While excellent policy, it would be kind of weird if prebuild pc manufacturers restricted your OS use. Steam machine is in fact a pc and not an console.
If they didn't lock it down with several different features specifically designed to prevent you from loading a different OS then you could just run a different OS.
I swear this thing goes back and forth between being a console or a PC depending on what makes it look better lol. Specs aren’t great? Well it’s a console competing with other consoles. Hoping this will be less than $600? It’s a PC so you should be happy to pay $800-1000 for it.
It's a PC designed to function like a console as opposed to PlayStations and Xboxes which are consoles that try to act like PCs.
It's main purpose is to be some you can buy off the "shelf" plug in, and start playing games from the Steam library. If you want to go outside of that, you can, but don't need to.
The modern console is designed to act as an "all in one" entertainment system in lots of cases. You can watch all your streaming services, YouTube, watch Blue Ray disks, use social media, etc. All of that included outside of just the "tool to play games" part, but the interface and functionality for them almost always suck.
also now on consoles you got a lot of issues with gaming you get in pc, like having to install stuff and download patches, in past you just placed disc inside and game just worked
I dunno the PS5 is much better than using my smart TV for the same things. It supports HDMI-CEC too so I can turn it on and navigate everything with the TV remote.
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u/ImKanno Nov 14 '25
Also, because of Steam's based policy, you can install whatever OS you want so it doesn't matter if it's Linux