That is not for desktops. I would assume they meant a proper steamOS desktop release. We haven’t seen one in many years and the previous one is basically useless for most people.
Many of us have been waiting for a proper release for a LONG time. Bazzite is nice but I want to see what valve does next.
my guess is it will be mostly the same as for the SteamDeck but with
- Game Mode becoming getting a not Steam Deck specific desktop version, which I would love to see, e.g. last time I installed Bazzite+Steam Game mode, the Game Mode will default to 1080p even if your GPU can render 4k ...(easy to fix in the options menu, tho. But not very convenient.).
- slightly different defaults, tweaks, builds (e.g. AFIK not to long ago if you tried to put SteamOS on a desktop with RDNA3 graphics it didn't work. But they seem to more or less just use a standard linux graphic stack, so it's probably was just something on the line of "as it's not expected the parts needed for RDNA3 wheren't compiled in/shipped in the SteamOS for SteamDeck image)
There's nothing stopping you from installing it on a desktop with the right hardware.
I have a Ryzen 5 5600 and a 7600 xt in an sff pc, installed steamos directly from the recovery image. It supports the GPU, controllers, even the super fast sleep/wake.
Valve has specifically taken down the (desktop) steamOS download page and only kept up the recovery page because it just isn’t a viable desktop OS if you want to play modern games consistently (as well as other shortcomings). They explicitly discourage its use for desktop on the recovery page IIRC and emphasize it’s for handheld hardware.
The amount of tinkering and driver patching and just general work it requires to get it to play games properly (especially if the person is not AMD CPU/GPU) now makes it a non-starter except for people who explicitly want to make it work.
It can run. It generally runs poorly and with major holes in it.
What you are saying just doesn't align with my experience. I've done no tinkering and definitely no patching and have been able to play several modern games (Cyberpunk, Spiderman 2, GoW: Ragnorok). I expect it's not the same for Nvidia based pcs or ones with exceptionally old or new AMD hardware, which is why I specified the hardware I'm using.
Telling me that the computer I've been gaming on for the last 7 months "isn't viable" for gaming based on CYA language on the downloads page is annoying and unconstructive.
You don’t have to argue with me about it. Feel free to dismiss my opinion. But I encourage you to go do a cursory search online about this and see what comes up.
I never said it can’t be done, just that it’s ill-advised given the limitations and specific hardware requirements to make it work stably/consistently. You yourself said “with the right hardware,” which is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Valve doesn’t stand by it as a desktop OS currently. Whenever it comes up, people almost always instruct folks to go to bazzite. What I am excited for is what they have planned for the steam machine because it’s hard to imagine that an updated version of steamOS built for desktops isn’t coming.
I don't think there's anything concrete at the moment, they're just working on improving hardware compatibility, you can hear it directly from Valve at the 5:05 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuJi1-Csrds&t=305s
Many of us have been waiting for a proper release for a LONG time. Bazzite is nice but I want to see what valve does next.