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Valve Gives The Green Light to Install SteamOS On Desktops To Create Our Own Steam Machines (steamdeckhq.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
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Tucked into their FAQ about the Steam Machine release was a mention about making your own Steam Machine by installing steamOS to a computer you already have. AMD only for now.

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[–] 118 points 4 months ago (29 children)

They should pay someone to finalize the jailbreak of the PS5, because SteamOS should run great on it if you have a hacked console.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    This would make me use it again, it's just gathering dust since I have a gaming laptop (bought on sale years ago, much better than the ps5), but mostly just use blender and watch tv, would be sick if it made it so I can play simracing games on it with my moza wheel because I never want to close out of my projects on my laptop.

    It'd be nice to use it as a homeserver too, just leave it connected to the router and throw some selfhosted apps on there or whatever. Be so much more useful as another linux pc now that I don't really game and if I do it's never an exclusive. Just don't care for linear single player story games.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    I still get use of mine through my steam deck using Chiaki4Deck remote play, I had a big PS digital library built up and it’s the easiest way for me to access it with minimal setup. I’m not buying Skyrim again, I refuse

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  • [–] 34 points 4 months ago (12 children)

    We shouldn’t need a jailbreak.

    If Apple has to allow 3rd party stores, why not Sony?

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  • [–] 27 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    Apple only allows 3rd party stores in the EU*

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago* (5 children)

    It's gone beyond the EU. Last week Apple announced third party app stores will be coming to Brazil and

    Apple has already allowed alternative app stores and/or third-party payment systems on iOS in the EU, Japan, and South Korea, and it will likely be forced to do so in the UK and Australia too, due to similar regulations in those countries.

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  • [–] 16 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Everywhere except Freedom Land™

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    For now, this is just the start and when apple is forced to do it in enough regions, they will have to relent.

    I hope my next iPhone will be open like this and have a desktop mode when docked.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago* (10 children)

    Well actually no, because consoles tend to have very divergent, oddball architecture, compared to normal PC x86_64, where it tends to be fairly to extremely difficult to basically reverse engineer the drivers... because the normal drivers there are propietary, Sony keeps em secret.

    Instead, they seem to have been collaborating with AMD and basically some open source hackers to get FSR4 working on RDNA 3 GPUs... 7000 series AMD GPUs, the Steam Machine, etc.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    You can run steamos on a jailbroken ps5 already. You need to be on a fairly old firmware though

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Huh, you're right, I didn't know that.

    But yeah, looks like the jailbreak process only works up to firmware v6-ish... which means you'd have to have a PS5 that was mfg'd before, and hasn't been connected to the internet since basically December 2022.

    And, apparently, because this doesn't actually overwrite the PS5's OS, you have to do some fuckery to boot into SteamOS every time?

    https://technave.com/gadget/Developers-have-found-a-way-to-turn-your-Sony-PS5-into-a-Steam-Machine-46446.html

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series are all x86_64, though, unless I'm misunderstanding?

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Yes but... they have varying degrees of nonstandard busses and timings and weird, proprietary, basicslly custom hardware, as well as often having weird, propietary implementations of that hardware, that often only work with a bunch of other weird custom drivers on other components...

    This is why emulation is hard, you habe to reverse engineer all that shit and then basically virtualize it and then try to map it to actually standard hardware.

    Making a linux distro runs into many of thr same things, just, without (as much of) the virtualization parts.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Consoles have really been getting closer to more standard hardware over the last years. The WiiU was a mostly custom PowerPC box, with a proprietary version of wifi for the gamepad, and including hardware specifically to run Wii games. The Switch was a barely modified nvidia shield, with bluetooth wireless controllers. The PS3 had a fully custom CPU, and old models included PS2 hardware for backwards compatibility, the PS4 is x86_64 with a custom AMD GPU.

    For the PS4/PS5, the majority of effort on running Linux is in getting it to boot in the first place. While some hardware does require patches to existing drivers (like mesa on PS4), or sometimes fully custom drivers (like the CPU fan on PS4), other hardware is completely standard, over a standard interface. Like the HDD and Blu-Ray drives on the PS4.

    The big difference is that a game console is "allowed" to deviate from standards, as it does not need to be compatible with anything outside the control of the manufacturer. This results in often small differences that require changes to a kernel which wouldn't work on any other device.

    The biggest reason why emulation is hard, is often no longer the custom hardware like it used to be, but the OS and other fully custom standards like a graphics API. The structure of games is completely different too. The old "ship the drivers on the game disc" like on the Wii no longer holds true on modern consoles, and emulators don't need to ensure the exact timing of an optical drive matches to get a game to work.

    There have been some attempts to get modern console games to work through kernel patches and translation layers, see horizon-linux and fpPS4, proving just how close modern console hardware is to standard PCs.

    All that being said, I don't think SteamOS on PS5 would work for multiple reasons. It's extremely difficult to get the process simple enough for the average consumer, especially with Sony quickly patching any exploits required to boot it. It's also not in Valve's business interest to make it easier and explicitly supported to buy a cheaper and more powerful standardized machine. As they would just be creating a direct competitor to the Steam Machine.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    All that being said, I don’t think SteamOS on PS5 would work for multiple reasons. It’s extremely difficult to get the process simple enough for the average consumer, especially with Sony quickly patching any exploits required to boot it. It’s also not in Valve’s business interest to make it easier and explicitly supported to buy a cheaper and more powerful standardized machine. As they would just be creating a direct competitor to the Steam Machine.

    There have been some recent discoveries that potentially make jailbraking a PS5 permanently easily possible, but yes right now it is too complicated and requires old firmware versions.

