Valve is set to unleash the full, fat version of SteamOS to the masses in just a few months. After a couple of years in the incubator through the Steam Deck, SteamOS has gone from Steam’s Big Picture mode with a Linux distro taped on the back to a compelling destination for PC gamers across both handhelds and desktops. But Valve’s work isn’t done.

Windows 11 is by far the most popular destination for PC gaming, but that’s despite a long (and constantly growing) list of issues with the OS. When Valve releases SteamOS into beta in April, it has a shot to finally push Linux gaming into the mainstream if it makes a few critical changes.

6 Decky Loader pre-installed

Valve can’t do it all

SteamOS is missing a lot of functionality out of the box, and that’s by design. It’s designed for a console-like gaming experience, be that on a handheld or desktop, so a lot of the more advanced settings are either buried or completely inaccessible. That’s where Decky Loader comes in.

This is a plugin launcher for SteamOS that includes a massive list of community-contributed plugins, from undervolting utilities to power management to SteamGridDB integration. It’s basically the framework for SteamOS modding, and it’s absolutely critical for breaking the mold that Valve established for SteamOS with the Steam Deck.

Valve could take some of the most popular plugins and build its own tools natively into SteamOS, but that would be a waste of time. The framework is already available, and the community surrounding it is vibrant. The best thing Valve can do is simply expose new users to Decky Loader's tools.

That became clear when I flashed Bazzite — a third-party fork of SteamOS — on the ROG Ally X. Bazzite gives you the option to install Decky Loader immediately. Decky Loader and its tools aren’t a replacement for what you can accomplish on the desktop with SteamOS, but it provides a nice on-ramp to new users to unlock the potential of whatever device they’re using.

5 Desktop/Game Mode defaults

A more elegant resume process

Another aspect of SteamOS clearly angled toward handhelds is Game Mode. I love Game Mode, especially as Valve continues to improve performance with its controller-friendly UI. As it stands now, though, you’re forced into Game Mode whenever you boot a SteamOS system up, and you have to toggle over to desktop mode manually. I’d like to see a toggle for the default environment you want to load into.

That’s a little tricky to do, though. If you’ve rebooted into desktop mode on the Steam Deck, you already know that the system fully logs you out of Steam in Game Mode before logging you back in through the desktop (and vice versa when you switch back). Presumably, the credential swapping when switching between the two modes is why Valve has this system mostly locked down.

There are workarounds to launch into desktop mode via the Konsole, but a more straightforward way to set which mode you want to load into by default would go a long way.

4 Broader non-Steam app support

There are other PC storefronts

Try as I might to condense all of my PC games under Valve’s umbrella, the reality of PC gaming today is that you need several storefronts to access all of the games you own. Even if you only shop on Steam, you’re missing out on a ton of games, from Battle.net exclusives to freebies via the Epic Games Store and Prime Gaming.

You can play the vast majority of these games on SteamOS. It’s just a matter of actually installing and launching them.

Third-party tools like the Heroic Games Launcher exist to make it easier to install games from storefronts like Epic, but that doesn’t really get around the problem. As it stands now, installing a non-Steam game with SteamOS involves installing a separate program and manually adding the game to Steam as a non-Steam app. SteamOS needs to streamline this process, ideally allowing users to install, add, or delete non-Steam apps directly from Game Mode.

3 Easy Game Pass integration

The hill Microsoft will die on

There’s one silver bullet Windows has: the Xbox app. Not that the Xbox app in Windows is particularly good — it isn’t — but it unlocks hundreds of games for you to play via Game Pass, including new releases like Avowed and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. But I wouldn’t hold my breath on the Xbox app showing up in SteamOS.

That doesn’t mean you should be completely locked out of Game Pass when using SteamOS. You can still stream games from the cloud with Game Pass, and Valve should point users in the right direction on how to set that up.

Microsoft has a dedicated support page for using Game Pass on the Steam Deck, so it’s not like Microsoft is burying its head in the sand about SteamOS. Ideally, Valve and Microsoft could work together to either include a shortcut for Game Pass for the cloud by default or streamline the process of setting it up.

2 A Kernel-level anti-cheat solution

It’s not going anywhere

The elephant in the room with SteamOS — and Linux gaming more broadly — is anti-cheat software. More specifically, kernel-level anti-cheat, such as what you’ll find with Valorant and Apex Legends. Anti-cheat and SteamOS are in a game of cat and mouse, but there are still wide swaths of very popular games that don’t work on SteamOS simply due to anti-cheat.

Developers are wising up to this issue, which is why newer games like Marvel Rivals work just fine on SteamOS even with anti-cheat software. Even newer, the upcoming Mecha Break reportedly works fine on the Steam Deck, despite using anti-cheat software that refuses to load on the SteamOS desktop.

I’d like to see Valve be more proactive with anti-cheat support on SteamOS, leveraging these newer releases to broaden support for older games. At the end of the day, Valve can’t change the anti-cheat software or what games choose to use it. Still, it can use successes like Marvel Rivals to bolster momentum for SteamOS, especially among the most-played competitive titles on Steam.

1 Nvidia drivers

Wishful thinking

I’ll be upfront here — this is completely out of Valve’s control. There are a lot of things Valve can do to make SteamOS a destination for PC gaming, but the single largest hurdle to broad adoption is support for Nvidia drivers on Linux.

For years, the traditional wisdom has been that AMD’s open-source approach through Mesa provided better performance and feature support than Nvidia’s closed-source Linux driver. That’s changed. Nvidia has open-sourced critical aspects of its GPU drivers, and you can use an Nvidia GPU that fits all of the driver-level features, mostly without issue on Linux today. That only applies to the desktop, however.

SteamOS is a different beast. For SteamOS’ Game Mode, Valve uses its Gamescope window composition tool, and it has major issues with Nvidia’s drivers. HDR and high resolutions can cause major graphical artifacts, performance is all over the place, and some features of Game Mode simply won’t work. Those are just the high-level problems, too. You can take a look through the issues page on the Gamescope GitHub to see the more specific problems Nvidia users run into.

Nvidia has heard plenty of criticism from the Linux community over the years, so I’m not hopeful the issues with Gamescope will be solved any time soon. Maybe if SteamOS takes off, though, Team Green will need to give its Linux drivers another look.

A little limelight for Linux

Similar to Windows on ARM, it’s felt like Linux gaming has been almost there for years. Valve’s release of SteamOS could broadly mark a turning point, and hopefully provide another option for PC gamers who don’t need everything Windows offers outside of running games.

None of this will happen quickly, though. Although I’m sure Valve will continue to poke and prod SteamOS during its beta period, we’re likely years away from broad support for the operating system across different hardware. Still, these changes would make SteamOS a better destination for PC gamers, and they’re things Valve can accomplish quickly.