Steam Deck to Launch Officially on February 25th, 2022

Steam Deck

Valve announced today that their Steam Deck Linux-powered handheld gaming device will launch officially on February 25th, 2022.

Announced in July 2021, Steam Deck promises to be a revolutionary gaming handheld powered by Valve’s SteamOS 3.0 operating system based on Arch Linux and featuring the KDE Plasma desktop environment.

Initially planned for the end of 2021, Valve delayed their upcoming Steam Deck device for February 2022, but now the company has finally revealed the official release date as February 25th. After this date, anyone will be able to purchase the device from Valve’s online store.

“On February 25th, we will be sending out the first batch of order emails to reservation holders,” said Valve. “The first units will be on their way to customers starting the 28th, and we plan to release new order email batches on a weekly cadence.”

So if you’re one of the lucky people to have reserved a Steam Deck device, you now know when to expect it to arrive in your hands. The sooner you’ve made the reservation, to sooner you’ll receive it, probably starting mid-March considering the COVID-19 restrictions around the world.

Meanwhile, Valve is still working hard to “tie up the last few loose ends and polish some rough edges” (probably related to shipping). In addition, they are still working hard to port as many Windows games to Linux using their in-house built Proton technology based on Wine.

Word on the street is that a major Proton release will arrive this coming Friday based on the recently released Wine 7.0, which adds support for new GPUs, improved HID (Human Interface Device) stack and joystick implementation, an updated Vulkan driver, and many other changes to improve support for most Windows games.

Now that we know the official launch date of the Steam Deck, we also know when to expect Valve to release the SteamOS 3.0 operating system to everyone else who doesn’t plan to buy a Steam Deck device but who wants to install the Arch Linux-based distro on their personal computers for gaming. This should happen soon after the February 25th launch, according to Valve.

Image credits: Valve

Last updated 2 years ago

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