Daily Driving SteamOS on a Laptop: Two Weeks on the Framework 13

It started with a friend's video about ditching Windows for SteamOS. Austin Evans took that prompt and flipped the question: whether a regular laptop can sensibly live as an enlarged, Deck-like machine. On the surface SteamOS boots like a console, but underneath it is a full Linux desktop that can be made to look strikingly familiar. Valve has recently opened the system beyond the Steam Deck and the upcoming Steam Machine, so with the right graphics hardware you can try it on something like the Framework Laptop 13.

To understand the philosophy, look at how it starts. By default the device lands in a Big Picture-like Gaming Mode; reaching the desktop takes a deliberate step. The message is clear: this is an OS built to play first, with a desktop on the side, not the other way around. The KDE Plasma desktop underneath brings the deep customization Linux users expect, with enough tweaks to mimic a familiar Windows-like layout if you want it.

Hardware support is the first real gate. Officially Valve supports only the Steam Deck family and the Steam Machine; generic AMD PCs and most handhelds sit in beta. AMD graphics is the sweet spot, Intel is workable, Nvidia is effectively unsupported out of the box. Evans first tried a modern Lenovo Yoga and hit a power-management wall that blocked the installer. The same process on the Linux-friendly Framework Laptop 13 went smoothly. That machine runs a two-year-old six-core Ryzen 5 with 16 GB of RAM — modest on paper, more than enough for this test.

Once installed, the surprise is speed. On identical hardware, SteamOS felt noticeably snappier than Windows, with apps popping open instantly. Evans described it as feeling like a brand-new two-thousand-dollar laptop rather than a two-year-old mid-range one. For anyone worn down by the growing heaviness of Windows, that sensation alone becomes a strong reason to keep experimenting.

Day-to-day apps paint a surprisingly normal picture. Straight from the Discover store, Chrome, Spotify, OBS, Slack and Todoist installed and ran without extra work. For anyone who has followed Linux in the last couple of years, that is not shocking, but in the SteamOS context it matters: you can keep your routine intact. That normalcy, however, does not erase the console habits baked deeper in the system.

The more revealing part is power and heat. At idle the laptop drew around eight to ten watts and ran warmer than expected. To make that visible, Evans used a small utility he vibe-coded called Tuxat, a lean successor to his earlier Winstat tool that shows fan speed, power draw and temperature at a glance. Then came the sponsored demo: using Zapier's platform tooling he turned that local data into a Zapier app and linked it to a smart bulb. Under load the bulb shifted from a purplish blue to orange and then to a bright red within seconds, cooling back through orange as the system settled.

Two weeks in, small frictions accumulated. The trackpad's two-finger tap for right-click often misread due to weak palm rejection, registering as single or double clicks. A more important win was display scaling. Where Zorin OS earlier in the year blurred apps at intermediate scales, SteamOS handled it cleanly thanks to KDE Plasma. Beyond Valve's polish, the breadth of Plasma's customization helped the desktop feel finished.

The harder friction appeared in networking and security. As someone who avoids open Wi-Fi, Evans relies on a VPN, but NordVPN has no native installer on this immutable system. A manual configuration worked once, then failed at a hotel, forcing a tethered session at an airport. Security out of the box is also light: the installer asks for a Steam login but sets no system password, and the wake-from-sleep prompt must be enabled separately. That makes sense on a Deck where you press power and jump into a game, but on a laptop it leaves a gap worth closing immediately.

Gaming Mode is where laptop logic clashes most. On Windows, Big Picture is just a full-screen app. On SteamOS, entering Gaming Mode silently closes everything on the desktop, like a soft reboot that clears memory for the game. Evans lost his browser and open apps on the first switch without any confirmation dialog. The behavior fits a console that guards memory like an Xbox 360, yet on a work machine with ten tabs and five apps open it begs for an Are you sure prompt. The underlying immutable design reinforces that console mindset: the root filesystem is read-only, so a major update can overwrite deep custom tweaks.

Gaming itself lands in the middle. It is better than a Deck, not a true gaming PC. Light titles like Stardew Valley run effortlessly and Baldur's Gate 3 is playable at low settings on this Framework, which is meaningfully stronger than a Deck and where Evans has logged hundreds of hours. Most Steam titles work well through Proton, but the anti-cheat wall is firm: major kernel-level titles such as Fortnite or Valorant remain blocked, and Epic Store-centric games often need workarounds. Still, the core Steam library is fine, and the closing conversation with his friend lands on the same note: for a pro Linux user SteamOS is not the best tool, yet it is the most polished door into Linux for the curious. That he felt no rush to leave after two weeks says a lot about the pull of its speed and simplicity.