After a bit of a false start with an announcement made too early, Google has now announced Steam for Chrome OS and Chromebooks and now Valve has done their own brief announcement. So it's all officially official now.
From Valve's announcement:
As of Monday this week, an early version of Steam for Chrome OS has been made available to developers. Google and Valve have been collaborating on this project, which will ship to end users sometime in the future. Because Chrome OS is a Linux-based operating system, it can leverage much of the work that Valve has recently done for Steam Deck to allow games to run well even when they don't have a native Linux build. Google engineers have worked to greatly expand the capability of Chrome OS to make this possible.
Much like for Steam Deck, Valve has made it clear that developers don't actually need to test their own games, as it's "up to Google and Valve to make sure compatibility for Chrome OS is as robust as possible". That said, nothing stops developers ensuring their native Linux builds are in good shape or testing their Windows builds with Proton on a Linux desktop / Steam Deck. If developers do test, they can report issues directly to [email protected].
Again, this is fantastic news for Linux gaming as a whole because Steam on Chrome OS is the Linux client. This gives developers more of a reason to care about Linux (on top of Steam Deck), and gives Valve another reason to keep the Linux client in good shape.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: mr-victoryThis situation sounds to me like this:
"Google vs Microsoft! Round 2! Fight!!"
Round 1 is obviously the market for smart phones. And we know the winner
round 1 was google vs windows live search, then bing.
round 2 was android vs windows phone.
as for the round 3, we are years into this battle.
honesly i dont trust google anymore, they seem to want to play this game as an winner takes it all approach, android didnt helped linux desktop, stadia dont seem to help much either, and steam seem to be their last option to bring games to chromebooks to fight the OS war, their plan B.
rustybroomhandle Mar 27, 2022
Quoting: tuxintuxedoQuoting: BoldosThat would change nothing. Wine (Proton) still doesn't work on ARM.Quoting: denyasisI was always under the impression that most/many of the Chromebooks were lower powered ARM chipsets? I'm assuming this is for x86 systems only?I also assumed that this is for >ARM< based systems...
So, no Steam for ARM yet?
Codeweavers CrossOver runs on ARM based Macs and you can play games on it.
Quoting: tuxintuxedoThat would change nothing. Wine (Proton) still doesn't work on ARM.
Seems to me Wine works with Box86 / Box64 on ARM. Here's a year old blog post about it from Box86. Might also work with Fex-Emu.
Quoting: rustybroomhandleCodeweavers CrossOver runs on ARM based Macs and you can play games on it.And also on Chrome OS
tuxintuxedo Mar 27, 2022
Quoting: rustybroomhandleThrough Rosetta 2. You need an emulation layer for that (x86).Quoting: tuxintuxedoQuoting: BoldosThat would change nothing. Wine (Proton) still doesn't work on ARM.Quoting: denyasisI was always under the impression that most/many of the Chromebooks were lower powered ARM chipsets? I'm assuming this is for x86 systems only?I also assumed that this is for >ARM< based systems...
So, no Steam for ARM yet?
Codeweavers CrossOver runs on ARM based Macs and you can play games on it.
On other ARM devices things like QEMU is needed for the same reason.
Crossover's Chrome OS support is limited to Intel CPUs.
Last edited by tuxintuxedo on 27 March 2022 at 9:26 am UTC
Looks like there is still a lot of very tricky work to do.
Quoting: tuxintuxedoWell, sorry, but that was not the point (and I did not clarify it enough).Quoting: BoldosThat would change nothing. Wine (Proton) still doesn't work on ARM.Quoting: denyasisI was always under the impression that most/many of the Chromebooks were lower powered ARM chipsets? I'm assuming this is for x86 systems only?I also assumed that this is for >ARM< based systems...
So, no Steam for ARM yet?
Of course I do not expect to play Cyberpunk or Witcher on RaspberryPi anytime soon...
What I meant was the fact that Steam for ARM would bring "some more" games to Linux+ARM platform combo; it would serve as a stable distribution platform, e.g. for native Linux-built games (and there are tons of those, which would run on e.g. ARM-based Raspberries or Chromebooks pretty nicely).
And that - in itself - would mean a lot!
Quoting: denyasisI was always under the impression that most/many of the Chromebooks were lower powered ARM chipsets? I'm assuming this is for x86 systems only?
It's kind of odd timing because a lot more Chromebooks ran on x86 architecture a few years ago. I'd say maybe even the majority did, but as Google pushed for more integration with Android apps, it also made sense to gradually shift Chromebooks more to ARM. Steam on ChromeOS made sense more in 2017 than it does now. I even have an x86 Chromebook that will stop receiving updates this June. I've already had it in dev mode for quite some time, and it will switch to a full-time Linux laptop pretty soon.
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