SteamOS Grows with New Tag and Device Support
Valve is moving forward with its plan to bring SteamOS—the company’s Linux-based operating system designed for gaming—to more handheld gaming PCs beyond the Steam Deck. The expansion begins with select models of the Asus ROG Ally.
One of these changes includes a new “SteamOS Compatible” label, set to appear in the coming weeks. This tag will indicate whether a game works properly on SteamOS, including basic functionality, launcher support, and anti-cheat compatibility. Games that don’t fully meet these standards will be marked as “SteamOS Unsupported.” While these titles might still run, they could face issues that prevent them from performing as expected.
Valve says that over 18,000 games already meet the compatibility requirements and will be labeled accordingly and developers won’t need to do anything extra if their games already support the Steam Deck, as that compatibility will carry over.
However, this new label is not meant to indicate how well a game runs on a particular device, like the Steam Deck. It’s simply a first step in Valve’s effort to help users better understand game compatibility across a growing number of SteamOS-powered systems. More detailed performance insights are in development.
As new handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go hit the market with significantly more powerful hardware than the Steam Deck—which launched in early 2022 and received only a minor RAM upgrade in late 2023—Valve’s operating system is moving into a broader ecosystem. What remains unclear is whether Valve will eventually release a general-purpose version of SteamOS for all PC hardware, as it briefly did in the early 2010s, or continue to provide it exclusively through hardware partners. In the meantime, community-driven projects like Bazzite offer a SteamOS-like experience on other PCs, though they usually require more complex installation steps.
