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This new version of Steam serves as more evidence that Valve is slowly bringing all the pieces together for PC games on truly mobile hardware. Valve is undertaking this work as the company’s Steam Frame headset uses a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset derived from smartphones. The company wants its Linux-based SteamOS platform to run directly on this device. So it’s clear that the newly released Steam client for Linux Arm is the latest piece of the puzzle.

There doesn’t seem to be a big difference between Steam on Linux and an Android app like GameNative in terms of compatibility. I also didn’t get the impression that there was a significant performance delta between the two platforms, but this is only based on my limited experience. However, I do appreciate that GameNative gives you easier access to various settings, allowing me to quickly swap out drivers, switch between graphical wrappers, and tweak the translation tools. By contrast, the Steam client doesn’t place these options within easy reach, if they do at all.