Valve’s latest SteamOS is out with ‘initial support for upcoming Steam Machine hardware’

After a standard spell in beta, the latest iteration of SteamOS—Valve’s Arch-based Linux distro for use on Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame—has hit the big three-eight. Or, well, three-point-eight. SteamOS 3.8 is out, is what I’m saying, and if you turn your face to the wind and inhale, you can detect the first notes of upcoming hardware.

Specifically, the Steam Machine, for which SteamOS 3.8 brings “initial support,” as well as support for waking a SteamOS device from sleep via a connected Steam Controller. Alas, no word on the Steam Frame in these patch notes, but consider me as eager as ever to get my hands on Valve’s living room box, presuming the RAM crisis has not made it cost $5,000 dollars.

But this is a pretty big release even excluding the GabeCube stuff. I’ll stick the full patch notes down below, but there are a number of tweaks and new features that leap out to me as a longtime Deck user. Chief among them is that yer Deck now defaults to Wayland rather than X11 in desktop mode.

Those are two different display servers for Linux desktops—the gubbins that make your GUI function when you’re not working straight in the virtual console like god intended. To cut to the chase: X11 is the old one (and as such, tends to have greater compatibility and work better for some particular tasks, at least for now) and Wayland is the new one (though it’s been out in some form for nearly 20 years)—it’s more secure and generally a bit more dextrous for most tasks.

So swapping to Wayland-by-default means that SteamOS has reduced “several cases of reduced performance in Desktop Mode compared to Game Mode” on your Steam Deck, desktop mode also has better scaling on TVs, support for external HDR displays, and support for VRR displays. The kind of stuff you might care about if you were making an OS for a device that’s expected to live underneath people’s TVs.

There are also new BIOSes for the LCD and OLED Decks, which will be installed as part of the general 3.8 update when you run it. The LCD one, sorry to say, isn’t too exciting, save that it adds preliminary support for device hibernation. OLED, though? Valve’s updated the Deck so that the charging LED now respects your device charging settings. If you set your Deck to top out at 80% charge for battery health reasons, then the LED will turn green—meaning fully charged—when it reaches that point, rather than remaining standard ‘charging’ white for eternity.

All good stuff, then. Here are the full patch notes for your perusal.

General

• Updated Arch system base
• Initial support for upcoming Steam Machine hardware
• Added support for waking from sleep via connected Steam Controller
• Substantially improved speed of future OS updates on high-speed connections
• Improved support for screen casting in Game Mode (e.g. OBS/Discord)
• Fixed dropdown menus not appearing in some games
• Fixed excessive trackpad sensitivity on certain early Steam Deck LCD models
• Improved support for games that attempt to open PDF files in external viewers
• Fixed an issue where video output could become frozen while using Remote Play
• Fixed a possible session crash when using Game Recording with certain “Maximum video height” settings
• Fixed an issue affecting certain titles (such as “SpongeBob SquarePants: Titans of the Tide”) where the game window could have an incorrect position
• Fixed closing certain titles (such as “STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor™” and Starfield) resulting in a session crash
• Improved support for certain USB racing wheels and USB devices that boot in a non-standard mode
  • Frequently these are devices that appear as USB storage devices with a driver installer, and must be switched to their normal mode by the OS
• Steam Deck controller firmware updates now display update progress on the splash screen
• Fixes issue on specific Steam Deck revisions where firmware updates could render the left controller inoperative for that session
• Numerous stability and security updates

Display / Performance

• Updated graphics driver with performance and stability fixes
• Added preliminary support for HDMI VRR for devices with native HDMI output
• Fixed an issue where “Allow Tearing” wouldn’t have the intended effect in certain configurations
• Improved VRR frame pacing
• Fixed FSR badge remaining off in the performance overlay, even if it was actually active
• Fixed a case where per-app performance settings would intermittently fail to apply when launching a game
• Added missing graphics features needed for titles such as “Crimson Desert”
• Fixed an issue on certain TCL TVs where the display may remain blank using the Steam Deck Dock when VRR is enabled (requires a Dock firmware update)

Bluetooth / WiFi

• Fixed a case where WiFi performance could become degraded until the device was put to sleep or manually reconnected
• Re-re-enable Bluetooth Wake for Steam Deck LCD
  • Fix for more spurious wake issues that were present in earlier attempts