    As for it being a competitor to the Steam machines... doubtful at the price they now announced. It is rather more likely that if they can get people with second hand jailbroken PS5 hooked to the Steam ecosystem that they are likely to upgrade to a Steam Machine 2 in the future.

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    • [–] 54 points 4 months ago (11 children)

    Wasn't that always allowed?

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  • [–] 55 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    Allowed but janky, this is probably a more polished installer.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    What's been janky about it? I have it installed on a custom build since like February, never had any hiccups, besides the same rare issues on my steam deck (some occasional sound issues when switching between desktop and game mode, recently now solved I think). It's otherwise been a flawless experience. Config is pure AMD : 5800X + 7600 XT 16GB with 16GB RAM. I was just hoping to get a steam controller but that proved harder than expected :(

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I think some hardware configs are harder to use, like if you have Nvidia.

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  • [–] 43 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    It wasn't officially supported for a long time even if they never stopped you. No real installer, etc. But now they started adding a lot more driver support even for hardware they aren't going to use, which you only do if you want to let people use 3rd party hardware

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago*

    They only had the old SteamOS available for installing to anything but a Steam Deck. But they had said the current SteamOS was going to be available for all PCs a long while back, anyway.

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    • [–] 22 points 4 months ago

    Love it, giving us an easy arch-based gaming distro basically. Now they just gotta give us half-life 3 as well.

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    [–] 21 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    This appears to be the page to pay attention to for actually doing this. https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/65B4-2AA3-5F37-4227

    It appears support is not yet there, but is intended to be.

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    • [–] 27 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (7 children)

    AMD only for now.

    AMD only forever unless you want to reinstall nvidia drivers every month, because the cunts will never support linux properly

    And at least AMD doesn't catch on fire and screw over their own power delivery interfaces.

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    The open source Nvidia drivers are coming along nicely I hear.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    Where did you hear it? The only I read was NVIDIA driver support for the Steam OS, not this year btw, but nothing about open source drivers.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 4 months ago

    Mainly just that there's constant improvements happening. I'm not sure how far behind it still is, but constant improvements are nice.

    For example, I saw a story in my RSS feeds this morning that the open source Nvidia driver just got DLSS support.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Tbh not even the fucking Windows drivers work properly either. In all my years of gaming every single time I’ve had an issue with my Nvidia GPU it’s the fucking drivers not working properly. Ranging from wild performance benches in games that only work on one specific driver, but fucks up the rest of my library, to crashes that cause me to force restart.

    Once I switched over to AMD with my 580 back in the day, drivers have been absolutely seamless. Fuck that DLSS shit and fuck Nvidia. I just want my $500 GPU to work properly.

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    • [–] 7 points 4 months ago

    I prepped for this a long while. Right down to having an AMD CPU and AMD rdna 2 GPU.

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    [–] 14 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    We could always do this, by the way. SteamOS has been available since the release of the Steam Deck. The main drawback is that core updates will wipe a bunch of changes you've made to your OS. I got tired of reinstalling AUR and a bunch of other things every month, so I changed distros.

    Once that issue goes away, I'll likely switch back.

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  • [–] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I dont think thats really an issue and more so a design choice to keep steam os immutable. I doubt that'll change since it does make it much harder to break the system.

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 4 months ago

    My understanding is SteamOS was lacking hardware support for most devices, and that they've been slowly fixing this. It's been mostly functional for awhile now, but used to be completely broken, and it's only now that Valve is saying it's actually ready for most AMD devices.

    It's part of why people had needed to use things like Bazzite/ChimeraOS on other gaming handhelds, because bare SteamOS wouldn't work. There were things like hardcoded support for just the Van Gogh chipset, hardcoded TDP management that would cause system crashes on different hardware, no support for network devices, etc.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    What did you switch to? I want to get away from windows and rn my main contender is Bazzite, but i wouldnt mind a non Fedora alternative...

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    I like both Mint and Zorin. Once I learned you can make your desktop environment whatever you want, I became less concerned about which specific Ubuntu distro I use, because I just want KDE Plasma. Kubuntu seems like a great option. Bazzite also seems good, but I haven't tried it yet and I like to tinker every once in a while.

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    • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    When they release steamOS for ARM, I'll throw a party

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 4 months ago

    When the Steam Frame comes out we should get an ARM SteamOS recovery image, but it will probably only be for the Frame hardware. It's possible that Valve will have prioritized wider hardware support for it though, since that's something they've been actively working on with regular SteamOS.

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    • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I've never seen a computer that's a Radiator. Thank you everyone have a great evening

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    • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I aspire to be like valve

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    [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    They should at least allow us to select the hard drive where we want to install the system. It’s completely hostile to multi-drive systems.

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    • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (4 children)

    Correction: The GPL gives you the green light to install SteamOS on your computer to create your own steam machine. Valve has no say in the matter. It's cute of the article to think otherwise though!

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Valve specifically released a new installation image that comes with an installer, has added hardware support for non-deck hardware and discrete graphics cards, and has officially updated their support documents to say that it's supported on more hardware.

    You may have a right to install it before, but that doesn't mean it would have worked or been a good experience.

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    • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    Should i put this in my laptop? It's on Ubuntu lts right now and standby is janky.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    For a full desktop experience, something like Bazzite will be better.

    That said standby/sleep issues can be nasty to track down, hopefully swapping distros will fix it, but be prepared to maybe have to deal with it on other distros as well. I'm in the middle of having to fix an issue with some ASIX usb network drivers on my desktop, where a recent update started causing loss of network and other issues after sleep.

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