‘Is this a practical way to play your Steam games? Nope, not even a little bit.’ But getting Steam running on Armbian and a single board computer really is a thing

Valve’s dedication to its portable PC SteamDeck has given us many surprising little side benefits in the PC gaming community. For couch lovers like myself, the improvements to big picture mode have been very welcome. However, by far the adaption with the biggest unintended effect has to be making Steam play better with Linux via Proton. This time it’s allowed one intrepid gamer to install Steam on their single board Armbian computer.

Now, we wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing this. As VennStone, the creator of this little project, says over at Interfacing Linux: “Is this a practical way to play your Steam games? Nope, not even a little bit. For now, this is merely an exercise in ludicrous neatness.”

This is definitely one of those cases where the fun is seeing whether or not we can, rather than making something good. VennStone explains the idea came to them when they wanted to mod their Orange Pi 5 Plus to run Steam. Upon finding most guides wanting, VennStone decided to make their own on how to get Steam running on this little single boarded badass.

You can follow the guide yourself if you like, though again, don’t expect an amazing gaming machine at the end of this. VennStone has split it into six steps with pretty clear instructions including some copy and paste code. It talks you through installing the correct kernel, all the way to eventually installing and running Steam. Which apparently has an approximately five minute boot time.

Still, this device can actually play games, and probably a fair few more than you might think. Thanks to Proton, far more games are compatible than would have ever been before… but they don’t exactly run well. Lowering the display setting to 720p allows for stability at 30 frames per second, though it sounds like even that wasn’t super consistent.

You can get a better look at some games running on the machine as well as the build steps in the video above. This includes a look at games such as Hollow Knight, Vampire Survivors, and Half-Life 2 running on the machine. That last one gave me olden times graphical whiplash after the new RTX demos.

Seeing these games run at all on this teeny tiny PC is still very cool. It’s a good sign of how far we’ve come when things are better optimised to run on hardware you’d never think possible, regardless of the original intention. I can’t wait to see what dinky little PC someone has Cyberpunk 2077 running on in 30 years time.