this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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It's mostly just ArchLinux with preinstalled steam, booting into "big picture" ui. You can do the same thing as with any linux distro. Nearly all non competitive games from steam should work ootb.
The important part is a lot of people don't really care about operating systems, a big part of home usage of windows comes from being preinstalled on a lot of laptops. People just switch on their new computer and use it, if the preinstalled os is good enough they don't search for replacement. This is consumer device from a well known manufacturer. Before this other similar devices had to use windows, as Valve didn't have installers for steam os, didn't supported third party devices.
As the usage of linux grows with this, more (game) developers would choose to also develop for linux or at least make sure their programs run fine with wine.
Would learning how to install arch help me install steamOS?
Probably not. SteamOS likely won't have any particular benefit on desktops over other distros.
Just download an Arch-based distro, like CachyOS or EndeavorOS, install the Steam app through
pacman -Sor whatever helper app they have for new users, install Proton Plus, and play your games. If you want to get into the weeds of immutable Arch, give blendOS a try.I recommend, trying all of these in a VM first, btw. You can even practice doing a pure Arch install from scratch that way.
Anyway, SteamOS is almost certainly just a preconfigured Arch + KDE that has Steam and Proton already installed, with downstream patches for specific hardware they've deemed worth their time to patch (which will eventually make their way upstream).
You can't install steamos, as it's not availble as an iso with an installer. Holo iso is an unoffiial installer for steamos
Installing arch nowadays is not complex at all, there is the command
archinstall, so it's just a meme now. If you are somewhat familiar with computers and linux, and don't call someone a "haxor" just for using a terminal, it won't be a big deal.At the moment. But the whole point of the article is that it's coming soon.
Ironically HoloISO also can't be installed easily right now since all the prepared downloads are missing. You could maybe built it yourself from source, but I haven't figured it out...
I opened this issue several months ago: https://github.com/HoloISO/issuetracker/issues/59
This sounds awesome! Thank you for taking some time to write this, it was really helpful.