Valve and Collabora Announce Official Arch Linux ARM64 Port for Steam Frame

posted by Marius Nestor on Jul 18, 2026,
updated Jul 18, 2026

Steam Frame uses an ARM64 processor, so Collabora, in collaboration with Valve, has been developing Holo Core as a full AArch64 port of Arch Linux intended as the base for the operating system that will power the gaming VR headset. Since Arch Linux has no official ARM64 support, Collabora had to build new tooling and CI infrastructure from scratch.

But the real challenge here was to make the entire process reproducible in CI (Continuous Integration) for a rolling-release distribution like Arch Linux, which Valve already uses on the Steam Deck and Steam Machine. For now, the result is a proof of concept rather than a finished product.

Read on

GoL:

• Collabora announce a preview of Holo Core, an AArch64 port of Arch Linux for Steam Frame | GamingOnLinux

  Open source firm Collabora who work with Valve (Steam), just announced a preview of Holo Core - the aarch64 port of Arch Linux for Steam Frame.

Neowin:

• Valve releases its first Arm-based Arch Linux preview for Steam Frame

  This means that developers can now start testing their games with the prepared binaries, package sources, and even a development container.

  For starters, aarch64 is the 64-bit version of the Arm instruction set used by the Qualcomm processor inside Steam Frame. The source tree is hosted in Valve’s SteamOS GitLab, while compiled packages are available from a SteamOS package server. Collabora has also published a base-devel container that can run directly on an Arm Linux system or, with QEMU user-space emulation and binfmt configured, on an x86-64 host through tools such as Docker, Podman, or Distrobox.

  It should be noted that this isn't a complete or general-purpose Arm edition of Arch Linux. Collabora says the initial target for this build is the package set needed for Steam Frame development and operating-system image creation. Even with that narrower scope, runtime and build dependencies expand the job to several thousand packages.

  The difficult part is not simply compiling each package for a different processor. Upstream Arch Linux does not officially support aarch64, and its rolling-release model means packages and dependency chains keep changing while the port is being assembled.