Steam has been a long time coming to Chromebooks - Google announced it in January 2020 and didn’t say much else about it after that until last week. Maletis even sites Valve’s “deep investment in the Linux ecosystem” when talking about how Google worked with the company to get Steam working on Chrome OS. That’s a welcome surprise, though it does make sense given how much effort Valve’s put into the Linux gaming experience in an effort to make its Steam Deck console as capable as possible. Google says Steam on Chrome OS will “typically run the Linux version of a game,” but it also says that Proton, a compatibility layer for running Windows games, is supported as well. After you’ve gone through all that, though, you should be ready to test out Steam and the games that come with it (Google has a list of which ones it recommends trying out, some of which have a few caveats).
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The install process also reflects the early state of the software - according to a post from Google, it involves switching your computer to the Dev channel version of Chrome OS, setting a flag, and entering a terminal command.
There are also apparently “performance and scaling” issues with screens that run at above-1080p resolutions, which Google is working on fixing. The company also notes that if a game requires 6GB of RAM, it may not work very well with a laptop that has 8GB of RAM. There are a few other additional caveats to note: Google’s only opening it up for configurations of those Chromebooks that have Intel XE graphics, an 11th-gen i5 or i7 processor, and at least 8GB of RAM. The Steam alpha’s really only for people willing to dig in and test unfinished software