Steam Valve plans to bring SteamOS to other third-party devices

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Valve's own operating system "SteamOS", based on a specific Linux distribution called Arch Linux, alongside their own Wine fork titled "Proton", have both opened up the doors for modern and AAA gaming on Linux machines, with their OS being developed specially for their Steam Deck handheld device. Since the release of the Steam Deck and SteamOS, many have wondered if the company could consider releasing their OS for general use as a distributable Linux distro to be installed in other devices and computers outside the Steam Deck.

That could all be a reality very soon, as Valve's designed Lawrence Yang has confirmed in an interview with The Verge that they are planning on bringing SteamOS support for other handheld devices in the market, more specifically, the ROG Ally.

Valve announced a few days ago a new update to the Beta channel of SteamOS, with version 3.6.9 adding a very specific general change which namedropped the ROG ally with the message "Added support for extra ROG Ally keys". While it was possible that Valve was simply adding support for the Steam Client on Windows to support these keys (given that the ROG Ally runs under Windows), The Verge asked directly if this was simply a Big Picture mode change, or if Valve is indeed planning to bring SteamOS to other systems:

The note about ROG Ally keys is related to third-party device support for SteamOS.
The team is continuing to work on adding support for additional handhelds on SteamOS.

Lawrence Yang mentions that work on bringing SteamOS to other devices, and even PCs, is currently "making steady progress", but their work is not ready quite yet, so it could still take some time to see SteamOS in other powerful handhelds and main PCs.

The Verge also asked about the possibility of dual-booting Windows on a Steam Deck, to which Yang replied:

As for Windows, we're preparing to make the remaining Windows drivers for Steam Deck OLED available (you might have seen that we are prepping firmware for the Bluetooth driver). There's no update on the timing for dual boot support—it's still a priority, but we haven't been able to get to it just yet.

Even though it could take some time to see SteamOS in other systems, the future for Valve's SteamOS, and Linux gaming as a whole, is looking better by the day, with more and more users using Linux and Steam for their gaming needs as days go by.

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