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SteamOS 3.9.0 Preview

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Re: SteamOS 3.9.0 Preview

#21

Post by jauntywundrkind »

Quite sad to see what happened to iwd after Intel left (it basically stopped development). Can't say I blame Steam for switching to wpa-supplicant. But man what a worse experience, really opaque annoying config files and pitiful tooling. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IWD-Development-Halts

Really love this bump from KDE 6.4 to 6.7. Now we're talking!! We got to modernity (about a year old KDE) and fast follow to much more recent, nice.

GE-Proton 11-6 just had a great release with native Wayland support for Steam overlays, which is great. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/08/ge-proton-11-6-release...

There was some great benchmarking of input latencies across x11, wayland, xwayland, and xwayland was doing not good at all. We can't stay here forever. So many great updates but we're not really Wayland yet! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48909424

Re: SteamOS 3.9.0 Preview

#23

Post by out_of_protocol »

atmanactive wrote: post #22
out_of_protocol wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that Apple and Android. I have 32 bit native software which can't run on modern devices at all.

I'm sorry to hear that. Could it be ARM related?

Apple dropped 32 bit support in specific OS version with no way to run it anymore sans downgrading the OS - so it's not hardware restriction

Re: SteamOS 3.9.0 Preview

#24

Post by dfabulich »

atmanactive wrote: post #22
out_of_protocol wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that Apple and Android. I have 32 bit native software which can't run on modern devices at all.

I'm sorry to hear that. Could it be ARM related?

It's just to reduce the maintenance burden of backwards compatibility.

Re: SteamOS 3.9.0 Preview

#25

Post by koolala »

N_Lens wrote: post #2

What I can see from this release is that SteamOS is being converted from device firmware into a general-purpose distribution that happens to boot into a game launcher. Quite a bit of a version jump in the dependencies as well.

What showed you this in this release? The motherboards compatibility?

Re: SteamOS 3.9.0 Preview

#26

Post by N_Lens »

koolala wrote: post #25
N_Lens wrote: post #2

What I can see from this release is that SteamOS is being converted from device firmware into a general-purpose distribution that happens to boot into a game launcher. Quite a bit of a version jump in the dependencies as well.

What showed you this in this release? The motherboards compatibility?

Scripts and packages moving from steamos- to holo-. "holo" is the internal name for the base OS layer. Pulling the product brand out of the plumbing is what you do when the plumbing is going to run somewhere the brand doesn't apply.

Version jumps - Kernel 7.2 while stable SteamOS is on 6.16, and Plasma 6.4.3 straight to 6.7.3 — three desktop releases swallowed at once. The driver (heh) is probably compatibility.

Valve also reversed course on their adoption of iwd (Wifi), and are going back to wpa_supplicant for compatibility with various networks (They ported iwd's fast-resume trick over for parity).

All of the above changes point to maximizing OS compatibility with various devices.

Re: SteamOS 3.9.0 Preview

#27

Post by tapoxi »

imkac wrote: post #6

Once KDE 6.8 is released, Valve must add Wayland support for Steam client and Proton/Wine. Also, they should drop 32-bit dependencies for Steam client on Linux, which has been done for Windows and macOS long ago.

They're doing this, it's the "use experimental SteamRT 3 client" in the interface settings.
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