Valve takes another step toward making SteamOS a true Windows competitor

We’ve known for months now that Valve is expanding its Linux-based SteamOS operating system beyond the Steam Deck to other handheld PCs, starting with some versions of the Asus ROG Ally. This week, Valve began making some changes to its Steam storefront to prepare for a future when the Deck isn’t the only hardware running SteamOS.

A new “SteamOS Compatible” label will begin rolling out “over the next few weeks” to denote “whether a game and all of its middleware is supported on SteamOS,” including “game functionality, launcher functionality, and anti-cheat support.” Games that don’t meet this requirement will be marked as “SteamOS Unsupported.” As with current games and the Steam Deck, this label doesn’t mean these games won’t run, but it does mean there may be some serious compatibility issues that keep the game from running as intended.

Valve says that “over 18,000 titles on Steam [will] be marked SteamOS compatible out of the gate,” and that game developers won’t need to do anything extra to earn the label if their titles already support the Steam Deck.

The “SteamOS Compatible” designation that will show up for non-Steam-Deck SteamOS users. Credit: Valve

SteamOS uses a collection of app translation technologies called Proton to make unmodified Windows applications run on SteamOS. This technology has dramatically improved SteamOS’s game compatibility, compared to older SteamOS versions that required games to support Linux natively, but it still can’t support every single game that Windows does.

Valve says that the “SteamOS Compatible” label isn’t meant to imply how well a game will run on the Steam Deck or any other SteamOS handheld but that this label is “just the first step.” The company is “continuing to work on ways for people to have a better understanding of how games will run on their specific devices.”

That’s relevant because the Ally and many other Deck-alikes are using newer chips than the Steam Deck, which was originally released in early 2022 and very slightly improved via faster RAM in late 2023. Valve is seemingly in no particular rush to overhaul the Deck’s internal hardware, and as long as that’s true, third-party Deck clones with newer CPUs and GPUs will gradually go from being “a little faster than the Deck” to being in an entirely different performance class.

Valve still hasn’t said whether its long-term plan is to offer a “generic” version of SteamOS that can be installed on any PC hardware, a la the original release of SteamOS back in the early 2010s, or if it will just offer the software directly to PC makers. Third-party community-maintained distributions like Bazzite offer a Steam Deck-like experience for generic hardware, but only after jumping through a few installation hoops.