Well, not really, otherwise they would prioritize making it easy to install for 3rd parties. IIRC, there's close to no documentation. Of course MSI (and everyone else) can fork it, but I don't assume many companies would want to sell a device with an OS without official support from the creators.

[–] brawleryukon@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

There'd almost certainly be a different level of support given to a name-brand OEM who approached Valve to use their OS in a shipping product compared to what Valve's giving to the community at large.

They clearly don't think the software's ready to just be installed on anything quite yet, but if MSI approached them with a fixed hardware platform and said they wanted to ship it with SteamOS, you don't think Valve would work with them to make that happen?

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I think that's more to do with them not wanting to provide support and not deal with the headache of people installing steamOS on Nvidia hardware, which doesn't always play nice with Linux (insert that pic of Linus Torvalds).

I mean the new steam deck UI-inspired big picture mode got delayed months (for everyone) purely down to quirks with Nvidia. Imagine a whole OS, with everyone going online and blaming Valve for it or calling Linux junk.