Want to harness the power of SteamOS without having to install it? You should give winesapOS a try.

Small update but fixes a lot of issues for users on older versions of WinesapOS.

WinesapOS has come a long way. Going from being able to play Halo with a friend on Mac, it has now evolved to become much more. It’s now become this thing where you can install the distro on a flash drive or MicroSD card for the Steam Deck, and enjoy an awesome gaming experience, with all the software packages you could possibly need provided right out of the gate. No need to install it to your internal drive.

WinesapOS – the portable Linux distro that lets you use Linux on any flash drive without having to install it – has evolved from alpha to beta to what is now the release candidate. Here’s some noteworthy changes: VirtualBox support in addition to VMware Fusion/Workstation. The latter is recommended for 3D acceleration improved Mac support, with better fan control and Wi-Fi support PolyMC has now been replaced with Prism Launcher for your Minecraft needs improved Xbox and Xbox 360 controller support the NVIDIA Flatpak runtime is now updated whenever the distro is upgraded – this prevents upgrade issues As with the beta release there are some known issues with workarounds:

WinesapOS – the brilliant Arch-based gaming distro created by Luke Short – has evolved from 3.2.0 alpha to beta. Noteworthy updates in this release include: support for VMware Fusion/Workstation bauh replaces Pamac – this is evidently more stable now built against “the latest Arch Linux” rather than targeting the outdated SteamOS 3’s packages – provides a more stable graphics library progress bar is now shown on initial setup rather than using terminal minimum requirements to run the distro have been lowered – you can run it on a single CPU core and 2 GB RAM!

When I had reported to Luke Short – the main developer behind WinesapOS – that his distro wouldn’t boot on a MicroSD card on the Steam Deck, he personally saw to it that he would replicate the issue and fix it. As such, we now have a new update to enjoy: 3.1.1. I can now confirm WinesapOS runs on the Steam Deck when it’s installed on a MicroSD card. Display is rotated (though I’ve found this to be a very common issue with distros outside of SteamOS).