Mi hyping The price of games is sky-high, and only a very high price can bring it down. Steam MachineIt will be what I've been looking for: a pre-built PC that can handle most games, and with it I'll be able to play them well. Horizon forbidden west, Black MythWukong and Borderlands 4. There's a lot of talk about this machine that hasn't even been released yet, and one subtopic is online gaming.
Pro-Steam supporters say you'll be able to play everything online without paying extra, while anti-Steam—or pro-Windows—supporters say that's not the case at all, that many games use kernel-level anti-cheatBoth sides are right if we remove the word "everything" from the first ones: yes, you can play a lot of games online for free, but the most popular games usually have anti-cheat software that only allows them to run on Windows, some even requiring that Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 are enabled.
The Steam Machine could change the rules of the game, even if only a little.
There are several factors to consider in this matter. One is something I recently read and confirmed by researching further: Microsoft is not happy about the existence of software with access to the kernel And, although it hasn't been officially announced, it could restrict this practice. It's been working for some time to offer the same security without needing to access the kernel, and in short, it's more than likely that this type of anti-cheat will cease to exist in the medium-term future. Before the Steam Machine launch? I doubt it, but the Steam Machine 2—or 1, since it's a reboot of the series, but I'm referring to the one coming in early 2026—will take advantage of all this during its lifecycle.
When I mention changing the rules of the game, it's for the simple reason that it might be of interest to developers. Windows PCs already exist, and Magnus Nothing will change regardless of sales. What might change is... a Linux device that achieves some successSteam Machine sales will be added to Steam Deck sales, and it's easy to see why the latter would outsell the former. Tim Sweeney said he loved the Steam Deck and would like to see tens of millions of units sold, which would make bringing Fortnite to Linux worthwhile. Four million Deck sales and six million Machine sales make up the first ten million.
Official Dual Start, a priority for Valve
Another thing we can expect is something Valve has mentioned in some interviews. For them It is a priority to release a wizard-type tool to create a dual boot with SteamOS and Windows 11Why is this important if it's already possible? Because official software is better supported than community-created software.
Currently, Steam Deck users rely on tools like SteamDeck_rEFIndA script to facilitate dual-booting on the Steam Deck. At the time of writing, the most recent version was almost a year old, and it mentions support up to SteamOS 3.5. We are currently on version 3.5. Steam OS 3.7.17which is probably compatible, but not so sure.
When Valve releases the official tool, we can expect full support and easy installation. If we have enough disk space, like 1TB, we can allocate around 250GB for Windows to ensure we can fit any game—even just one—that might require anti-cheat, install Windows 11 on that partition, and leave the rest for SteamOS. Most games will work perfectly on LinuxAnd if not, well, we'll just switch to Windows and throw it away.
Which option would be best? Undoubtedly, changing how anti-cheat systems work so we can play everything on Linux. But even so, having Windows on a PC and all its applications is something that can come in handy at any time.
We're waiting for news. For now, that's all we can do: wait patiently.