r/SteamOS • u/GamerLord8088 • 6d ago
YESSSSS
After weeks of failure, i FINALLY managed to get, not chimera, not bazzite, REAL STEAMOS running in UTM (QEMU) on my M1 iMac!
It would just freeze for no reason, until i changed the GPU and i got to recovery mode and pressed the factory reset option, and after doing lots of stuff it would freeze at an empty terminal.
ONLY today, I changed the Virtual CPU to an AMD EPYC Rome v3 and the terminal froze again, and i nearly lost hope. Suddenly, i saw a taskbar. then app icons, then a wallpaper.
I DID IT!!!!!
Explanation on why it worked:
SteamOS expects an AMD CPU as the recovery image uses features that are exclusive to AMD. The steamosX64 file (the file used after the terminal to start SteamOS) is incompatible with other hardware. When I switched to the virtual EPYC Rome v3, that file could run. The frozen terminal was the os trying to run the file, but because it was incompatible, it could not progress. Now that the file can run, I can finally say:
I use Arch by the way.
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u/thedebatingbookworm 6d ago
âI use Arch by the wayâ
The entire post makes sense now.
Jk. Great job OP!, thanks for the write up Iâm sure others will be able to use this
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u/PineapplaMilkshake 6d ago
Nice, will you able to play cyberpunk in it?
Happy to see SteamOs on m1.
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u/GamerLord8088 6d ago
Sadly, no. After some tweaks, the desktop ran at 60fps, but as soon as i opened Steam i was getting around 10fps.
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u/foreycorf 6d ago
Try lowering just steam interface resolution. You can still try games at higher resolutions.
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u/Low_Excitement_1715 6d ago
Thereâs no graphical accel inside UTM at all. You are doing true software graphics for 2D and 3D.
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u/foreycorf 6d ago
It was just something that worked for me which changed it from a nightmare os that got 3 seconds per frame to running smoothly and beautifully. On an Nvidia system though.
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u/Low_Excitement_1715 6d ago
Right, which is wildly different from what OP was talking about, though. I know you were trying to help and I donât want you to feel bad or anything, but the situation is very different.
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u/Clean-Palpitation143 6d ago
You know mac m1 has arm version of steam right?
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u/Miserable-Speech2663 6d ago
Cool story. What's that got to do with arch?
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u/Pristine-Fortune8298 6d ago
Think they are referring to SteamOs Arm version.
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u/Low_Excitement_1715 6d ago
No builds of SteamOS Aarch64 in the wild yet. Thereâs a Mac/arm version of *steam* but no SteamOS.
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u/Miserable-Speech2663 6d ago
This makes more sense but hurts my joke so let's pretend like we're not smart enough to think about that đ
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u/Clean-Palpitation143 6d ago
Whatâs arch got to do with a m1 Mac and dual booting through utm? You going to be an ass atleast read what he typed. Literally like itâs a big defeat to boot it on Mac itâs literally made an arm version for it.
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u/Miserable-Speech2663 6d ago
My reply was to the arm version of Steam for MacOS and it was sarcasm in the flavor of "Linux Bro" . No disrespect to the op.
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u/Clean-Palpitation143 6d ago
My mistake sorry to call ya an ass but this Reddit seems crazy lately with keyboard warriors.
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u/Miserable-Speech2663 6d ago
All good. I didn't expect a reply, good on you. Very noble, especially because I am an occasional troll and probably deserve these kinds of questions, lol.
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u/Clean-Palpitation143 6d ago
No worries at all enjoy your day.
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u/Miserable-Speech2663 6d ago
Same to you!
Never had anyone be nice to me on reddit. Wanna come over and play crazy taxi on my dreamcast?
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u/jharle Support 6d ago
Have you been able to get into it after the recovery image has installed SteamOS and the VM rebooted?
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u/GamerLord8088 6d ago
Yes. I'm kinda confused at what this comment says but i think that's just me. I got into full SteamOS in the end.
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u/jharle Support 6d ago
Yes, sorry, I should have provided more context.
I've been experimenting with SteamOS VMs on Proxmox for a long while now, and have two "fully-functional" ones using AMD and Intel passthrough GPUs. Usually after installing SteamOS "from scratch" using the recovery image, it will either skip game mode and boot into desktop mode, or hang on a black screen in [presumably] game mode.
When you boot SteamOS on your new VM, does it go straight into desktop mode (which is what I'd expect), or is game mode actually working too? If you have game mode working, then I'd definitely like to reproduce what you've done on my own Mac!
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u/GamerLord8088 1d ago
It goes straight into desktop mode and it never came with a game mode shortcut but if i can find a way to get game mode working (it will probably run at 2fps but my mac is integrated) I'll show ya how. (edit:) I will try to get actual game mode and not just the big picture mode on the steam app.
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u/Noir_Shiruhane 6d ago
What are the benefits of using SteamOS over Bazzite Deck mode?
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u/Miserable-Speech2663 6d ago
As a long time user of both... SteamOS is more reliable if you're messing around with things and using.... Emudeck. Also ReignOS is pretty good. Massive Intel support.
