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SteamOS Linux 3.8 released as stable

214 points by jrepinc

by nithssh

0 subcomment

by hilsdev

1 subcomments

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

by twoquestions

3 subcomments

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.

by pidgeon_lover

3 subcomments

by jauntywundrkind

1 subcomments

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

by jonathanstrange

5 subcomments

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?

0 subcomment

by TiredOfLife

2 subcomments

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

by mbmbn

3 subcomments

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

by toofy

3 subcomments

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.

by utopiah

1 subcomments

by lanycrost

1 subcomments

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+.