In an IGN interview, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said that “[they] want [SteamOS] to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC”. Below is a transcript of the interview. I tried to clean it up to my best ability.
Just like Steam Deck paved the way for Steam OS on a variety of third-party handhelds, we expect that Steam Machine will pave the way for Steam OS on a bunch of different machines in either similar form factors, different perf envelopes, different segments of the market, and get to a good outcome there. We definitely want to encourage people to try it out on their own hardware. We’ll be working on expanding hardware support for the drivers and the base operating system. Just last week, we fixed something that was preventing us from booting on the very latest AMD CPU platforms. Last month, we added support for the Intel Lunar Lake platforms. We’re constantly adding support and improving performance. We want it to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC, but there’s still a ton of work to do there.
If the embedded video doesn’t take you to the correct part of the video, the correct timestamp is 5:37.
EDIT: Here’s the written article of the video:
https://www.ign.com/articles/valves-next-gen-steam-machine-and-steam-controller-the-big-interview
Can SteamOS run Word and Excel? Or is it just for gaming?
Honest question. I understand that SteamOS is Linux, and therefore you would be running LibreOffice. I’m on a Mac, and I run iWork, because it’s free, or rather included in the purchase. But I could run Word and Excel, and have done before they doubled the price of Microsoft 365.
The gateway to getting people off one platform and onto another is whether the apps they use will still work. The big advantage Linux has is, Firefox runs on everything (even iOS, albeit with heavy limitations) and you can sync your progress across. My wife doesn’t care about OS/platform; when we switched from Windows to Mac, all she cared about was, will Firefox work the same? And yes, yes it does.
I think LibreOffice is good enough for most people. Same with iWork. But people want familiarity, and if they own Word and Excel, they will want to run those. Unfortunately, I’ve seen some great deals for Office 2021, which I think is the latest offline version, but they’re always Windows only. You can’t install the same thing on Mac or Linux, even if the software is available there — the license is strictly Windows only.
But yes, if you’re wondering, as a Mac user, I do support Linux adoption, Linux gaming… it’s not what I use, but taking anything away from Microsoft means more attention on the other two. I don’t know what’s bigger between Mac and Linux, and I don’t care. Microsoft is the enemy here. A rising tide lifts all boats. Unfortunately with regards to gaming, Proton is Linux but not Mac, so the rising tide doesn’t help us on gaming, but no one buys a Mac to game on it. Not if they know what they’re doing. And I know what I’m doing — at least, enough to have built gaming PCs.
Try Onlyoffice. It’s designed to look and feel like MS Office.
even current steamdeck / steamos can run basically any desktop apps. I’ve seen some folks even run kdenlive (nle video editing app) on it, obvs using mouse&keyboard rather than the “gamepad”. While it’s gaming first ui, it does have a regular desktop too.
As for literally word/excel? Not sure, but doubt it. Reasonable alternatives like libreoffice or others? Absolutely.
It’s complicated. You can run either in the browser. Most open source office suites are designed to emulate Microsoft products so it shouldn’t be a huge burden to switch. Lastly if you want to fiddle, you can get them running with WINE compatibility layer.
Word is a website program at this point so yes it can run it