I love my Steam Machine but there’s lots of work Valve need to do

The Steam Machine has released and as Valve go through the list more people will get it, but it was pushed out clearly a bit too early. ICYMI: you can see my initial thoughts in the previous GamingOnLinux article.

Even with the extra delay we saw due to the component pricing situation, the Steam Machine in a few ways still feels quite half-baked.

What’s surprised me the most is the amount of issues the sleep mode seems to cause. On the Steam Deck, it’s rarely been a problem, but with the Steam Machine, the sleep mode seems to be the root cause of so many problems.

Below are just a few of the issues I’ve encountered recently, all of which seem to happen when waking the device from the sleep mode. Because when shutting down fully, these issues never appear:

• Sometimes games simply won’t load at all. This is the biggest and most annoying problem. The whole point of sleep mode is to get you back in quickly. This is entirely random where you get the Steam logo screen with a spinning blue circle around it. You wait and wait and…nothing happens. Forcing a full reboot and then it all works properly again.
• There are times games just refuse install to the microSD until you reboot. The Steam Machine complains of a disk write error, but it works fine after a reboot. Tested across multiple microSD cards that otherwise work fine, again it only happens after sleeping.
• Do you like having audio? Well, tough! No audio for you at all on waking from sleep sometimes! It just doesn’t pick it up from the HDMI cable at random (and yes, I’ve tried multiple cables). In the settings it just appears as null.

• Even with various HDMI-CEC features disabled, the system still likes to just automatically wake itself from sleep all the time.

Sleep mode on the Steam Machine right now is just plain terrible.

There’s quite a lot of niggling issues like that across the whole system – some of which is simply due to how Valve share features between systems – more tweaks are needed to separate this from the Steam Deck.

Aside from sleeping problems, there’s various general bugs elsewhere, some of which is expected from a fresh hardware release.

Rebooting for example (like when needed due to sleep problems) sometimes it will just sit on the Steam Machine logo screen for a good 3-4 minutes. Other times it reboots rather quickly, but there’s times it’s waiting on something – but you get no idea what it’s doing.

One feature of the Steam Machine is that it has a built-in receiver for the Steam Controller, so you don’t need to have a Puck connected. The problem is, that receiver seems to have a pretty terrible signal unless you have direct very clear line of sight to the Steam Machine. If it’s up higher or lower than you, or to the side, the signal is poor. Thankfully, that hasn’t actually caused a problem in my many hours of testing with it, more an observation from sifting through the settings to see the signal strength. Confirmed across two different Steam Controllers just to be sure.

Additionally, I’ve been sent quite a few reports of the internal Steam Machine receiver for the Steam Controller causing disconnections. So it seems it’s just quite problematic in general. The Puck is far superior but doesn’t allow you to power on the system from shutdown whereas the internal one does.

Something I just thought was mildly amusing to share, in a really silly way – why is the Steam store recommending me the system I am currently browsing from? “Hey, you’re on a Steam Machine, we recommend you buy a Steam Machine!”. Dumb.

Probably because even though I’m no longer in the waiting / reservation list, it still left it weirdly somewhere in my wishlist. It didn’t show up in my actual store wishlist, so I had to manually go to the Steam Machine page and hit the star again to fully remove it. The Steam UI is just weird.

Also – where the hell is my “Great on Machine” store page? We have the Great on Deck page, we even have a live Great on Frame page for the system that isn’t even out yet. Where’s the Machine page?! Stupid little oversights like that annoy me. Also, where are my store filters for the Steam Machine? Come on Valve. How hard is it to add tickboxes to the search?

If I do buy a game directly on the Steam Machine – let me install it there and then. Don’t make me go back to the library for it. Just give me the option there, reduce some clicking around.

One of my other gripes about account switching at least has a little bit of work done to improve it recently – hope to see more UI improvements like that soon.

Before ending this quick part 2 of my Steam Machine testing I will once again complain directly at game developers. Yes, you! Add text and UI scaling to your games! Stand back from your monitor a bit – can you read the text? No you can’t! Sort it out. It’s the middle of 2026 and I still have to moan about the text in games being too small. This is my number 1 accessibility issue for PC gaming – so many games have text that is just too small. Even certain games that have scaling often don’t go even close to big enough.

All the issues aside, I love this tiny little PC box. It performs well enough in the games I’ve tested so far, much nicer than the Legion Go I was docking with. With all of Valve’s continued Linux work, I expect it will eventually age like a fine wine. With GPU driver upgrades, Proton upgrades and eventually more developers optimising for it – the future does look good for it.

Even though I love it, and already use it constantly, it worries me about the state the Steam Frame will be in at release – especially considering that will no doubt cost a pretty penny too.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.