Valve Says SteamOS 3.0 Will Be Available for Everyone to Download and Install

Valve today held their Steam Deck Development live stream on YouTube to share more details on the upcoming Steam Deck gaming handheld and the SteamOS 3.0 operating system it’s running.

As you probably already know, Valve is developing their first ever gaming handheld called Steam Deck, which runs SteamOS, Valve’s in-house built GNU/Linux distribution that’s now derived from Arch Linux rather than Debian GNU/Linux, as previous versions were.

SteamOS was available to download for free, like many other GNU/Linux distributions out there, and you were able to install it on any machine if you wanted to turn it into a full gaming computer. I personally followed its development, and the latest version ever released was SteamOS 2.195, more than two years ago.

Apparently, during this time, Valve rebased their SteamOS distro on Arch Linux, a powerful and flexible rolling-release distribution, most probably to provide users with the latest security and software updates as soon as they are available upstream.

When Valve announced Steam Deck, they also revealed the fact that it will be running SteamOS 3.0, based on Arch Linux and the KDE Plasma desktop environment running on Wayland. As you could expect, the community wanted to download SteamOS 3.0 and install it on their PCs, but there isn’t anything to download yet.

Today, during the Steam Deck Development live steam, Valve finally gave us some good news and said that SteamOS 3.0 will be generally available for everyone to install on their computers. They also revealed that SteamOS 3.0 will have an immutable root file system to prevent unauthorized access and use PipeWire for audio.

But the question remains, when will SteamOS 3.0 be available for download. Valve engineer Lawrence Yang said that there isn’t a solid date at the moment as their are still finishing things up for the Steam Deck launch, but after the launch it will be generally available.

So there you have it, SteamOS 3.0 is coming soon to your PC, and by soon I mean after February 2022 when Valve will start sending order invitations so you can actually buy the device. For more details about Steam Deck and SteamOS, check out the full Steam Deck Development live stream below and the official website.

Source: https://9to5linux.com