Valve today (12 November 2025) announced their new Steam Machine (x86 CPU, 6x more powerful than Steam Deck) and Steam Frame (self-contained and PCVR streaming VR headset with ARM CPU & “FEX” translation of x86 to ARM) to be released in early 2026. No prices yet.
I’m trying to speculate what effects this will have on the wider Linux ecosystem. Both devices will be running Steam OS and be open so you can run any OS.
First, I’ve read many people state that the Steam Deck considerably increased the number of devices running Linux, so it seems to me that these two new devices will accelerate that trend.
Second, it seems to me that the Steam Frame will significantly increase VR use and development for Linux.
Third, I wonder what the implications of Frame’s x86 to arm translation layer (based on FEX, an open source project that I only learned about today) as well as Android compatibility (they state it can sideload Android APKs) will be. Could this somehow help either Linux on Apple silicon or Linux phone efforts? I’m very unfamiliar with what’s going on with either of these efforts, so I may be way out on a limb here.
What do you think about all this?
Not a video of a Valve employee, but I’ve read at least a couple articles now quoting Valve as saying it will support Android APKs, although I can imagine that this kind of thing could easily be misinterpreted due to some technical detail. This article mentions it: https://www.theverge.com/news/818672/valve-android-apps-steam-frame
The actual quote mentions porting, and the non-quote claims they’re saying “same Android APKs”. It definitely sounds like it could be a misinterpretation of what was said, which is disappointing for a popular tech outlet like The Verge.
Edit: now this video has a Valve quote saying (at 26:03) that APKs will be sideloadable like Steam Deck apparently already does. They also say that they expect VR APKs to work if they don’t use proprietary APIs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWUxObt1efQ
It certainly will, but it’s not going to make gaming on Android APKs anymore possible than it currently is. Running Android apps on Linux has been a thing for a long time.
Right, I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea that Waydroid does some kind of ARM emulation on x86, but now we’re talking about ARM software running on ARM hardware. Can Waydroid itself do this if it’s run on ARM hardware?
Frame is an ARM architecture, so the same APKs compiled and shipped for phones would work on it without an emulation layer.
Note Valve isn’t claiming that APKs will run on ANY SteamOS device or anything universal. They’re just saying you wouldn’t need alternate arch versions of APKs to run on Frame.
Wouldn’t there be at least some Android APIs that they would need to handle too? I wouldn’t expect Android APKs to work natively on Linux even on ARM, but perhaps Valve has already addressed that.
That’s what Waydroid is essentially. Think of what Wine/Protonndoesnfor Windows, and it’s the same for Android. It acts as a “device” as an Android app sees it, and Waydroid provides all the interfaces and input/output control needed for an Android app to run on anything.
Pretty much just an open version of the proprietary Android emu stack developers use in the Android SDK.
You can go and run these things right now yourself, it’s nothing new.