additional software.

I mean it literally is not meant to be used as a general distro for a desktop machine so I'm guessing not very good.

it makes no sense, just use bazzite or something

SteamOS is not designed or meant for installation as a generic OS. It is only designed to run on the specific supported hardware devices that it comes preinstalled on.

No matter how many times you see LTT install it on a system they have assembled, its not supposed to be used that way and not supported.

I hope the Bluetooth audio latency issue I've been having is fixed. I have two Bluetooth pairs of headphones, one open-ear and one noise-cancelling, and they both have either a half-second or one-second latency between what happens on screen and the audio feedback.

Luckily wired headsets work perfectly fine.

Trip report: FFXIV does great, but both Hades and Hollow Knight have atrocious lag. I don't know why different games are different for Bluetooth lag performance, when they're all great on my Windows machine.

Do they work without noticable latency on other devices? I've always found the BT technology wasn't designed for gaming, it even has a feature to delay streamed video until the sound catches up in order to reduce latency for video+sound playback.

I've had this issue with a different Linux distros. If I recall correctly, it was becauserthe headphones were using some proprietary codec to push more bits over an older Bluetooth standard.

If you boot into desktop mode, you can check if switching to plain old A2DP works. That solved the issue on Ubuntu (and Windows) for me. I think audiophiles will lament the loss of audio quality, but lower latencies are much more important for gaming.

That line about update arch base means it is shipping only a year old packages and not 1.5 year old ones.

So, depending where you look, more current than $FAVORITE_LTS... with a distribution found on mass-market gaming devices intended for precisely three wrappers. Why do you, presumably a normal user, even care about the packages? Eesh.

As long as Valve provides more snapshot updates in the next six months, I don't see the problem. The ~~TiVo~~ toy is maintaining currency.

I'll concede this might be annoying for the subset that chooses to use a Steam Machine as a server or development workspace, once the product releases. My condolences to this imaginary and small group. They'll be shocked to find immutability, too.

When you maintain systems long enough you realize that's a feature rather than a bug

When it's not based on a rolling disto.

Everything's ultimately based on a rolling distro; Debian is frozen from Sid and Fedora (and ultimately RHEL) are frozen from Rawhide.

Agreed. Valve is the maintainer, it's no longer 'rolling' (or Arch) by virtue of creating SteamOS and delivering momentary snapshots. Arch is upstream and largely irrelevant to us, the consumers of SteamOS.

Ask anyone outside of Valve or strange hobbies what packages actually 'make' SteamOS; they couldn't tell you. It's simply not their concern.

In fewer words: if you need/want to know the lifecycle, you'd know. The "by the way, they're a year old" message that started this thread is in bad faith. The Fedora release that equates to any EL derivative is comparatively ancient. It's fine.

Can it be used without logging in online to Steam?

From my experience with the steam deck:

If you're already logged in, you can use it online. But if it decides to log you out, and you're offline, then you're out of luck.

Older versions allowed you to switch to desktop mode without logging in (with broken on screen keyboard, since that's only available once you log into steam), but that option is missing in newer versions.

They changed its location and it was bugged for an update. You go to Settings > System and then enable Show Switch to Desktop Mode.

For me the "Switch to Desktop mode" button only showed up after logging into steam but was hidden while logged out.

Right that setting is to make it show when logged out. You can get to the setting without logging in.

Yes. They recently made it extra easy to do too.

Microsoft must be quite nervous right now.

You can run your OS of choice.

Here's NixOS on the steam deck: https://github.com/Jovian-Experiments/Jovian-NixOS

You can't run NixOS on SteamOS. The post is about the OS, not any specific piece of hardware.

Realistically, what should be expected if I run this in my desktop with AMD 9000x CPU and a NVIDIA RTX 5000x GPU?

I don't think it works with NVIDIA.

I just run CachyOS on my gaming desktop which is also Arch based. Works fine.

Yeah that works but they asked about SteamOS not CachyOS and SteamOS doesn't work with NVIDIA.

