The Steam Deck, as most people know by now, is a powerful, portable handheld gaming device built on Valve’s proprietary SteamOS platform. The idea is that it has everything you need to run just about any game on the Steam Store.
Why on earth anyone would want to ditch that OS in favour of one with legendarily weak video game support is beyond me, but here we are.
A user in the r/SteamDeck subbreddit named Lampa183 has posted photographic evidence of his Steam Deck running Mac OS Catalina. Observe:
According to Lampa, they got it running on SteamOS via Virtualbox. Performance is reasonably normal, they say, though some animations stutter and the device now takes 3-4 minutes to boot up.
The response was swift and predictable.
Others wanted them to go further.
Others still wanted to know how the foundational trick of installing Virtualbox was done, since it is not an app that exists on the Steam store. This means it was likely sideloaded, but Lampa, so far anyway, isn’t talking. There are plenty of modding tools already available for the Steam Deck as owners have looked for ways to experiment with the hardware beyond its intended feature set.
What Lampa hasn’t really gone into is what they intend to use their Mac OS-powered Steam Deck for. Like the tradition of getting Doom running on increasingly idiosyncratic hardware, it seems this may have been nothing more than an experiment. It’s not about the longer-term use case, it’s about seeing if you can get it to work at all.
And, it seems, yes, you can.
But now it runs like a quarter of the Steam games it could run before.
Anyway, there’s your morning head-scratcher. Happy Friday.
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