SteamOS Linux 3.8 released as stable

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675200/view/697641379212298072

by jrepinc • 1 month ago

225 73 1 month ago

store.steampowered.com

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

kombine2• 1 month ago

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

dessimus• 1 month ago

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

Atotalnoob• 1 month ago

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.

utopiah2• 1 month ago

I imagine it's for the upcoming hardware.

jay_kyburz• 1 month ago

It's the second point in the release notes

utopiah2• 1 month ago

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.

TiredOfLife2• 1 month ago

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

bravetraveler2• 1 month ago

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.

bandrami2• 1 month ago

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

TiredOfLife2• 1 month ago

When it's not based on a rolling disto.

toofy3• 1 month ago

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.

scott01• 1 month ago

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

charcircuit• 1 month ago

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

toofy3• 1 month ago

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.

la_oveja• 1 month ago

davinci resolve is available on the aur

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

toofy3• 1 month ago

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.

pbmonster• 1 month ago

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...

jonathanstrange2• 1 month ago

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?

koolala13• 1 month ago

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

jonathanstrange2• 1 month ago

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

CodesInChaos3• 1 month ago

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.

Levitating• 1 month ago

For development work you could try using toolbx or distrobox.

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

altmanaltman• 1 month ago

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.

throawayonthe• 1 month ago

it makes no sense, just use bazzite or something

Arrowmaster2• 1 month ago

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.

mbmbn• 1 month ago

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

koolala13• 1 month ago

I don't think it works with NVIDIA.

CodeCompost2• 1 month ago

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

gabegm• 1 month ago

Use CachyOS or Bazzite instead.

pidgeon_lover2• 1 month ago

Can those be used without logging in online to Steam?

FrozenSynapse• 1 month ago

why?

Arrowmaster2• 1 month ago

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.

lanycrost• 1 month ago

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+.

tehbeard• 1 month ago

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

shmeeed• 1 month ago

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

pidgeon_lover2• 1 month ago

Can it be used without logging in online to Steam?

CodesInChaos3• 1 month ago

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.

koolala13• 1 month ago

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

koolala13• 1 month ago

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

vovavili• 1 month ago

Microsoft must be quite nervous right now.

farfatched• 1 month ago

You can run your OS of choice.

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

cassianoleal• 1 month ago

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

nithssh• 1 month ago

That non-steam-deck section is glorious.

hilsdev2• 1 month ago

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

streb-lo• 1 month ago

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

ASalazarMX• 1 month ago

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.

hilsdev2• 1 month ago

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.

twoquestions2• 1 month ago

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.

twoquestions2• 1 month ago

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.

rpigab• 1 month ago

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.

jeroenhd• 1 month ago

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.

SteamOS Linux 3.8 released as stable

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