Phoronix article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Machines-Frame-2026
Also listed here: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/hardware
Valve has already sent support for the new Steam Controller upstream: https://www.phoronix.com/news/New-Steam-Controller-SDL
I’m curious about the “it’s a PC” aspect of the Steam Box. Because a device that plays all Steam games but isn’t a Windows computer is extremely appealing, but I admit if I can’t install a few non-Steam games on it, that’s a spoiler for me. But if the whole “it’s a PC” provides some avenue to that, I’m definitely ready to stop building a gaming PC every 5 years.
If you are looking to get it or try linux gaming in general then I would recommend looking at heroic games launcher which supports games from epic, gog, and Amazon. Past that there is always a huge list of other games (and applications) available for install from lutris' website. And bottles for specific things, but that is a bit more advanced/nuanced to setup.
Allow me to be pedantic here. What you were referring to here, "PC", stands for "personal computer". It's a device on where you can perform computation. Sometimes that computation is to render video streams encoded in H.264 onto the screen, and sometimes it happens to take in your control signal to alter that video stream, like video games. You are free to perform any kind of computation on it.
"PC" has no implications of Microsoft or Windows.
Insufficient pedantry detected.
The PC platform is an extension of IBM's Personal Computer architecture, which was not a description of what it was so much as it was literally the brand name. It's long since been forgotten that this is now a shorthand, and the full name of the platform arguably ought to be PC Compatible. Unless you bought your machine from IBM, anyway, which these days would be quite the trick.
Being PC compatible was a big deal back when the original PC was also a big deal. Probably slightly less so now, since it's the assumed default.
It should go without saying that the original IBM PC, model 5150, did not run Windows... Because Windows did not yet exist. It didn't even necessarily run the then-nascent PC-DOS provided by Microsoft, because IBM also supported running CP/M and and UCSD Pascal on it.
The whole Windows-as-default thing didn't happen until well after the appeal of the PC specification had escaped containment at IBM and x86 had handily taken over the desktop computing world.
A personal computer is basically anything you can stick on your desk (or lap) and doesn't require hooking up to a mainframe to run. But a Personal Computer, capital P and C, implies an x86 compatible platform with architecture designed such that it is technically still capable of running all those decades old 8086 programs and operating systems. (Just, several orders of magnitude faster than their designers ever envisioned, and probably only by sticking your UEFI BIOS in legacy mode first.)
Allow me to match your pedantry.
A “denotation” is an exact, codified definition of a word, commonly thought of as a “dictionary definition.”
A “connotation” is a less official but culturally understood meaning of a word, often dependent on context or setting.
“PC” connotes Windows in the gaming world. But thanks for taking time out of your day to tell me what it stands for, etc 🙄
it's an arch linux machine. with proton and some tweaks to steamos you can run any game without a kernel level anticheat.
Ahem, it's a GabeCube.
I'm sure it will be like the Steam Deck, meaning you can absolutely install non Steam games on it, but they still have to work under Proton (meaning the vast majority of games work, except ones requiring kernel anti cheat).
Yeah, you can. SteamOS is basically just a customized arch Linux. It's what runs on the steam deck, which you can install non-steam games on. They integrate really well into the console experience as well.
It's going to be like the steam deck, I've yet to find a old Non-steam game that I couldn't run on the steam deck.
I've found some, but they're mostly obscure and older out-of-support stuff. But anecdotally something like less than 5% of my library didn't work with it.
Do the kernel level anti-cheat windows only dev guys support steam deck running official steamOS?
Some games anticheat supports Linux. VAC, EAC, GameGuard, and BattlEye either run under Linux by default or can be configured to do so, by the game dev, with a toggle. A number: Destiny 2, Fortnight, etc. break it intentionally even though the client could run without modification. Battlefield 6 breaks because it checks the Windows measured boot API.
Short of explicit developer lockout