Valve will finally let you build your own Steam rig with SteamOS for desktop

If you’re not out of luck with Valve’s Steam machines reservation systemyou can make it yourself Steam machine instead of. Valve says that “starting with SteamOS 3.8, you can assemble your own Steam machine using any PC parts you want.” SteamOS 3.8.10 Launched last week With a slew of updates, including “improved compatibility with modern Intel and AMD platforms.” Along with this improved compatibility, Valve is giving gamers the green light to install SteamOS on their desktop PCs.

In an interview with EdgeValve is “rolling out improvements to (SteamOS) to make it more compatible with desktop devices,” including eventual support for Nvidia graphics, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said.

Valve has a “growing team” working on Nvidia driver support for SteamOS, Griffais says, adding: “We’re collaborating with Nvidia very closely.” While he mentioned that Nvidia support may not be coming this year, Griffais emphasized that it’s “definitely something we’re working on in the background.”

It’s technically possible to run SteamOS on your own hardware for a while, but compatibility has been mostly limited to AMD systems. So now it requires installation as well Using the Steam Deck recovery imagea process that, from experience, is much less straightforward than the installation process for most other Linux distributions. Trying to run SteamOS on Intel or Nvidia hardware hasn’t been easy yet.

According to Griffais, Valve is working to change that, which could mean that in the future, you’ll be able to run SteamOS on any PC you want, including Nvidia.

As for the immediate future, Griffais says SteamOS in its current state should offer a “good experience” on console-like PC setups: “If you have something similar to the Steam Machine use case, where you have a PC that’s going to be plugged into the TV, and it has one hard drive you’re not going to experience dual booting (…) you can put SteamOS in there, and you’re going to get a very similar experience to a docked Steam Deck or a Steam device, with some caveats of course, like the lack of HDMI-CEC support. But “The essential parts of the experience are there. You get it all with the SteamOS graphics driver, shader pre-compilation (…).”

While Griffais mentioned a “SteamOS installer,” he also said that it’s not designed to dual-boot alongside another operating system yet. “There’s still no installation wizard where you can easily, you know, move another operating system out of the way and partition your hard drive.”

The current SteamOS installation process is still intended to put a new operating system on a new PC, but Griffais says he envisions “a time when the experience of installing on your desktop will be better and coexist with a different operating system.”

Building a gaming PC right now is probably at least as expensive as a Steam Machine due to Constant lack of RAM. But if you don’t want to wait to reserve a Steam Machine, the DIY route is now an option. You can also install SteamOS on an existing gaming PC running Windows or a different operating system, but you’ll need to erase your drive in the process (so back up everything beforehand).

There are also other gaming-focused Linux distros you can try if you’d rather wait for further improvements to the SteamOS desktop experience, such as Bazett or Nobara.