Ok, I was only making a suggestion which I thought might be helpful.

Use CachyOS or Bazzite instead.

Can those be used without logging in online to Steam?

Yes you can use SteamOS without logging into Steam too!

Yes, they are Arch and Fedora Atomic variants respectively and don't require any accounts or corporate affiliation.

Only if you don't want to use Steam. I'm not really sure what point you think you're making here by constantly asking whether you can use SteamOS without logging in to Steam. You can however install literally anything you like on a Steam Deck.

It's nice on something like Steam Frame where it's hard to install a new OS. Forcing a log-in like Windows is evil and sucks when you don't have internet.

Nobody knows if it will be hard to install another OS on the Frame.

The hard part is making one work on it since none already exist like the hundreds that exist for normal computers like Deck. They might not let their 6dof headset tracking code be shared and getting that working would be very hard.

Given Valve's past history in this regard I'm inclined to believe it'll be possible to install whatever you like on the thing, and that there'll be a reasonably well documented way of integrating with the sensors/display. Valve have got decades of form on being as open as possible with their hardware and I've seen nothing recently to make me think that's changed.

Software wise their SteamVR / OpenVR stuff is very closed source. Someone had to reverse engineer their Lighthouse tracking which is hard but doing that is easier than making 6dof SLAM tracking just from camera access. All I am saying is its not easy and people will have to do hard work.

why?

Easier to report issues and have a fix implemented?

they have NVIDIA

You can expect it to not work. SteamOS is not designed or meant for installation as a generic OS. It is only designed to run on the specific supported hardware devices that it comes preinstalled on.

No matter how many times you see LTT install it on a system they have assembled, its not supposed to be used that way and not supported.

i’d love to see blackmagic jump in with steamos as their main distro. i think they build for rockyos currently but…

if they jump to building davinci resolve (and its new lightroom style photo editing) on steamos rather than rocky.. this would be pretty powerful combine the insane wonders steamos is doing for gaming on linux and add davinci, that would really open up the linux landscape for a ton more people.

i’m currently daily driving linux for work, gaming, and personal pc. unfortunately i’m still pulling out my macbook for video editing and for lightroom.

come on blackmagic, read this and take the leap. valve has done fucking amazing with linux. just choose steamos to build against rather than rocky. its going to have significantly higher number of people already using it for other stuff.

I believe the tools like Resolve are built around VFX reference platform specs. I doubt anyone will standardise on the basis of a rolling distro where you can’t pin glibc version. https://vfxplatform.com

The flatpak runtime they would choose would have a fixed glibc version.

steamos is not a rolling release. yes, it’s built on arch, but they halt with snapshots and do testing and their own patches before they roll out updates.

davinci resolve is available on the aur

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/davinci-resolve

sure, but you have to jump through hoops to make it work. the only distro blackmagic supports is rockyos. they don’t want to build against and support hundreds of distros so they work specifically against rocky. to save developer time.

my point is, since steamos is already supporting their distro and not rolling out bleeding edge, (yes, it’s based on arch, but they freeze it and they test it before they roll out updates) blackmagic would have a vetted foundation to build on and a much larger user base from the jump.

This might make sense once SteamBox is a large percentage of Linux Desktop installs.

Right now, it would be insanity. Just the situation with running SteamOS on hardware with NVIDIA cards would be a showstopper. And a whole lot of consumer PCs ship with NVIDIA chips...

I imagine it's for the upcoming hardware.

It's the second point in the release notes

Obviously correct, what I meant is that they don't mention the Steam Frame which is what I'm interested in and had in mind due to the recent "leaks" on Steam getting shipments in the US.

It's always great to hear about linux in gaming.

It's sad that they decide to increase the price for steam deck (even if I have one already). Hope it doesn't mean steam machine will cost 1000+.

"decide" feels like a particularly choice word for a supply chain issue hitting many consumer facing companies.

Well, they could also decide to sell it at a loss! /s

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