Looks like Valve is preparing to release SteamOS to the public (or at least to third-party hardware manufacturers)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/23210770
Full Document: https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/steamworks_docs/english/steam_brandGuidelines.pdf
Credit to @mr_MADAFAKA@lemmy.ml for the original post.
I’m out of the loop and I don’t own a deck but didn’t Valve have a Linux OS years ago?
They silently switched from Debian to Arch under the hood for the Deck and never released it to the public for download.
They didn't maintain it, let it die, and made a new one.
tbf back then they picked possibly the worst base for a gaming distro, a problem that has been remedied with the new SteamOS
That is not why it failed.
It failed because the market of Linux native games was minimal and at that time compatibility tools like proton didn’t exist and wine was nowhere near sophisticated enough and required too much fiddling to get to work, especially for the layman which steamos very much was and is targeted towards.
A thing can fail for multiple reasons at the same time
Being based on Debian is not one of them, and any others are honestly made irrelevant by the gave that a gaming centric OS couldn’t run 99% of the games out there
tbf back then they picked possibly the worst base for a gaming distro, a problem that has been remedied with the new SteamOS
The actual runtime the games run on is still based on Debian, though.
that's fine and all but the problem with the debian based SteamOS were the horribly outdated GPU drivers. The runtime was fine but the OS lacked support for bleeding edge hardware (which is somewhat important for a gaming OS)
that’s fine and all but the problem with the debian based SteamOS were the horribly outdated GPU drivers.
SteamOS doesn't use plain upstream GPU drivers. Back when SteamOS 3 was announced, Valve employees said in interviews that switching to an Arch base would allow them to more frequently update the OS, yes, but now with SteamOS 3 being out since quite some time it became clear that this is simply not the case. Big Arch package syncs are a rare occurrence, kernel and Mesa are maintained in their own downstream branches.
As someone else mentioned, that one was based on a different distribution of Linux, and had a lot of differences in function/setup to the current version of SteamOS on the steam deck. The steam deck's version is steam deck exclusive right now, and people have to use other options like Bazzite and HoloOS if they want a Steam Deck-like experience on another device.
This implies that Valve is finally ready to let other vendors use SteamOS, which is great news.
SteamOS 2 came out almost 10 years ago (!) with the release of Steam Machines in 2015. That one was public but it seems Valve has pulled the links to download it. SteamOS 3 is what is on the Steamdeck which isn't publicly available yet.
While SteamOS is open-source and everyone can build one for themselves, it is only officially supported on Steam Deck. They promised to release a generic version of it targeting more devices in the past, and this post hints that that day is closer.
They promised to release a generic version of it targeting more devices in the past, and this post hints that that day is closer.
This post says that Valve is talking about hardware by Valve partners with SteamOS developed in collaboration with these partners. It says nothing about it being generic.