r/SteamOS • u/CloudyEngineer • 6h ago

SteamOS 3 on a virtual machine

I'd like to try SteamOS before I commit to installing it as my main OS on my laptop.

Has anyone successfully installed the latest SteamOS inside of a virtual machine under VMware workstation?

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u/Low_Excitement_1715 6h ago

Depends on what you mean by “successful”. Can it be installed, boot? Yes. Does it “run right” and can run games? No. Guests need software support for things like shared folders, time sync, and graphical/3D acceleration. Last time I looked, SteamOS wasn’t shipping the vmwgfx driver needed, and I don’t think VMware supports Vulkan anyways, so gamescope and game mode won’t work.

Can it be run under virtualization at all? Heck yes! I ran SteamOS under Linux KVM for a long while with a second 3D accelerator “passed through” to the VM. It’s just not trivial to set up, and not under VMware Workstation.

1

u/CloudyEngineer 3h ago

Apparently VMware does support Vulkan with a passthrough GPU to the VM. https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/desktop-hypervisors/workstation-pro/17-0/using-vmware-workstation-pro/configuring-and-managing-virtual-machines/configure-display-settings-for-a-virtual-machine/prepare-the-host-system-to-use-accelerated-3d-graphics.html

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u/jharle Support 2h ago

Does your laptop have both an integrated and dedicated GPU?

1

u/Low_Excitement_1715 17m ago

If you are passing through a GPU, you are using that GPU’s drivers, not VMWare’s. VMWare’s vmwgfx does not support Vulkan acceleration.

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u/_MAYniYAK 5h ago

Yeah unless you have dual gpus and can maybe pass a ton of hardware through libvirt (a different VM system than VMware) only thing you're going to experience is a very slow non accelerated version of steamOS.

You'd be better off using a different drive to boot from instead to test with if you don't want to wipe your main drive