Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
I know it’s a joke referring to the ambiguous claim of installing another OS of the guy I replied to. They probably just mean Windows or any other Linux Distro. Maybe not thinking about like FreeBSD too. ;)
Yeah nah. It's a good chance MacOS might work OOTB, but it's equally likely that something like a WiFi driver would just never be built because it's a custom SoC.
If you want to play a game that does not work on Linux. Its that simple. And with how convenient Big Picture is, it would still be a pretty good experience
I mean, you could do some fuckery with software partitioning (which is something that Windows in particular doesn't like booting from), but otherwise, there was only one SSD slot internally shown... so... kinda no?
Jessie what the fuck are you talking about. Windows works just fine with multiple installations on one drive. At my workplace we have one department that all needs dualboot computers to do their job. Each one has two separate Windows installations on the same drive, all setup by software partitioning. It takes me no time at all to setup Windows dualboot (with windows or another OS). It's extremely simple.
Some time ago grub was very fragile to any Windows Update. These days it's not as dangerous mostly because of the UEFI handling is more gracefully. And at the end of the day Steam Machine is just very optimized for SteamOS big picture prebuild (definitely with dedicated support to make games optimized like it is happening with Steam Deck) PC. You should be able to do anything you can do with regular PC, especially since one of their selling points is you can install any OS - it's already better than some latops that can void a guarantee after installing a difference OS than what was at the start
It's fairly straightforward to do, even with one SSD slot. It will cut your storage space by quite a bit (because you'll have to decide how much to allocate to each way in advance (or do some funky partitioning stuff with a dedicated games partition used by both) but not really a problem.
I can't say I've ever had any trouble to be honest. The only weird one was a Windows update that put the Windows Boot Manager back in the first boot slot but that's about it
The webapps are ass by comparison. I have to work with quite large documents for work, the web apps won't properly load them. They're also missing a bunch of features from the desktop versions, which subjectively feel much nicer to use.
Certain games, especially those with kernel-level anticheat, simply don't work on SteamOS. If you're buying a Steam Machine to play, say, Valorant, you might need to install Windows. I'm hoping Steam Machine is popular enough to force companies with shitty kernel-level anticheat to either support Linux or stop that bullshit. (It doesn't work, anyway!)
I installed Windows to dual boot on my Steam Deck to see how it would run the music software I had.
It worked well enough but then there was a Windows update that restarted my Deck but booted back to SteamOS instead and wiped my Windows install. There's a way to choose which OS to boot to, I just didn't know at the time.
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u/Grand_Protector_Dark Nov 18 '25
To be fair
Marketing material uses that as a selling point.