SteamOS 3.9.0 Preview

N_Lens

What I can see from this release is that SteamOS is being converted from device firmware into a general-purpose distribution that happens to boot into a game launcher. Quite a bit of a version jump in the dependencies as well.

chorizo

My steam deck has been my main dev pc for a year now. Also serves Qwen 3.5 9B when I use my MacBook Air. Distrobox prevents OS updates from clobbering my environment.

xiaoyu2006

Nice, they are quite close to upstream.

imkac

Once KDE 6.8 is released, Valve must add Wayland support for Steam client and Proton/Wine. Also, they should drop 32-bit dependencies for Steam client on Linux, which has been done for Windows and macOS long ago.

glimshe

Anyone has had a good experience using SteamOS on one of those $200 N95 PCs from Amazon?

jauntywundrkind

Quite sad to see what happened to iwd after Intel left (it basically stopped development). Can't say I blame Steam for switching to wpa-supplicant. But man what a worse experience, really opaque annoying config files and pitiful tooling. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IWD-Development-Halts Really love this bump from KDE 6.4 to 6.7. Now we're talking!! We got to modernity (about a year old KDE) and fast follow to much more recent, nice. GE-Proton 11-6 just had a great release with native Wayland support for Steam overlays, which is great. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/08/ge-proton-11-6-release... There was some great benchmarking of input latencies across x11, wayland, xwayland, and xwayland was doing not good at all. We can't stay here forever. So many great updates but we're not really Wayland yet! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48909424