Anika Begay
Valve once envisioned every PC manufacturer having their own “Steam Machine,” a PC gaming console running the company’s Linux-based SteamOS operating system. It took a decade for that dream to evolve into the company’s in-house developed Steam Deck gaming laptop, but the original dream isn’t dead.
The company has long said it wants to let other companies use SteamOS as well, which means explicitly supporting rival portable gaming console Asus ROG Ally, as Valve designer Lawrence Yang now confirms. The limit.
A few days ago, some people noticed an intriguing line in Valve’s latest SteamOS release notes: “Added support for extra ROG Ally keys.” We didn’t know Valve supported any ROG Ally keys, let alone extra ones!
Maybe Valve was just supporting those keys in the Steam desktop client on Windows, where it offers a Steam Deck-like Big Picture Mode interface for any PC, and the line accidentally ended up in these patch notes? I asked just to be sure.
But no: it’s actually the fact that Valve will eventually support ROG Ally and other rival portable consoles!
“The note on the ROG Ally keys is related to third-party device support for SteamOS. The team is continuing to work on adding support for more portable devices on SteamOS,” Yang tells me.
Of course, this doesn’t mean Asus will officially bless Valve’s installer or sell Ally with SteamOS. (Asus told me there are several reasons it ships with Windows; a major one is that Microsoft has dedicated validation teams that ensure its operating system runs on many different hardware configurations and chips.)
And it’s not like Valve is suggesting it’ll bring SteamOS to rival portables anytime soon. Valve is “making steady progress,” Yang tells me, but “it’s not ready to launch yet.”
We already knew that Valve was planning a general release of SteamOS 3, which would theoretically be possible to install on non-portable PCs as well; Yang says that he is making progress in this area as well, but that he is not ready yet.
Here’s the update on turning your Windows portable into a Steam Machine; what about Valve’s promise to also let you turn Steam Decks into dual-boot Windows machines, allowing you to switch between the two operating systems at will? Here’s Yang on the subject:
On the Windows side, we are getting ready to release the remaining Windows drivers for the Steam Deck OLED (you may have seen that we are preparing the firmware for the Bluetooth driver). There is no update on when dual boot support will be available – it is still a priority, but we haven’t gotten around to doing it yet.
Valve isn’t alone in adapting its compelling Linux and controller-friendly Steam UI combo to Windows portable devices. Universal Blue touted that its Bazzite OS had already gotten support for the Asus ROG Ally X before it even came out.
