this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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I'm still bit confused about steamOS, I thought it was supposed to be a full on operating system for gaming centric PCs but it seems to need Plasma in order to do any traditional computer things.
Which aspect of that confuses you? That it uses a Desktop Environment to do desktop things, or that they are using KDE Plasma instead of something else (say, gnome)?
So steamOS is in fact not an operating system it's just a program that runs on plasma. Or is steamOS actually an operating system, but just quite a limited one, and you dual boot into plasma.
KDE Plasma is just the desktop environment. It's not an OS. SteamOS is a full OS, built off of Arch Linux. It has both a Gaming mode, which looks a lot like Steam Big Picture does these days, and a desktop mode that uses Plasma as the graphical shell/interface. It doesn't matter OS-wise which one you "boot" into, as both are SteamOS.