Windows 11 might finally be dead for PC gaming, and Microsoft should be absolutely terrified of what Valve is doing right now. For decades, Windows has held a complete monopoly on the PC market. It has been the default choice. The only choice. But Microsoft has recently developed an obsession with bloated artificial intelligence features, forced updates, and intrusive background services and it’s driving PC gamers completely insane which is where SteamOS enters the chat. Valve officially released version 3.8 to the public back in June, which means you can now officially turn your standard desktop PC into a dedicated Steam Machine, and they aren’t slowing down either, because the brand new 3.9 preview update recently rolled out. This proves that Valve is aggressively refining this operating system for the masses and today we’re going to look at exactly why this is a monumental shift in PC gaming, how much money it could save you on your next build, and why Microsoft is sitting on a ticking time bomb.
Let’s take a step back and look at how we got here. Have you noticed how much slower a fresh Windows installation feels today compared to ten years ago? Windows used to be a platform that just stayed out of your way. You booted up your rig, double clicked your game, and that was it. Now, Windows 11 feels like an advertising platform that just happens to play games. We have Copilot being integrated into every corner of the operating system. We have the controversial Recall feature designed to take screenshots of everything you do. We have widgets pushing news articles you don’t care about. We have start menu recommendations suggesting applications you never asked for and the list goes on.
Think about the underlying architecture of Windows. It’s an operating system carrying decades of legacy code. Microsoft has to ensure that Windows 11 can run enterprise database software, ancient printer drivers from the early two thousands, and massive corporate server networks. All of that legacy support is literally baked into the operating system you use at home. You’re carrying around all that digital dead weight just to play a video game. Furthermore, Microsoft forces strict hardware requirements like TPM 2.0, rendering millions of perfectly capable gaming PCs obsolete when Windows 10 support ends. All of these background tasks eat up your processor cycles. They consume your system memory which is still a sore subject. They read and write to your solid state drive constantly and when you’re trying to squeeze every single frame out of Cyberpunk or Elden Ring, the last thing you need is a background telemetry service phoning home to Microsoft. Is this really the experience you want after spending thousands of pounds on top tier hardware? The answer is more than likely, no.
This frustration is exactly what Valve is capitalising on, but they’ve been planning this for over a decade. You might remember the original Steam Machines from years ago. Hardware partners built these small form factor PCs for the living room, and Valve provided an early version of SteamOS. They were…. a massive failure. The hardware was expensive and the game compatibility was terrible because developers simply didn’t want to port their games to Linux natively, but Valve didn’t give up. They went back to the drawing board and realised the biggest barrier to Linux gaming was that exact compatibility issue. People don’t want to type terminal commands just to get their games to launch. They want a plug and play experience.
So Valve heavily funded Proton. Proton is a compatibility layer that translates Windows application programming interface calls into Linux commands on the fly. It translates DirectX into Vulkan in real time. It’s absolute black magic. For years, Valve quietly perfected Proton and then they launched the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck proved that Linux gaming isn’t just possible, but it can provide a superior console-like experience. Millions of people are playing their Windows games on a Linux handheld right now and most of them don’t even realise it, and now, Valve is taking all of that development, all of that polish, and dropping it straight onto the desktop, meaning that SteamOS is a lightweight, Linux based operating system built from the ground up for one thing and one thing only. Gaming.
Because SteamOS strips away all of that background bloat and spyware of Windows, independent testing is already proving that it can match or even beat Windows 11 frame rates in massive AAA titles and that’s something we’ll be looking at in a follow-up feature. That aside, this isn’t just about average frame rates, it’s about frame pacing and 1% lows.
To really understand how it achieves those incredibly stable one percent lows, we have to look under the hood. SteamOS is actually built on a highly respected and remarkably lightweight distribution called Arch Linux. Valve hasn’t just taken that foundation and simply slapped a gaming theme over the top of it. They have implemented a heavily customised Linux kernel that is aggressively tuned specifically for efficient processor scheduling and delivering the absolute lowest possible latency for your games. Unlike a standard Windows environment, this operating system doesn’t waste a single background resource worrying about secure corporate network domains or actively searching for legacy office printers you haven’t plugged in for ten years. SteamOS completely ignores all of that unnecessary bloat because it has one single objective in mind. It only cares about taking your hardware and rendering your next frame as quickly and smoothly as physically possible.
Valve has also implemented an incredible shader pre-caching system. When you download a game on SteamOS, it also downloads pre-compiled shaders specifically for your hardware. This completely eliminates the dreaded shader compilation stutter that plagues so many modern PC ports on Windows. The community is already obsessed with how clean and responsive the operating system feels compared to a standard Windows installation. Just think about how an Xbox or a PlayStation works. The operating system is incredibly thin and therefore dedicates all the system resources to the game you’re currently playing and SteamOS is bringing that exact philosophy to the PC space. You don’t have an antivirus scanning files while you’re in a crucial multiplayer match. You don’t have unexpected driver updates forcing a system restart right when you’re about to save your game. You just get pure, unadulterated performance and it puts the game front and centre where it belongs.
