SteamOS
More info
- Creator
- Valve
- Released
- Type
- Linux distribution
Valve's own Linux distribution, built to break into the living room — first a flop, then the heart of the Steam Deck.
SteamOS 1.0 arrived in 2013 as a Debian-based distribution for "Steam Machines" — living-room PCs meant to challenge the games consoles, which flopped around 2015. Valve didn't give up: SteamOS 3.0 (2022) was rebuilt on Arch Linux with a KDE Plasma desktop and became the system inside the Steam Deck.
The key is Proton — a compatibility layer on top of Wine that uses DXVK to translate Direct3D into Vulkan, so Windows games run directly on Linux. Together with a read-only, immutable root filesystem and A/B updates, it made the Steam library playable without the user ever needing to know there was Linux underneath.