Steam engines 2.0?
While there has yet to be a broader official launch for the Powered by SteamOS program, any move by Valve to offer officially licensed SteamOS support for third-party hardware wouldn't be a complete surprise. Valve's Lawrence Yang has been saying since 2022 that “we're excited to see people create their own SteamOS machines.” And last November, Yang told PC Gamer that SteamOS would be “more available to other handhelds with a similar gamepad-style controller” in an approximate time frame of “soon.”
In August, after a SteamOS beta update suggested SteamOS could come to Asus' Windows-based ROG Ally handheld, Yang told The Verge that Valve's hardware team is “continuing to work on adding support for PCs.” additional handheld devices on SteamOS.
While we waited for that official support to materialize, and the much-promised general public distribution of SteamOS 3 on PC, fans have had to get a little creative to install the Linux-powered, gaming-focused operating system on their devices. Earlier this year, Ayaneo announced that its Next Lite handheld would ship with HoloISO, a fork of Arch Linux that seeks to “provide a quasi-official SteamOS experience” without official support from Valve.
In 2015, limited and low-performance software support for early SteamOS made Steam Machines a rather poor alternative to Windows gaming platforms. Today, the launch of the Steam Deck and the widespread implementation of cross-compatibility powered by Proton have made modern SteamOS a much more attractive alternative to an expensive Windows license for hardware original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). We hope that more hardware manufacturers will have the opportunity to make official use of this alternative very soon.