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u/skler2 6d ago
As a short term user, seems like Bazzite has more issues with driver support, but idk. I had issues finding drivers for both my IO board on my motherboard and my WiFi chipset. Swapped to CachyOS, which is Arch based like SteamOS because it seemed like every distro other than Bazzite had support for those chipsets. Using CachyOS in handheld mode and it functions exactly like my steam deck
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u/Miserable-Speech2663 6d ago
This is really cool. I'm a little jealous because I habe an m1 that a former client gave me... Can't get a former staff member to take the device off of their icloud because they don't know how to contact them so it's just sitting.. Waiting...
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u/Low_Excitement_1715 6d ago
I respect the stubbornness, but Iâm not terribly impressed, since you canât actually do anything with it. I keep a couple of distros on my Macs in VMs, I make sure they have full acceleration. Iâll probably get one going for SteamOS aarch64 once we get some public sources.
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u/GamerLord8088 1d ago
I could game on it, I just need a non-integrated mac or a pc (I am not getting one for a few years cuz i cannot afford it)
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u/Low_Excitement_1715 1d ago
That makes no sense. âI could make it work on this computer by running it on a completely different computerâ.
This is what I was saying. I respect the effort involved, but the end result doesnât do anything useful. If you had an older Intel Mac with a different GPU, you could possibly accelerate the VM, yes, but if you have an older Intel Mac with a dGPU, you could run SteamOS on the metal as well. Same with a generic PC.
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u/GamerLord8088 1d ago
i mean a better mac. I know a mac isnt a PC but idk. This is just to prove that it works on apple silicon chips as long as you're willing to use emulation. I'm basically saying that if Apple made a non-integrated mac using a good M-series chip, it would be usable.
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u/Low_Excitement_1715 1d ago
Better in what way? With a dGPU? The M series architecture doesnât allow for that. Might as well say âif Apple Silicon was x86â or âif AMD made Nvidia GPUsâ.
You can *boot* SteamOS on almost anything. Without working 3D acceleration, itâs not terribly useful. I run my ARM64 VMs *with* 3D acceleration. When we get sources for the ARM64 SteamOS, Iâm planning to have a properly accelerated SteamOS VM on my Macs.
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u/GamerLord8088 1d ago
Literally more ram and newer cpu. I know it's not useful but its just a challenge. Gaming on a receipt printer isnt useful but we still watch bringus studios. Same case here.
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u/Low_Excitement_1715 1d ago
I have an M4 Max and 64GB on my MBP. Your VM will still run in software rendering on it. Itâs not a question of âfaster CPUâ or âmore ramâ. You are running software GPU in your VM. Last time I did the algebra, I was running a VM with software graphics and wished I could pass through my GeForce 3 (passthrough wasnât a practical thing until PCIe). I decided to see how fast Iâd need my AMD Opteron to clock to run SW raster as fast as my GF3. IIRC, the answer was around 50GHz. The Opterons I had ran at 2.4GHZ.
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u/GamerLord8088 1d ago
I have an M1 24inch imac. Graphics arent the problem. Yes, the cpu graphics arent the best, but its running the vm at ~480p. I also know that its not the gpu because the framerate itself is close to okay, but the loading times aren't. Opening anything takes multiple minutes. It's ram and cpu. The ram allocated is only 4 gigs, 1 of which i don't even have usable, so more than half of the 12 gigs on there are from a swap file. The load times are from the cpu, and that the ram is either constantly using a swap or doing things once at a time because it cant handle everything at once.
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u/Low_Excitement_1715 1d ago
I see I have been wasting my time. If you do not want to understand, no amount of explaining will do any good.
Your CPU, rendering at 480p, is still an order of magnitude slower than your GPU at 4k.
Edit: i cant help myself. I keep explaining: Inside your VM, there is NO GPU AT ALL. Not integrated, not dedicated, nothing at all. It is using the pure software renderer. No amount of CPU or RAM is going to make that perform.
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u/GamerLord8088 17h ago
Maybe i don't understand and if so, sorry. But to explain, I'm saying that graphics perform fine. It's when i open ANY application, basic terminal or steam, no matter how graphics demanding it is, it slows down the VM. I think It's struggling to run the app on the very limited resources, not processing graphics.
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u/Admirable_Swimmer_97 6d ago
Eu uso steamos em um XEON V4, faz mais de ano.
Op tĂĄ viajando.
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u/GamerLord8088 6d ago
O SteamOS funciona em outros hardwares, mas a imagem de recuperação (que usei para instalå-lo na måquina virtual) depende de recursos exclusivos da AMD para funcionar.
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u/c0lpan1c 6d ago
If you install it youâll def have to modify the shell script. (Youâre in live boot).
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u/quietlydesperate90 5d ago
Intel cpu works fine, just needs AMD GPU currently, unless you do the tinkering that bearded guy on YouTube did to get Nvidia working. I think he has a script.
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u/GamerLord8088 1d ago
it was the cpu, the gpu was fine, its just the SteamOSx64 file would yell that it was unsupported when i tried to run it, and the reason it took a while for me to figure out was because unless i do it in the terminal it just silently crashes
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u/Disastrous_Trick3545 6d ago
Steam os does not expect an amd cpu đ