almost got steam os running on Nvidia hardware

Soooooo

​I recently decided to see if I could brute-force the official, unmodified Valve SteamOS recovery image onto standard desktop hardware. I know community forks like Bazzite exist for this exact reason, but I wanted to see what it would take to bypass Valve’s hardware validation on an non supported hardware and what would happen if I did... Well we know..

​The Hardware i used:( this is my old test bed server)

• ​CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600
• ​GPU: Nvidia RTX 2080
• ​Target OS: Official Valve SteamOS Recovery Image

​The Roadblocks:

If you just boot the recovery USB and try to install it without a standard NVMe drive, the script instantly fails. The official installer runs an NVMe sanitize command that is explicitly tuned for the NVMes iirc. On my experience, it throws an error and halts. If you try to restart the process, you get hit with constant "disk busy" or "resource locked" errors.

​Here is the triage process I used to get it installed anyway:

​Step 1: Releasing the Target Disks

To clear the "disk busy" errors preventing the partition wipe, I had to manually free up the drive from the live environment.

• ​I identified my target (sata) not NVMe drives and manually unmounted all active partitions.
• ​I disabled swap completely to ensure the drive was entirely unallocated and free for the script to manipulate.

​Step 2: Modifying the Installation Script

To get around the hardware-specific storage check, I had to edit the recovery script on the fly.

• ​I opened /tools/repair_device.sh in a text editor directly from the live USB boot environment.
• ​I hunted down the specific routines calling the NVMe sanitize command.
• ​I commented out those checks to force the script to ignore the sanitize validation step and just proceed with the installation.

​The Result:

It actually worked. With the drive unmounted and the script patched, executing the modified repair_device.sh successfully built the immutable A/B partitions and unpacked the SteamOS payload onto my desktop’s NVMe.

As expected, because I'm running an unmodified image on an Nvidia GPU, the system fails to load the display compositor on boot. I'm currently sitting at a black screen due to the lack of proprietary Nvidia drivers in the immutable root filesystem.

​If anyone else is trying to experiment with the official image on non-Deck hardware, I hope this post maybe helps script-bypassing steps save you a headache but it doesn't get you much use at the end of the day. It was just fun to tinker haha.

Serious question has anyone done this a got it to work?

Made a post on reddit too, just for visibility lol

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamOS/s/LqZbD9grQp