As you already know, SteamOS is the operating system “designed” by Valve for its portable console, the Steam Deck, the device that brought this market back to life. And since then, you’ve probably guessed the reason I put it in quotes It is actually a customization layer deployed on standard Linuxexactly as we tell you here. And of course, as we also clarified in the same article, the Steam Deck, like other portable consoles that subsequently hit the market, are PCs with certain peculiarities, but they fall under the x86-64 platform.

Of course, this has a very obvious derivative, namely that with a certain adaptation to its own components, SteamOS should be able to work on these other consolesif they are based on the same architecture. And this, as you may remember, led to the fact that we have already seen some project in the past that brought this operating system to other consoles, as it was originally supposed to happen with the Ayaneo Next Lite, although in the end it did not happen. and instead the console came to market with Windows.

Of course, this has been making us think for some time whether Valve had reservations or even outright refused to let SteamOS be used on other platformsif you wanted to keep it bound exclusively to the Steam Deck. On the one hand, it wouldn’t be strange, because the customization layer of this OS provides a very well-honed user and gaming experience. But on the other hand, allowing it to be installed on other laptops can also serve to further expand the reach of Steam, a business that is undoubtedly also more than interesting for Valve.

As I say, until now we had some reasons to doubt, but now they seem clear, because, as we read in the information from the latest beta version of the operating system, Valve adds support for ASUS ROG Ally on SteamOS. To be more specific, as you can see in the penultimate entry of the extensive list of beta news, Valve states that “Added support for multiple ROG Ally buttons«. Of course, this tells us that the OS is being worked on for compatibility with the ASUS portable console, which is currently one of the most suitable for local gaming in the portable console compatible part of the Steam catalog.

SteamOS unlike Windows (which is the operating system found on other laptops) was specially designed to provide the easiest, most comfortable and smoothest user and gaming experience possibleand therefore it is a more than suitable choice for portable consoles, which explains why we have already seen some unofficial project porting it to other platforms in the past. Much, much more interesting, however, is the fact that Valve itself will get to work in this regard (we understand that in cooperation with manufacturers of other devices).