Valve are still taking SteamOS beyond the Steam Deck, though dual booting is a ways off

Valve have made no secret of their plans to make SteamOS – the Linux-based operating system that powers the Steam Deck – available to other games-playing devices, including rival handhelds. After a recent beta update mentioned adding support for the Asus ROG Ally’s inputs, The Verge confirmed with Valve that SteamOS support for non-Steam Deck portables is still very much in the works. The Deck’s long-promised dual booting capability, on the other hand, sounds further down the to-do list.

"The note about ROG Ally keys is related to third-party device support for SteamOS", Valve engineer Lawrence Yang told The Verge. "The team is continuing to work on adding support for additional handhelds on SteamOS".

While Yang also warns that this third-party support "isn’t ready to run out of the box yet", it’s likely a comforting development for those who crave the Deck-beating performance of its big rivals – the ROG Ally, ROG Ally X, Lenovo Legion Go and so on – but don’t fancy their preference for Windows 11. Which is understandable, as unpleasantness abounds when trying to wrestle a desktop-optimised operating system with a tiny touchscreen and thumbsticks. The ability to run more of your PC games collection without SteamOS’s occasional compatibility trip-ups is a compelling one, though even the most basic Steam Deck can work around this, be it through streaming games from the cloud or manually installing non-Steam launchers.

Nevertheless, there also exists a contingent of Steam Deck owners/admirers who’d like to dual boot their handheld with both SteamOS and Windows. Best of both worlds, innit. Unfortunately, this feature sounds even further off than the spread of SteamOS, despite being floated as a possibility back when the Deck first launched. So sayeth Yang:

"As for Windows, we’re preparing to make the remaining Windows drivers for Steam Deck OLED available (you might have seen that we are prepping firmware for the Bluetooth driver). There’s no update on the timing for dual boot support – it’s still a priority, but we haven’t been able to get to it just yet."

Booo. You can already bodge a form of dual-booting, by installing Windows on a microSD card and booting from that, though being able to keep both on the Steam Deck’s SSD will first require an indeterminate amount of thumb-twiddling.