The absolute biggest reason SteamOS could actually take the throne though comes down to cold, hard cash. Building a PC right now is ridiculously expensive. With graphics card and system memory prices completely out of control, every single penny matters when you’re putting together a rig and a standard retail copy of Windows 11 Home will set you back around $120. Meanwhile, SteamOS is entirely free. If you’re building a system on a strict budget, dropping Windows means you can take that money and put it straight into a better part. You could upgrade from a generic 1TB SSD to a high speed 2TB model. You could bump your system memory from 16GB to 32GB of high speed DDR5. You could even jump up an entire tier of graphics card. Think about the difference between an RTX 4060 and an RTX 4060 Ti, or an RX 7600 and an RX 7700 XT, though currently, SteamOS is geared towards AMD and no native NVIDIA support exists, but they are working on it. That in mind, the operating system budget alone covers the upgrade cost. Would you rather have an artificial intelligence chatbot on your desktop, or a faster graphics processor rendering your games? The choice is incredibly obvious for anyone who cares about gaming performance.
This massive price difference is exactly why the internet is predicting a huge wave of prebuilt gaming PCs ditching Microsoft entirely. System integrators are absolutely desperate to keep their entry level prices down in this terrible hardware market. Slapping a free, gaming optimised Linux operating system onto their budget builds lets them claw back some serious margin without sacrificing any gaming performance. Imagine going onto a custom PC builder website and seeing a system with Windows for $1000, and the exact same hardware with SteamOS for $880. Which one are you going to choose? For purely gaming focused machines, putting SteamOS on them out of the box makes perfect financial sense for both the builder and the consumer, and when the big system builders start doing this en masse, Microsoft is going to see a massive drop in their licensing revenue and that’s a direct threat to their bottom line.
Right now, as I said, the official SteamOS desktop release is heavily focused on supporting AMD graphics cards which makes complete sense because the Steam Deck uses a custom AMD processor. Valve knows this architecture inside out and the open source Linux drivers for AMD hardware are frankly phenomenal. You just plug in your Radeon card and it works perfectly straight out of the box but Valve are actively working on expanding hardware compatibility and Nvidia support is the final piece of the puzzle. Historically, Nvidia proprietary drivers on Linux have been a bit of a headache for regular users, but even Nvidia knows they can’t ignore this momentum. They’re starting to play nicely with open source community drivers and improving their own proprietary Linux software to support modern display servers like Wayland. Once Nvidia graphics cards get full, official, seamless support in SteamOS, Microsoft is going to have a massive problem on their hands and it will open the floodgates. Every single desktop PC in the world will essentially be a prime candidate for a SteamOS installation.
Of course, we have to talk about the elephant in the room when it comes to ditching Windows. Multiplayer anti-cheat software. This has always been the biggest sticking point for Linux gaming. Games like Valorant, Rainbow Six Siege, or Call of Duty use kernel level anti cheat systems that traditionally only work within the Windows environment, but even this impenetrable wall is starting to crumble. Epic Games has officially enabled Easy Anti Cheat support for Linux and Proton and BattlEye supports it too along with popular games like Apex Legends and Helldivers 2 which work flawlessly on SteamOS right now. It’s now entirely up to the individual game developers to flip a simple switch and allow Linux players onto their servers. Some studios like Riot Games are still holding out with their strict Vanguard software, which completely blocks Linux users, but as SteamOS grows in market share on the desktop, developers will have a massive financial incentive to support it. I mean, why would a game studio actively lock out millions of potential players? They won’t and it’s only a matter of time before the final holdouts realise they’re leaving money on the table by ignoring the SteamOS ecosystem.
Now you might be wondering if you can still use your PC for normal daily tasks if you decide to install SteamOS and the answer is yes. SteamOS has a full desktop mode powered by the KDE Plasma environment and it looks and feels very similar to what you’re already used to. You have a taskbar at the bottom of the screen. You have a familiar start menu. You can install web browsers like Chrome or Firefox. You can use Discord to chat with your teammates. You can watch YouTube. You can even do productivity tasks with free office software suites or edit videos in DaVinci Resolve using flatpak applications from the Discover software centre. It’s a fully functional, highly customisable operating system underneath the gaming interface. But the true beauty is that you only see that desktop mode when you actually want to. By default, it boots straight into the Steam interface which gives you a seamless, immersive, console like experience from the very moment you press the power button on your PC case.
Honestly, we’re currently standing at the edge of a massive shift in the PC gaming landscape. For the first time in PC history, there is a truly viable, high performance, free alternative to Windows that is backed by one of the biggest and most trusted gaming companies in the world. Valve has the money, the patience, and the technical expertise to pull this off and they’ve already conquered the digital storefront and the handheld hardware market so the desktop operating system market is clearly their next target. Microsoft has grown incredibly complacent over the years as they assumed PC gamers would always put up with the telemetry, the bloatware, and the rising costs because there was simply nowhere else to go.
So, are you ready to finally ditch Windows and install SteamOS on your rig, or is Microsoft’s grip on PC gaming still way too strong?
