You know what the worst thing about the Steam Deck is? Being able to play your games on the go. Wouldn’t it be better if it was a screenless brick that lived under your TV? Well, maybe not, but at least one person thought so, because [Interfacing Linux] has created the GeekDeck, a Steam OS console of sorts in this video embedded below.
The hack is as simple as can be: he took a GEEKOM A5, a minicomputer with very similar specs to the Steam Deck, and managed to load SteamOS onto it. We were expecting that to be a trial that took most of the video’s runtime, but no! Everything just… sorta worked. It booted to a live environment and installed like any other Linux. Which was unexpected, but Steam has released SteamOS for PC.
In case you weren’t aware, SteamOS is an immutable distribution based on Arch Linux. Arch of course has all the drivers to run on… well, any modern PC, but it’s the immutable part that we were expecting to cause problems. Immutable distributions are locked down in a similar manner to Mac OS (everything but /home/ is typically read-only, even to the superuser) and SteamOS doesn’t ship with package manager that can get around this, like rpm-ostree in Fedora’s Silverblue ecosystem. Actually, if you don’t have a hardware package that matches the SteamDeck to the same degree this GEEKOM does, Bazzite might be a good bet– it’s based on Siverblue and was made to be SteamOS for PC, before Steam let you download their OS to try on your PC.
Anyway, you can do it. Should you? Well, based on the performance shown in the video, not if you want to run triple-A games locally. This little box is no more powerful than the SteamDeck, after all. It’s not a full gaming rig. Still, it was neat to see SteamOS off of the ‘deck and in the wild.
Usually we see hacks that use the guts of the SteamDeck guts with other operating systems, not the other way around. Like the Bento Box AR machine we liked so much it was actually featured twice. The SteamDeck makes for a respectable SBC, if you can find a broken one. If not, apparently a Chinese MiniPC will work just as well.
I installed the official SteamOS image on an AMD 7840HS mini PC and it works well with the exception of needing to switch audio output device each time it boots and the WiFi sometimes being flaky. I’m not sure if Bazzite would resolve those two pain points.
Disable the other audio device?
I took my SSD from my Steam Deck when I upgraded it and threw it in my desktop. I didn’t expect it to boot to SteamOS vs my existing W11 install, but it did. Everything ran fine, recognized my Ryzen 5700 and RX 6800 and was remarkably speedy. It was also the most recent Steam Deck version at the time, so it was above the available PC image version.
I believe as long as the chip sets involved are contemporary to what is in the steam deck they will work.
Very similar specs, my foot. It’s a Zen 3 with Vega 7 graphics, while the steam deck has a modified Zen 2 and RDNA2 graphics.
They oddly didn’t put the specs in the article, and I’m not getting on YT again to find out.
If they use the 680m or 780m it will be faster than a Deck. Not better, but the GPU will be faster. The deck has a pretty well tuned 4 core, which you could argue might be better as 6 cores these days. But the only problem is AMD only pairs the 680m and 780m GPU with an 8 core CPU, so it’s way off being a balanced system.
I like balanced systems, APUs are not great for that usually, barring the Legion Go S or Steamdeck, which have a fairly specialized APU.
This is great news because I have a couple Lenovo T14 motherboards (Also compatible with P16s and T16).
The Legion Go S is unusual as its Z2 Go APU has a 4-core Zen 3+ with Radeon 680M. Tech-wise it’s older than the Z1/Z1 Extreme (Zen 4 + RDNA3), but probably cheaper as it’s manufactured in TSMC’s mature N6 process.
But I agree that’s it’s a pretty well-balanced design suitable for a gaming handheld.
The Z1’s Radeon 740M is just pathetic– they should’ve put in a 760M instead.
Balanced for what task though? After all you might be a crypto miner and not want any general purpose compute beyond the bare minimum, or doing photogrammetry (for a more legitimate GPU hogging task).
I think AMD are generally correct to tune the APU to being more CPU than GPU as a general rule – the folks that really really need more GPU than the APU have are almost certainly going to want a dedicated GPU anyway (which isn’t to say they don’t also want a second very capable GPU element – perhaps the encoding of their stream for instance). And for everyone else a decent enough GPU that just works is all you need. While I suspect the price difference and power cost when you are not using them of having more CPU is relatively negligible – so other than in very constrained systems you might as well have the extra CPU headroom.
Balanced for a pure APU based gaming device like a handheld (Steamdeck) or a mini PC similar to what the article discusses.
Generally for the tasks being discussed here, you’d want more GPU than CPU on the chip so you aren’t bottlenecked as heavily.
Honestly as much as I love Hackaday showing up in my news feed, I also Really love it when a article shows up (and it seems most of internet journalism is guilty of this these days) and they make a bold claim of some small form factor PC or a handheld PC gadget being “similar” or “better than” a Steam Deck but dont actually list any specs to back up the claim.
Is there any price advantage to this than making an mATX system? Or is there just a space thing? I have a Ryzen 5 5600X + RTX3060 + 16GB system connected to my 43″ TV which i use from my couch using a wireless keyboard and mouse combo. It’s very comfortable and very powerful
Usually the smaller systems are a price disadvantage (at least relative to performance).
But they are also smaller, usually significantly lower power and more efficient so cooler running systems (at the same performance level), and generally handle being used in a more portable fashion better than than the more usual ATX standard sized stuff – don’t need a GPU sag bracket at all if you don’t have a separate GPU with all that mass hanging in space a huge distance from the case attachments…
So if I wanted to put a computer in a boat or caravan, or have a new LAN party box something like this has advantages, especially as the decent enough smaller form factor video cards seem to be an almost entirely forgotten option – seriously the last of the low profile video cards I saw was I think a 10 series. But otherwise…
Neat project, but I dug out my old SteamLink box recently and was impressed at how well it still works at streaming games from my PC. Near zero latency (both devices on same wired local network ) and PS4 controllers just worked. If you got one of those for cheap years ago, give it another try.
Glad to hear they are still solid. Though I feel like they did lose their niche once good Android boxes were available alongside the app.
At least I’ve had good experiences with Android TV + Steamlink over Ethernet. For close rooms I’ve even played with my controller connected to the PC still instead of the box without any issues.
Though, supporting the article/project, I do like beefier boxes so you can do some stuff locally if you don’t need max power. Like doing the easier emulation locally or other older games or simpler titles.