Steam Deck, the powerful, portable PC handheld that enables players to access their entire Steam library from anywhere, driven by hardware that includes an APU by AMD, will eventually, as previously promised, include support for dual boot, allowing users to turn their devices into dual-booting Windows machines, according to new statements shared by Valve UX designer Lawrence Yang. The news comes a few days after Valve published a new beta update for Steam Deck, one that suggested SteamOS, the Linux-based distribution that Steam Deck normally runs on, was being updated for ASUS ROG Ally (Windows 11) devices.
Yang said:
- “The note about ROG Ally keys is related to third-party device support for SteamOS. The team is continuing to work on adding support for additional handhelds on SteamOS.”
- “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.”
Some of the latest Steam Deck promos:
From a report:
[This] doesn’t mean Asus will officially bless Valve’s installer or sell the Ally with SteamOS, of course. (Asus has told me there are many reasons why it ships with Windows; a big one is that Microsoft has dedicated validation teams that ensure its operating system works across many different hardware configurations and chips.)