SteamOS

⚠️ Article status notice: This Article's Relevance Is Under Review

This article has been flagged for questionable relevance. Its connection to the systemic consumer protection issues outlined in the Mission statement and Moderator Guidelines isn't clear.

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Notice: This Article's Relevance Is Under Review

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To justify the relevance of this article:

• Provide evidence demonstrating how the issue reflects broader consumer exploitation (e.g., systemic patterns, recurring incidents, or related company policies).
• Link the problem to modern forms of consumer protection concerns, such as privacy violations, barriers to repair, or ownership rights.

If you believe this notice has been placed in error, or once you have made the required improvements, please visit either the Moderator's noticeboard, or the #appeals channel on our Discord server: Join Here. There may be a discussion about this article on its talk page.

SteamOS

Basic Information
Release Year	2013
Product Type	Operating system
In Production	Yes
Official Website	https://steampowered.com/steamos/

SteamOS is a Linux-based operating system, developed and maintained by Valve. Despite being a full fledged desktop OS, SteamOS' primarily optimized for gaming. It incorporates many gaming specific tweaks, such as Proton and Gamescope, and comes with Steam pre-installed. It is the default OS on Valve's first-party hardware, which includes the Steam Deck, Steam Machine and Steam Frame. Starting from 2025, Valve has been broadening device support to include third-party devices.

SteamOS was first unveiled in 2013, with versions 1.0 and 2.0 being based on Debian. These releases showed limited adaption. In 2022, alongside the Steam Deck, Valve announced SteamOS 3.0 based on Arch Linux.

Consumer-impact summary

Overview of concerns that arise from the conduct towards users of the product (if applicable):

• User Freedom
• User Privacy
• Business Model
• Market Control

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Incidents

Add one-paragraph summaries of incidents below in sub-sections, which link to each incident's main article while linking to the main article and including a short summary. It is acceptable to create an incident summary before the main page for an incident has been created. To link to the page use the "Hatnote" or "Main" templates.

If the company has numerous incidents then format them in a table (see Amazon for an example).

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This is a list of all consumer-protection incidents related to this product. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the SteamOS category.

Example incident one (date)

Main article: link to the main CR Wiki article

Short summary of the incident (could be the same as the summary preceding the article).

Example incident two (date)

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See also

• Microsoft Windows 11
• Apple macOS
• Android