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
Valve also used Windows 11 on their own demos for VR streaming to the Steam Frame
I do believe they called out that the steam machine is designed to work with the frame, right? I’d have expected to see Linux SteamVR updates leasing up to this, to get it fully fixed up and tested ahead of time, though I might also have missed something…
The ad for the Steam Frame specifically says it’s compatible with the whole Steam family, Deck, Controller, and Machine. I expect Steam Deck will only be a virtual screen, as well as it’s standalone capabilities. If that’s all it can do with the deck, that’s enough for me. If it can do VR as well, even better. Either way, the frame also runs on SteamOS, so that will be Linux, and if they can’t support streaming VR from the Machine they will be crucified.