SteamOS 3.9.0 Preview | Hacker News Reader

SteamOS 3.9.0 Preview

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43 pointsEspadaV926 comments

Quite sad to see what happened to iwd after Intel left (it basically stopped development). Can't say I blame Steam for switching to wpa-supplicant. But man what a worse experience, really opaque annoying config files and pitiful tooling. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IWD-Development-Halts

Really love this bump from KDE 6.4 to 6.7. Now we're talking!! We got to modernity (about a year old KDE) and fast follow to much more recent, nice.

GE-Proton 11-6 just had a great release with native Wayland support for Steam overlays, which is great. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/08/ge-proton-11-6-release...

There was some great benchmarking of input latencies across x11, wayland, xwayland, and xwayland was doing not good at all. We can't stay here forever. So many great updates but we're not really Wayland yet! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48909424

What I can see from this release is that SteamOS is being converted from device firmware into a general-purpose distribution that happens to boot into a game launcher. Quite a bit of a version jump in the dependencies as well.

What showed you this in this release? The motherboards compatibility?

Scripts and packages moving from steamos- to holo-. "holo" is the internal name for the base OS layer. Pulling the product brand out of the plumbing is what you do when the plumbing is going to run somewhere the brand doesn't apply.

Version jumps - Kernel 7.2 while stable SteamOS is on 6.16, and Plasma 6.4.3 straight to 6.7.3 — three desktop releases swallowed at once. The driver (heh) is probably compatibility.

Valve also reversed course on their adoption of iwd (Wifi), and are going back to wpa_supplicant for compatibility with various networks (They ported iwd's fast-resume trick over for parity).

All of the above changes point to maximizing OS compatibility with various devices.

Once KDE 6.8 is released, Valve must add Wayland support for Steam client and Proton/Wine. Also, they should drop 32-bit dependencies for Steam client on Linux, which has been done for Windows and macOS long ago.

Must?

Supporting old games is important for me or I'll use a distro that doesn't fuck around for me.

Microsoft fucked up many people's lives and I for one will never let working products get fucked with the same terrible people and their decisions.

+1. Most games, once shipped, completely disband their development team.

If you require game developers to even so much as recompile their game, they simply cannot do it. If you want the game to keep working, you have to guarantee ABI compatibility in perpetuity.

64-bit machines run 32-bit software just fine.

Tell that Apple and Android. I have 32 bit native software which can't run on modern devices at all.

I'm sorry to hear that. Could it be ARM related?

Apple dropped 32 bit support in specific OS version with no way to run it anymore sans downgrading the OS - so it's not hardware restriction

It's just to reduce the maintenance burden of backwards compatibility.

I don't think Steam being 64bit stops you launching 32bit games, just reduces the need for all the 32bit dependencies to use Steam at all.

I'm in favor of removing 32-bit dependencies from steam-the-application, except that you still need 32-bit libraries to run 32-bit games in Wine.

Having steam depend on those libraries directly means that when you install you get all the libraries you'll need and you won't run into issues later on when you go to run a 32-bit game and it can't load the appropriate 32-bit system libraries for you. It's annoying for sure but it simplifies the user experience dramatically (especially if you're just installing Steam directly on Ubuntu or something).

This is why Windows still ships 32bit libraries, after all these years.

They're doing this, it's the "use experimental SteamRT 3 client" in the interface settings.

My steam deck has been my main dev pc for a year now. Also serves Qwen 3.5 9B when I use my MacBook Air. Distrobox prevents OS updates from clobbering my environment.

Still more sensible than the 'my iPad is my main dev environment' fad from ~10 years ago. The Steam Deck is a fully fledged Linux desktop, not a defanged entertainment system.

SteamOS is Arch Linux under the hood. Mine is setup as a desktop with 4K monitor, keyboard, mice and webcam. Upgraded internal ssd, added an external drive. 16GB ram, cooling fan and AMD unified gpu. It’s designed to tolerate close to max cpu+gpu load indefinitely and runs my Vulkan simulation code overnight.

It's awesome as a desktop. Way better than modern windows. It's like a weird Linux laptop you can unplug from your dock and use comfortably laying down which most computers can't.

Me too. Are you able to run full screen programs like games on a monitor with this latest OS?

The version before this broke fullscreen when I updated to the Wayland stable branch so I had to revert to X11 SteamOS.

Haven’t used mine to play games in ages, not sure. Haven’t installed the update yet because I don’t want my dev environment to get accidentally borked. But yes, the previous version couldn’t even play videos full screen.

Same. Videos too yeah. Hopefully this update fixes it but I don't see it mentioned. Weird how something like that makes it into Stable.

There is a command you can run to make the old boot partition the main partition again so reverting the update holds after reboot. Wish they built the command into the GUI.

Anyone has had a good experience using SteamOS on one of those $200 N95 PCs from Amazon?

Nice, they are quite close to upstream.

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