A week with the Steam Machine: Love and frustrations

Love:

• Quiet: For me this is a must, and the main reason I bought the Steam Machine.
• Small
• Powerful enough for 1440p

Before I talk about the frustrations, please note that I want to use my Steam Machine not just for gaming, but as a PC replacement for productivity. I prefer Fedora Workstation (not immutable) with GNOME for my workflow. SteamOS by itself doesn’t suit my needs.

Frustrations:

• Dual booting: The BIOS does not have a setting for boot priority. Commands to update the EFI boot order are also ignored. I practically have to trigger the boot menu at power-on every time. Even that is not reliable; the boot option for a secondary OS simply disappears from the boot menu whenever I have any external drive connected. I have tried combinations of different OSes: SteamOS, Windows, Fedora, and CachyOS.

Workaround for automatically booting into Fedora: I created a script to set the next EFI boot priority automatically every time Fedora starts. Somehow, the Machine respects only the “next priority” setting, but not permanent ones.

• USB-C: There is only one USB-C port, and it doesn’t work reliably with hubs or docking stations. One minute it works perfectly at high speeds, and then one restart later it falls back to USB 2.0 speeds. I have tried Dell docking stations and a TP-Link USB-C hub with power passthrough; they all eventually drop to USB 2.0 speeds. It would have been better if the Steam Machine had 10 Gbps USB-A ports, but Valve cheaped out and provided only 480 Mbps at the back and 5 Gbps at the front.

Workaround for USB ports: I am buying a powered USB-A 3.0 hub to use with the front port. Hopefully, it will work properly (though only at 5 Gbps).

• MicroSD slot: I bought a 1 TB microSD card specifically to use with the Steam Machine. Unfortunately, the card doesn’t work at all when inserted into the Machine’s slot. However, the same slot reads my smaller microSD cards fine, and the 1 TB card works perfectly in a card reader and on my laptop. It is an Amazon Basics brand—perhaps I should have gotten a SanDisk instead—but it is still disappointing.

Workaround for microSD: Using a USB-A 3.0 card reader.

• Firmware updates: Because of the dual-booting issues, I wanted to use only Fedora. However, I realized that even though Linux can normally update firmware on most devices, that is not the case with the Steam Machine. I was stuck on an early BIOS version. Updating the BIOS required SteamOS, and installing SteamOS required wiping the entire internal drive.

Workaround for firmware updates: Keep SteamOS installed, shrink its partition, and add Fedora for dual booting so I still have SteamOS available for future firmware updates.

• Shut down: Neither Fedora nor CachyOS can power down the Machine; it always restarts itself after shutting down.

Workaround for shutdown: Pressing the power button on the Machine when needed. Most of the time, I just put it to sleep.

• Wi-Fi: I have a UniFi network with two Wi-Fi 7 access points, including an SSID dedicated to the 6 GHz band for devices supporting Wi-Fi 6E/7. For some reason, the Steam Machine insists on connecting to the AP on another floor instead of the one in the same room with a stronger signal. When I modify my UniFi settings to force it to connect to the nearest AP, the Steam Machine simply refuses to connect. Both APs are the exact same model and configuration.

Workaround for Wi-Fi: I created another dedicated 6 GHz-only SSID specific to the nearest AP.

I still like the Steam Machine and have no regrets. I just wish Valve would fix the issues above to make the system much more pleasant to use.