Valve is reportedly planning to make its SteamOS system compatible with other portable consoles in the very near future.
By releasing the Steam Deck in February 2022, Valve has succeeded perfectly. The firm behind the Steam platform, now number one in PC gaming, had long had the idea of offering "Steam"-stamped hardware, but the attempt at Steam Machines launched in 2015 had come to nothing. By releasing the Steam Deck, Valve will have been more in tune with the PC audience, but while the Steam Deck is a technically impeccable machine with excellent compromises on all levels (size, weight, power, autonomy), it also owes its success to the excellence of the accompanying software, the famous Linux-derived SteamOS.
SteamOS takes greater account of the specific needs of a portable machine like the Steam Deck than the inevitable Windows. Microsoft's system can often seem a little cumbersome, even clumsy for nomadic use, but for the sake of simplicity/compatibility, most of Valve's and the Steam Deck's new competitors have opted for it. Whether it's Lenovo with its Legion Go or ASUS with its ROG Ally, these two machines run on Windows 11, with no other option... well, for the moment.
The ASUS ROG Ally soon on SteamOS? © ASUS
Indeed, Valve's developers are working on porting SteamOS to machines other than the Steam Deck, and the latest list of changes to SteamOS beta version 3.6.9 confirms this. It clearly states: " Additional button support added for ASUS ROG Ally ". In other words, the specific functionality of certain buttons on the ROG Ally will be taken into account by SteamOS, and The Verge was able to confirm this with Valve designer Lawrence Yang: " The note on the ROG Ally buttons concerns support for third-party devices in SteamOS. The team continues to work on supporting other handheld consoles on SteamOS ".
It's also good to know that Valve is also working "in the other direction" and continues to consider the use of Windows 11 on its Steam Deck: " As far as Windows is concerned, we are preparing to make the remaining Windows drivers available for the Steam Deck OLED (you may have seen that we are preparing firmware for the Bluetooth driver). There's no update on the dual-boot schedule: it's still a priority, but we haven't been able to get there yet." Why consider a SteamOS/Windows dual-boot if SteamOS is so efficient? Quite simply because Microsoft's PC Game Pass and certain games such as Fortnite refuse to run on SteamOS.
