SteamOS 3.9 Preview Moves To Linux 7.2, KDE Plasma 6.7 Desktop

Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 29 August 2026 at 06:35 AM EDT. 12 Comments
VALVE
In time for the weekend Linux gamers, Valve last night released the first preview of SteamOS 3.9 for the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and other devices. This early preview comes with some exciting software updates.

SteamOS 3.9 Preview updates its Arch Linux package base. Among the notable software upgrades is the SteamOS Desktop Mode now running on KDE Plasma 6.7.3 compared to the dated Plasma 6.4.3 version it had been using. In turn this fixes many bugs and other improvements for the desktop experience under SteamOS.

SteamOS 3.9 Preview is also running on the Linux 7.2 stable kernel for newer hardware support, better performance, and other improvements over the existing Linux 6.16 LTS usage.

Steam Deck


The SteamOS 3.9 Preview also switches over to WPA_Supplicant for better WiFi handling, preliminary support for system hibernation but not yet exposed via the Game Mode UI, improved support for running SteamOS as a guest VM with VirtIO graphics acceleration, and other improvements.

More details on the SteamOS 3.9 Preview release via SteamPowered.com.
12 Comments
Related News
Steam On Linux Dives Down To 3.05% For September
Valve's Work On Foveated Rendering For The Open-Source Turnip Driver On The Steam Frame
Igalia Improving The Firefox Experience For Valve's Steam Deck
New FUTEX Syscalls Back To Being Worked On For Helping Valve's ARM64 Gaming Ambitions
Valve Introduces Pyrowave Video Codec In Beta For Low Latency Streaming
Steam Frame Making Use Of Zink For OpenGL On Vulkan
About The Author

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week
The Amazing Work By Valve's Timur Kristóf On Improving Old AMD GPUs On Linux
Siemens Slams The Door Shut On Promising Open-Source Radioss Project
NVIDIA's Results Of Conducting Wayland vs. X.Org Latency Testing
Linux 7.4 To Introduce Initial Device Trees For Apple M4, A18 Pro For MacBook Neo
Microsoft Announces General Availability Of WSLC: Linux Containers On Windows
Linux 7.4 To Support The Raspberry Pi 10-Inch Touch Display 2
AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform OS Updated With ROCm 10.0, Linux 7.2
KDE Plasma 6.8 Now Makes Tiled Windows Fit Together More Nicely