Following on from the success of the Steam Deck, Valve is creating its very own ecosystem of products. The Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller are all set to launch in the new year. We’ve tried each of them and here’s what you need to know about each one.
“From the Frame to the Controller to the Machine, we’re a fairly small industrial design team here, and we really made sure it felt like a family of devices, even to the slightest detail,” Clement Gallois, a designer at Valve, tells me during a recent visit to Valve HQ. “How it feels, the buttons, how they react… everything belongs and works together kind of seamlessly.”
For more detail, make sure to check out our in-depth stories linked below:
Steam Frame: Valve’s new wireless VR headset
Steam Machine: Compact living room gaming box
Steam Controller: A controller to replace your mouse
Valve’s official video announcement.
So uh, ahem.
Yes.
Valve can indeed count to three.
The Frame uses FeX for ARM emulation.
Then it does Proton in top of that.
The Machine is x86, but you can Steam Link stream to the Frame (ARM) from the Steam Machine (x86), or, run some games entirely from the Frame (ARM).
They very much have been developing / leveraging linux into ARM, check out Gamers Nexus video for some more on that, as well as bunch of other stuff.
FeX is userland only though, I’m wondering how they’re getting it booting arch in the first place since arch doesn’t support ARM officially (Arch Linux ARM/alarm is a separate project that has had serious maintainership issues with their packages to the point where a lot of core packages break due to being partially out of date)
SteamOS is arch based, but not arch. We will see how far this will affect upstream, but since SteamOS mainly focusses on Flatpak for apps, there is no real need for a huge ARM repo.