Valve Confirms It Will Support ROG Ally With Its Steam Deck OS

Valve once imagined that every PC maker could have its own “Steam Machine,” a PC gaming console running the company’s Linux-based SteamOS operating system. It took a decade for that dream to evolve into the company’s in-house Steam Deck handheld gaming console, but the initial dream isn’t dead.

The company has long said it plans to let other companies use SteamOS, too — and that means explicitly supporting rival Asus ROG Ally handheld gaming console, Valve designer Lawrence Yang now confirms. The Verge.

A few days ago, some spotted an intriguing line in Valve’s latest SteamOS release notes: “Added support for additional ROG Ally keys.” We didn’t know Valve supported ROG Ally keys, let alone additional keys!

Maybe Valve only supported these keys in the Steam desktop client on Windows, where it offers a Steam Deck-like Big Picture Mode interface for any PC, and the line ended up in these patch notes by mistake? I asked to be on the safe side.

But no: it is indeed Valve that will eventually support the ROG Ally and other competing portable consoles!

“The note on ROG Ally sticks is about third-party device support for SteamOS. The team continues to work on adding support for additional portable devices on SteamOS,” Yang tells me.

That doesn’t mean Asus is going to officially endorse Valve’s installer or sell the Ally with SteamOS, of course. (Asus told me there are a number of reasons why it ships with Windows; one of the main ones is that Microsoft has dedicated validation teams that ensure its OS works on many different hardware configurations and chipsets.)

And Valve isn’t suggesting it will bring SteamOS to competing handheld consoles anytime soon. Valve is “making steady progress,” Yang told me, but “it’s not ready to ship yet.”

We already knew that Valve was planning a general release of SteamOS 3 that you’d theoretically be able to install on non-portable PCs as well; Yang says he’s making progress on that front as well, but it’s not quite ready yet.

So that’s the update on turning Windows handhelds into Steam Machines; what about Valve’s promise to let you turn Steam Decks into dual-boot Windows machines as well, letting you switch between the two operating systems at will? Here’s what Yang thinks:

On the Windows side, we are preparing to release the remaining Windows drivers for Steam Deck OLED (you may have seen that we are preparing a firmware for the Bluetooth driver). There is no update on the timeline for dual boot support – it is still a priority, but we have not been able to get there yet.

Valve isn’t alone in bringing its compelling combination of Linux and a controller-friendly Steam UI to Windows handhelds. Universal Blue has touted the fact that its Bazzite OS has already gained support for the Asus ROG Ally X before it even launched.