Valve is one of the few companies and developers that showed the most interest in Linux as a platform to play games. In addition to creating their own Linux gaming computers and being among the first to port their games, they also created an operating system, SteamOS, based on Debian, which allowed anyone to create their own Linux machine to play games. Unfortunately, this operating system has long been forgotten, and for years it has received practically no support or updates. This made some developers decide to follow in Valve’s footsteps and create their own alternatives to SteamOS, as is the case with GamerOS .
GamerOS is a Linux operating system specially designed to copy, and surpass, SteamOS. Unlike other systems, which have a desktop and all kinds of programs and tools, GamerOS is based on a minimal Arch system, and runs Steam on top of it. With this we get that as soon as we start, it turns on the Big Picture mode of Steam . And from there we can launch the games that we want.
Unlike SteamOS, GamerOS has a fairly active maintenance, and every so often we can see new versions and updates of this system to fully enjoy our games on it. And this same last weekend, this distro launched a new version , 23, with important improvements and optimizations.
What’s new in GamerOS 23
Being such a minimal and reduced system, we will hardly be able to find major relevant changes in it. At the end of the day, what we will always see is the Steam Big Picture interface as soon as we run the distro. The most important thing is that this new version includes the Linux kernel 5.11.1 . This is one of the latest versions available right now and it brings us a large number of fixes and improvements for compatibility with all types of hardware.
The MESA drivers have been updated to version 20.3.4, and it has version 460.56 of the NVIDIA drivers . Steam Tweak and Steam Buddy have also been updated to their most recent versions and, finally, the possibility of using Moonlight (to connect remotely to the PC), Chiaki (to play remotely to the PS4) and the ability to install and use Chromium.
Its developer has updated the list of games that work without problems in this new version of the distro, being able to find a greater number of games thanks to Steam Play Proton.
Download
Of course, this Linux distro to play is totally free for all users. The new version can be downloaded for free from the following link . It will be enough to copy the system to a USB memory, or to a hard disk, and use it to start the PC. So we can start enjoying the improvements that the new GamerOS 23 has brought us.
To be able to use this distro without problems we will need a more or less powerful PC. At best we must have a good processor (i5, equivalent, or higher), a good graphics card with support for Vulkan, 4 GB of RAM and 20 GB of hard disk space. Not counting enough space to download and install the games we want to play.