Steam Deck OS on your PC? It’s possible with HoloISO

Get your hands on a Steam Deck is not necessarily easy in these times of shortages, but HoloISO could help you wait if you have not yet had the opportunity to test the handheld console from Valve. This emulator allows you to launch SteamOS, the operating system of the Steam Deck, directly on your PC.

Enjoying the Steam Deck… without having one. That’s kind of what HoloISO promises. As summarized WCCFTechthis project transforms the operating system of the Steam Deck into an installable file, capable of faithfully replicating the experience offered by a Steam Deck, but on your PC.

An “almost” official experience

Imperfect, because unofficial, this solution is still at the beginning of its existence. It is nevertheless supported by a team of developers who continue to work on it to refine the experience. An already convincing experience as it is (despite some youthful bugs) since the code and the packages come directly from Valve, all without any possible modification, note WCCFTechwhich also states that the ISO is built from the official Steam Deck recovery image, running in a QEMU instance.

Currently, most functions of SteamOS are therefore supported. Among them, the startup and the SteamOS OOBE (pre-boot interface), the Deck UI, the limitation of the TDP and FPS, the support of the global FSR or even the Shader Pre-Caching.

Some issues with Intel and NVIDIA GPUs

Among the disappointments, HoloISO has some problems with certain GPUs. For example, we learn that NVIDIA graphics cards can hang while running it and that Intel GPUs/iGPUs require a downgrade of Gamescope and MESA in order to be able to start a Steam Deck session.

Available for free at GitHub, where all the indications for the installation are given, HoloISO requires the rest 4 GB of flash memory and one if necessary an AMD GPU compatible with Vulkan and VDPAU. The device used for installation must also be UEFI enabled and must have secure boot disabled.

Source : WCCFTech