Before we begin, let me clearly state that this is not a comprehensive installation guide for installing Steam OS on your PC. Mainly because the variety of hardware that can be present in any PC makes each installation a somewhat bespoke affair. Hence I have decided to provide a list of bullet points of the various steps and issues I encountered during my installation, last week. Consider it advance warning of things you may encounter if you install this operating system. As ever, if this is something that you are intending to do, I would advise allowing yourself a suitable amount of time so you can accommodate any issues should they arise. It is entirely possible that this may be a two hour job for the technically literate running the most generic or commonplace hardware. However, I suspect that a lot of people undertaking this project will run into variations of the same problems that I encountered. First off, here are the specifications of my humble PC. I have a Ryzen 7 5700X 8C/16T processor, and 32GB of RAM all running on a TUF Gaming A520M-PLUS II motherboard. My GPU is a Radeon RX 6650 XT 8GB. The C: drive is a 1TB Crucial SSD running Windows 11 Pro and I have an additional 4TB NVMe drive for all my data (games, documents, audio and video files). For this “experiment” I added an old 240GB SanDisk SSD to accommodate Steam OS. NB At present, Steam OS lacks native support for Nvidia graphics cards, although this may change in the immediate future. I obtained the relevant installation files from Steam themselves. There is a recovery image available specifically for Steamdecks. I then used Rufus to create a bootable flashdrive with the installation files on. The plan was simple. Boot from the flashdrive, select the appropriate SSD, install the OS, reboot, log in to Steam OS and feel smug. However, as you would expect, that is not the way it panned out. There was many a hiccup, both big and small, along the way. The Installer would not initially target the intended SanDisk SSD. Steam OS expected a NVMe drive, as that is what is in a Steamdeck, so the installer/repair script had to be edited to allow installation onto the SanDisk SSD. Secure Boot had to be disabled in the BIOS before Steam OS could be installed. It should be noted that when using Windows 11, certain games such as Battlefield 6 require Secure Boot to be enabled. Hence, at present this means manually toggling Secure Boot depending on which operating system is being used. It also means that games that require Secure Boot to be on, cannot be played on Steam OS, as enabling it prevents Steam OS from loading. Steam OS creates numerous partitions on the drive it is installed. This looks alarming in Windows Disk Management, but was normal for the Steam OS installation layout. Hence within Windows 11 you can hide the disks from view to avoid any confusion. The PC initially booted into Steam OS by default, once it was installed. I changed the BIOS boot order so that Windows 11 once again booted automatically, with Steam OS selected manually through the motherboard boot menu. A load menu can be created if required. Steam OS setup initially stalled while trying to detect which networks are available. By default it is looking for a wireless network, again because that is how a Steam deck connects. This complicated the first-run configuration, although I was eventually able to complete the setup using the console. Input devices caused problems during installation/setup. The wireless mouse I was using was initially unavailable, requiring a USB mouse and keyboard to navigate. Switching between Game Mode and Desktop Mode in Steam OS caused problems. The desktop shortcut intended to switch modes produced a blank screen, a startup jingle and then returned us to Desktop Mode instead. SteamOS initially wanted to start in Game Mode. I successfully changed the system via the console so that it now boots into Desktop Mode by default. I am still experiencing issues trying to hot swap between modes. SteamOS disagreed with the hardware clock, always setting the time an hour prior. When booting back into Windows 11, the bug persisted. I adjusted the Linux RTC/time configuration and subsequent testing showed Windows 11 retained the correct time. Multi-monitor behaviour is somewhat anomalous. Steam OS considers the right-hand monitor the primary display, which is the exact opposite of Windows 11. Despite all of these issues, Steam OS has been successfully installed independently of Windows 11, on its own SSD. It can be selected manually at boot. Post installation I had to make a few minor tweaks with regard to the keyboard layout and other language, time and measurement settings. By default Steam OS assumes US regionalisation. Overall, Steam OS runs well on my PC and has not objected to any of my hardware. I am currently adding a few recent games to see if they perform better, than in a Windows 11 environment. When in Desktop mode, Steam OS is like any other Linux distro and can be comfortably used for standard PC activities. I will try to use it for certain daily tasks and see how quickly I adapt and get used to it. It will be interesting to see how often the build is update by Steam. Permalink