Out of the box, the Steam Deck comes with SteamOS 3 Linux and overall apart from early quirks and bugs it does work very well but they're now providing Windows drivers — with a big caveat.
This was announced on Steam today, for those who do want to put up with Windows (not me). There's a few notes they included on it but the biggest and most important is that Valve will not actually be supporting Windows on Deck in any way. It was put very clearly as Valve said "we are providing these resources as is and are unfortunately unable to offer 'Windows on Deck' support".
People are free to do what they want with it, unlike more traditional "consoles" but the point is that for official support, you need to use SteamOS.
The quick notes Valve included:
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
- For now you can only perform a full Windows install. While Steam Deck is fully capable of dual-boot, the SteamOS installer that provides a dual-boot wizard isn't ready yet.
- Also for now, you can only install Windows 10. Windows 11 requires a new BIOS that is currently in the pipe (which provides fTPM support) and will be shipping soon.
- Drivers are provided for GPU, WiFi, and Bluetooth. Audio drivers are still in the works with AMD and other parties - but you'll still be able to use Bluetooth or USB-C audio with Windows on Deck.
And LTT is out with a video on exactly how horrible Windows is on the deck right now:Huh. It references GoL at about the 15 minute mark. Specifically, mentions and briefly shows a screenshot of Ethan Lee's article critiquing Valve's Steam Deck verification process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNt_ReLwk40
I'll bet that was the work of Anthony.
And LTT is out with a video on exactly how horrible Windows is on the deck right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNt_ReLwk40
Oh how the tables have turned !
They have even turned a few more turns than that. Looking at the comments done by people in the various videos it's quite clear that people have zero insight into their own biases.
E.g Linus on the Linux videos made it Linux fault that drivers where bad or missing, but here when Windows is suffering from the very same thing he blames Valve...
And we have Windowsgamers that page up and page down refuses to even try out Linux since that would potentially make them loose 10fps in games and that would be completely unacceptable but now suddenly with the Deck they consider replacing SteamOS with Windows because loosing 10fps in games is nothing :-)
Valve is providing an official way to install Windows as well as put SteamOS back. The dual-boot wizard seems to also be in the work. Hopefully Windows users will also get the new SteamOS interface on Windows as a Big Picture mode replacement. That's plenty of support.
any steam client can run the new interface its just a matter of tweak a few config files, people already figured out how.
Do you have a link how to do this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/t57l4t/how_to_get_the_steam_deck_ui_on_windowsany_linux/
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