An unofficial build of the Steam OS 3 operating system has been published, adapted for installation on regular computers. Valve uses Steam OS 3 on Steam Deck game consoles and initially promised to prepare builds for regular hardware, but the release of official Steam OS 3 builds for non-Steam Deck devices has been delayed. Enthusiasts took the initiative in their own hands and, without waiting for Valve, independently adapted the recovery images available for Steam Deck for installation on conventional equipment.
After the first boot, the user is offered a Steam Deck-specific initial setup interface (SteamOS OOBE, Out of Box Experience), through which you can set up a network connection and connect to your Steam account. Through the "Switch to desktop" menu in the "Power" section, you can launch a full-fledged KDE Plasma desktop.
In the proposed test build, the initial setup interface, the basic Deck UI interface, switching to the KDE desktop mode with the Vapor theme, power consumption limit settings (TDP, Thermal Design Power) and FPS, proactive shader caching, installing packages from SteamDeck pacman repositories mirrors , Bluetooth. For systems with AMD GPUs, AMD FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) technology is supported to reduce image quality loss when scaling to high resolution screens.
The packages supplied as part of the package have been left unchanged as far as possible. Of the differences from the original builds of Steam OS 3, the inclusion of additional applications, such as the VLC multimedia player, Chromium, and the KWrite text editor, is noted. In addition to the regular Linux kernel package for Steam OS 3, an alternative Linux 5.16 kernel from the Arch Linux repositories is offered, which can be used in case of boot problems.
Full support is currently provided only for systems with AMD GPUs that support the Vulkan and VDPAU APIs. To work on systems with Intel GPUs, after the initial boot, you need to roll back to the previous versions of the Gamescope composite server and MESA drivers. For systems with NVIDIA GPUs, you need to load the build with the nomodeset=1 flag, disable the launch of the Steam Deck session (remove the /etc/sddm.conf.d/autologin.conf file) and install proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
Main features of SteamOS 3:
- Using the Arch Linux package base.
- By default, the root FS is read-only.
- Atomic update installation mechanism - there are two disk partitions, one is active and the other is not, the new version of the system in the form of a ready-made image is fully loaded into the inactive partition, and it is marked active. In case of failure, you can roll back to the old version.
- A developer mode is provided, in which the root partition is put into write mode and provides the ability to modify the system and install additional packages using the pacman package manager for Arch Linux.
- Support for Flatpak packages.
- The PipeWire media server is enabled.
- The graphics stack is based on the latest version of Mesa.
- To run Windows games, Proton is used, which is based on the code bases of the Wine, DXVK and VKD3D-PROTON projects.
- To speed up the launch of games, the Gamescope composite server (formerly known as steamcompmgr) is used, which uses the Wayland protocol, which provides a virtual screen and can work on top of other desktop environments.
- In addition to the specialized Steam interface, the main composition includes the KDE Plasma desktop for performing tasks not related to games. It is possible to quickly switch between the dedicated Steam interface and the KDE desktop.
Source: opennet.ru