news
Games: DIY "Steam Machine", Bazzite, and SteamOS
-
Make Use Of ☛ I built my own Steam Machine, and I love it
Valve's mid-November 2025 Steam Machine whipped gamers into a frenzy, only for the company to be rather coy with the release date. Valve is confident the revival of the Steam Machine, and the follow-up to the wildly popular Steam Deck, will hit our shelves in 2026... at some point.
But I can't wait that long. I decided to take matters into my own hands and revamp a gaming laptop into a sleek but powerful Steam Machine tablet. I know; I feel your eyes rolling. But stick with me, because my homebrew Steam Machine tablet is serving me well, and is also one of the most fun DIY hardware projects I've done in a while.
-
XDA ☛ Bazzite turned my second PC into a console, and SteamOS never felt this polished on the desktop
It’s funny to think how Linux was once considered the worst operating system for gaming, but then SteamOS came along. It deserves a lot of credit for not just making Linux gaming viable, but actually fun. The problem is, SteamOS is optimized for handhelds, so the experience isn’t quite the same on desktop hardware. If you’re a PC gamer, you still end up living with Windows.
I did that for the longest time, until recently, when I decided to try Bazzite. It follows in SteamOS’s footsteps to make Linux great for gaming, and in some cases, it even outshines it. It has turned my second PC into a console, and the overall experience is so polished that SteamOS doesn’t even come close.
-
XDA ☛ I’ve been running SteamOS on a non-Steam mini PC, and it makes a better living room console than I expected
The most recent video game console I bought is the Xbox One. No, not the Series S, nor the X, the original Xbox One. It's a solid workhorse that saw very little use as a TV tuner box and a console. I primarily play games on PC and have done so for decades, but I have fond memories of the Xbox and 360, as well as the OG PlayStation and earlier Game Boys. That led me down the rabbit hole of emulation, but I still have a huge Steam library of games to get through, which is where the big screen could help out with.
I set up a mini PC with Batocera, and it's an absolute rocket, comfortably playing through Xbox and PlayStation 2 titles, as well as countless PC titles. But with the Steam Machine out, I thought about loading SteamOS on another mini PC to play around with it, see how it performed (with relatively mediocre specifications), and whether it's better to run SteamOS or Batocera for a mix of vintage and current gaming. So, I dusted off my Minisforum U850 with its beastly Intel i5-10210U processor.
-
HowTo Geek ☛ 8GB graphics cards aren’t the problem, your operating system is
Many of the modern-day AAA games cannot be played at their maximum graphical settings on GPUs with 8GB VRAM. Thanks to a Valve developer, there’s now a way to improve the performance of GPUs limited by their VRAM.