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Beyond Steam Machine: Why Valve's New ARM Support Shouldn't Be Overlooked
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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
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Imagine a Google Pixel level phone made by Valve, running Steam OS (Linux) on ARM. That's my nerd wet dream.
I'd be happy with just installing full blown Linux on my pixel a la graphene.
Surely this Pixel 7 Pro has enough oomph to do some of my games.
I think memory is going to be the limiting factor. 12 gigs is very limiting on non-console systems
This is just nuts to me... My first laptop came with 512MB of RAM and only supported up to 2GB. They were still selling Macbook Pros with only 8GB of memory a year or two ago.
12GB SHOULD be enough to do everything, especially if it's running a linux OS. But I guess we can't have nice things because of memory hogs like Chrome.
your first laptop also had, like, a megapixel screen, while the Steam Deck over here (checks notes) (checks notes again)
Haha, I didn't even realize but the resolution is actually identical. My first laptop was a min-spec Macbook gen 1 (first Intel CPU model). It's the same 1280x800. The modern LCD (or OLED) on a Steam Deck looks way better obviously, and they're different DPI, but the performance hit is identical.
For a typical desktop Linux 12 GiB should be fine.
It depends on what you do with the system, of course. If you regularly compile big and template-heavy C++ codebases, work with Blender,... then 12 GiB won't be enough.
(What really surprised me was how much can still be done with just 4 GiB of memory. My laptop is currently limited to 4 GiB, and with some effort to set up a minimalist system it's working surprisingly well. I barely ever hit the memory limit - actually only when compiling big template-heavy C++ codebases 😉.)
Gaming, as they were wondering if their phone had the oomph to do it.
I considered Bazzite with Steam Game Mode on a recently purchased mini PC I'm using as a HTPC to replace Android TV. In addition to not working well with a remote, the data Valve collects via Steam is a concern. Not sure I’d consider a proprietary, closed-source front-end as the main UI on a phone to be much of an improvement over Android, though I’m sure Valve’s other related efforts to get Linux working well on a phone that get open sourced would be good.
If it runs linux you'll easily be able to run whatever you want on it
I guess my overall point is that DEs like KDE or Gnome don’t work well on other form factors like TVs, phones, and tablets. Just having Linux on a device without an appropriate UX isn’t that useful. Steam Game Mode acts like a DE for SteamOS that provides a good UX for a controller, but it’s not something I care to use unless it’s blocked from the internet so Valve can’t collect data and spy on me. If Valve makes a phone that isn’t private, the main value would be that the hardware can run Linux, but it would still need an appropriate DE to make it actually usable.
It's useful because it provides a development target, part of the reasons they currently aren't great on phones is because there isn't a target and nobody has one.
There is Plasma Bigscreen that's a modification for HTPCs. For touch screen based devices, a tiling WM is available for both Gnome and Plasma, though not baked in. IMHO bigger issue for both is a poorly working touch screen keyboard. This is something that SteamOS solves quite well.