If you're the lucky owner of a Steam Deck, you can now manually install Windows 10 on the device, making it a true Windows gaming machine.
Valve today released the GPU, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth drivers necessary to get Windows 10 running on the hardware; download them from this website.
By default, the Steam Deck runs the Linux-based SteamOS, but the company’s goal has been to make the handheld a true PC capable of supporting multiple OSes, including Windows.
For now, a Windows 10 installation on the Steam Deck comes with some limitations. For one, Valve has yet to release the audio drivers needed to run the OS over the device. So Windows 10 won’t be able to play sound through the speakers or headphone jack. Instead, the OS will only be able to play audio via the USB-C port or through Bluetooth.
Installation also sounds like a hassle. For example, Valve points out: “To enter your product key during installation, you'll need internet. Because there are no Wi-Fi drivers at this point, you'll need a USB-C hub with an Ethernet port for internet.” (A Windows 10 installation usually takes up 12GB in space, although Microsoft recommends having 20GB for the 64-bit version.)
There’s also the risk of something going wrong during the installation, though Valve created a guide on how owners can restore a Steam Deck to a factory reset.
Meanwhile, the SteamDeck still doesn’t support booting up more than one OS. So if you install Windows 10, you have to do a manual recovery to return to SteamOS. "While Steam Deck is fully capable of dual-boot, the SteamOS installer that provides a dual-boot wizard isn't ready yet,” Valve said. “This will ship alongside SteamOS 3 once it's complete.”
You also can’t install the newer Windows 11. However, Valve is working on a new BIOS for the Steam Deck that’ll make this possible in the future. The upcoming BIOS will add a firmware-based Trusted Platform Module (fTPM), a requirement to run Windows 11.