There’s something almost endlessly endearing about the wee Steam Machine box. It’s beautifully designed, beautifully small, and it’s a gaming PC that you wouldn’t mind sticking in/on whatever furniture your TV sits on. But it’s also hard to buy, was manufactured in small numbers, and commands an incredibly high price for a PC with a weak last-gen GPU and single-channel memory.
But, bless ’em, Valve is still trying to carry on as though it’s all fine. And to that end, it has now listed the Windows drivers for its Steam Machine so users can easily switch from the installed SteamOS software to Microsoft’s more-pervasive operating system. The drivers are all listed on the support pages for Steam Hardware, sitting just underneath the options for the different Steam Deck SKUs.
In the interests of choice and customisation, that’s great. Having the option to switch from Linux to a more widely supported OS means that all the games which are blocked from SteamOS (such as most online shooters) are now available to you if you commit the sin of an operating system switch.
Okay, that’s maybe a little harsh, but it does feel like one of the boons of the Steam Machine is innate support for SteamOS—something that’s still not all that widespread for desktop PCs—making for a particularly ideal living room/TV-connected experience. Though I will say that the Steam Controller itself takes much of the pain out of using Windows from a sofa, which also kinda undermines the SteamOS positivity.