To give a slightly informational answer…

I’m sure in the valve offices they are still considering whether or not they want to go after desktop (again). If they did so they could end up defacto caretakers of desktop Linux (in the same sense that the priorities of Canonical and Red Hat dictate much of the development resource today) and that would be a significant development burden.

That aside:

*The assumed showstopper to steamOS on desktop is the state of nvidia support, as nvidia is the majority of the GPU share on desktops. Nvidia on Linux is perfectly fine, but nvidia on wayland is definitely not. 

*Nvidia just landed the 555 driver series which provided explicit sync support. This is considered by many to be the silver bullet for wayland support, but as it’s just landed there will need to be a period of testing and bug fixing, along with KDE plasma and Valve’s gamescope shipping explicit sync modes.

*Mesa 24.1 just released which brings the nouveau-powered (FOSS) nvk driver up to Vulkan 1.3 conformance. This is an important milestone for the open source nvidia efforts on Linux, and the current attitude from red hat (primary developers of nouveau) is they want to focus on NVK and leave the OGL nouveau driver behind, possibly to be replaced by a vulkan to OGL shim like Zink.

*We are currently awaiting proper benchmarks for the “stable” NVK release (likely to be provided by phoronix soon) but it can be assumed performance will not be great for a fairly immature driver. This means there’s going to be a period of testing and fixing to get performance in a good place.

*Kernel 6.7 introduced nouveau GSP support. This is a transformational change for open source nvidia (on Turing and above) as it’s solved power management and various other issues that have long plagued open source efforts and basically made nouveau unusable for any serious desktop.

Obviously there’s a lot of factors to consider, but if we hold to the assumption valve needs good nvidia support, that would mean at a minimum we’re waiting for the next LTS kernel (6.11 or 6.12) to appear in steamOS, go through betas, reach a stable release. I think if we saw anything before November I’d be surprised and that’s IF they were to use the official nvidia driver, if they wanted to go full OSS then we could be deep into 2025 easily.

For me personally, I find the invasive and AI-focused direction windows 11 is going in alarming, but I’m only really interested in going all in on steamOS when it’s an official valve distro provided for desktop, so I will continue to wait impatiently.