this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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I'm still bit confused about steamOS, I thought it was supposed to be a full on operating system for gaming centric PCs but it seems to need Plasma in order to do any traditional computer things.
Which aspect of that confuses you? That it uses a Desktop Environment to do desktop things, or that they are using KDE Plasma instead of something else (say, gnome)?
So steamOS is in fact not an operating system it's just a program that runs on plasma. Or is steamOS actually an operating system, but just quite a limited one, and you dual boot into plasma.
A desktop environment is just a GUI program that your computer boots into by default. SteamOS just boots into Steam Big Screen Mode by default instead, and you can launch into the desktop afterwards. Plasma is the program that Valve chose to use for their desktop environment.
If you wanted to, you could skip all this entirely and launch your games or programs directly from the terminal without ever loading into your desktop.