Audio

• Detect HDMI channel count and expose surround configuration if available
• Add a setting to allow using Bluetooth headset mics (Bluetooth playback quality will be worse while capture is active)
• Restore internal audio device on reboot if set to “Off” in desktop mode
• Increase suspend timeout for HDMI devices so initial audio isn’t cut off after a few seconds of inactivity
• Fixed a bug with switching input devices when a wired headset is plugged in
• Fixed an issue where audio underruns could be experienced after sleep/resume
• Fixed a bug on Steam Deck OLED where rebooting would occasionally cause a loss of speaker output until rebooted again
• Fixed a case where FPS limits would fail to apply when downscaling games from a higher resolution

Accessibility

• Added an option to force mono audio output

Desktop Mode

• KDE Plasma updated to version 6.4.3 from 6.2.5, and now uses wayland by default

  • Fixes several cases of reduced performance in Desktop Mode compared to Game Mode

  • Improved support for rotated displays

  • Better scale factor out of the box on TVs

  • Adds support for external HDR displays

  • Adds support for VRR displays

  • Adds support per-display scale factor

  • For more information, see Plasma release announcements

  • https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.3.0/

  • https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.4.0/

System Firmware

• Includes Steam Deck LCD BIOS v133

  • Security updates

  • Added “Memory Power Down” setup option

  • Preliminary support for hibernation

• Includes Steam Deck OLED BIOS v114

  • Security updates

  • Charging LED now changes color when charge limit is reached, rather than only at 100%

Non-Deck

• Improved compatibility with recent Intel and AMD platforms

• Greatly improved video memory management on discrete GPU platforms

• Fixed a compatibility issue with the SteamOS chainloader that could cause a boot failure on some desktop systems with recent UEFI firmware

• Power button short and long presses now supported across a wide variety of devices

• Improved controller support for OneXPlayer F1 series, GPD Win 5, GPD Win Mini, Anbernic Win600, OrangePi NEO, and Lenovo Legion Go

• Added controller support for OneXPlayer X1 series and Lenovo Legion Go 2

• Added system and controller firmware update support for the Lenovo Legion Go 2

• Added preliminary charge limiting support for Legion Go, Legion Go S, and Legion Go 2 – currently only accessible in Desktop Mode

• Added controller RGB LED color settings for the Lenovo Legion Go 2

• Added controller, TDP control, and speaker audio support for the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally series

• Reduced handheld controller input latency from 5-8ms to 100-500us

• Night mode, color vibrance, and color temperature sliders in Steam now work on Z2E and later AMD APUs

• Seamless boot fixes for Z2E and later AMD APUs

• Automatically handle internally rotated display for some third-party handhelds

• Improved motion control support for handhelds with BMI260 IMUs

• SD card reliability improvements for some third-party handhelds, including ASUS ROG Xbox Ally, Legion Go 1, Legion Go S, Legion Go 2, and MSI Claw

• Fixed washed out colors for Zotac and OneXPlayer handhelds with OLED

• Fixed some GPU hangs on Phoenix APU devices (Tales of Arise, Octopath Traveler II)

• Fixed ASUS ROG Ally power consumption from fingerprint reader while shut down

• Fixed trackpad losing functionality after sleep/resume on the Legion Go

• Fixed spurious wake-ups when using a Logitech Bolt receiver

• Add controller support for MSI Claw devices (A1M, 7 AI+ A2VM, 8 AI+ A2VM, A8 BZ2EM)

• Add controller support for OneXPlayer APEX and X1 series.

• Improved gyro response for devices that use AccelGyro3D (Legion Go 1, Claw A1M)

• Fixed a system crash on international Asus ROG Xbox Ally models

• Fix Bluetooth not working on some Intel handhelds

• Add initial firmware for upcoming Intel handhelds

Developer

• Desktop Mode now uses Wayland by default

  • X11 support may still be selected via Steam developer settings, or via `steamosctl`

• Updated Linux kernel to 6.16

• Steam now uses steamos-manager to query available desktop sessions and trigger desktop session switching

• Added support for setting the desktop password in developer settings

• Initial support for running as a Virtual Machine guest (virtio guest drivers)

• Added support for third-party devices to trigger the SteamOS boot menu via EFI variable

• Added `custom-update` verb to `atomupd-manager` for easier testing of specific builds

• System reports now include more audio debug information

• Initial support for LAVD CPU scheduler via `steamosctl set-cpu-scheduler lavd`