this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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I'm still bit confused about steamOS, I thought it was supposed to be a full on operating system for gaming centric PCs but it seems to need Plasma in order to do any traditional computer things.
Which aspect of that confuses you? That it uses a Desktop Environment to do desktop things, or that they are using KDE Plasma instead of something else (say, gnome)?
So steamOS is in fact not an operating system it's just a program that runs on plasma. Or is steamOS actually an operating system, but just quite a limited one, and you dual boot into plasma.
KDE Plasma is just the desktop environment. It's not an OS. SteamOS is a full OS, built off of Arch Linux. It has both a Gaming mode, which looks a lot like Steam Big Picture does these days, and a desktop mode that uses Plasma as the graphical shell/interface. It doesn't matter OS-wise which one you "boot" into, as both are SteamOS.
SteamOS is a linux distro based on Arch Linux, similar to any other. It's a amalgamation of different pieces of software, including a traditional desktop environment (plasma). But it does not boot into the desktop mode by default, instead it boots into their own graphical environment (gamemode) by default, running their steam client.
That's because their main focus is gaming machines, and that's why they want gamers to be greeted with a consolized, 10-foot UI.
I think you're confused because you think of steamOS being the UI (i.e. "Desktop Environment") that welcomes you when you boot into it, instead steamOS is the entire package, including a "traditional" desktop environment (which is KDE Plasma), as well as their own (gamemode), etc.
A desktop environment is not a prerequisite for an operating system.
Basically SteamOS is just a tweaked version of Arch Linux that boots Steam Big Picture Mode by default and launches games with Proton. It’s not a full blown OS by itself.
It is a full blown Linux OS. You can switch out of the gaming specific mode/UI to a Linux desktop environment using KDE. There you can install your own software and use it like a normal computer.
The only limiting factor is that the root file system is read only by default (can be disabled). If you want to install system level packages, you can work around this by using something like distrobox.