r/SteamOS • u/Matau_228 • 3d ago

help wanted SteamOS installation compatibility help

Recently got a MSI Cyborg 15 A13VE for relatively cheap; the machine was wiped with a fresh Win11 install by the previous owner and I want to upgrade to a usable OS, with SteamOS as my preference.

I've been told that the current version of the OS is compatible with the hardware since the June update to support NVIDIA GPUs and intel CPUs, and I haven't been able to find anything otherwise online.

Intel i7 13620H 2.40 GHz

64GB DDR5 RAM

2TB Storage, NVME & SSD

NVIDIA RTX 4050

Whenever I boot from USB and start the install from the image, it will show the usual install output but will suddenly restart before hitting the welcome screen. If I have the USB set first in the boot order in the BIOS it will just loop.

Any error messages that may be showing up disappear too quickly to for me read. Is there a way to check error logs to try and troubleshoot, or did I miss some compatibility tests somewhere and just keep banging my head into a wall?

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1

u/rft183 3d ago

Unless they've recently changed it, SteamOS is not compatible with Nvidia cards, just AMD.

1

u/Matau_228 3d ago

Ah, I had read somewhere that Nvidia drivers were recently added to SteamOS and that the tests run on machines with Nvidia cards were good and assumed it was for the main distro. Wonder if it's just a dev build.

The integrated GPU is intel though, which is supported, so hypothetically it should install & run and I should be able to grab one of the experimental Nvidia driver projects from github, but it's not getting to the welcome screen.

1

u/SoggyBisqit 3d ago

secure boot off?

1

u/Matau_228 3d ago

Secure boot is indeed off; It didn't even try to load from USB when it was on.

1

u/SoggyBisqit 3d ago

re-do the stick

1

u/Matau_228 3d ago

I've done that a couple of times, is it possible my initial download is bad?

1

u/SoggyBisqit 2d ago

could be. it comes as a tar file. unzip and burn the iso inside. also ur pc has an nvme or an ssd?

1

u/Matau_228 2d ago

Whenever I've downloaded it, it comes as a .img zipped into .bz2- that may also be half the problem.

Integrated NVME with a formatted SSD expansion (at far as I've been able to determine)

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u/SoggyBisqit 2d ago

i recomend you unzip the download until u get just one iso file. that is what you write on the usb. also for easiness make sure you only have the nvme connected to the pc. the script defaults to nvme0n1

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u/Matau_228 19h ago

Information from the seller was incorrect, there's only the 2TB NVME drive in the laptop, so I should be all good there.

Haven't been able to find a .iso from within the .img or the sub-.img files, I'm going to attempt with the whole thing converted to .iso, but that unfortunately hit the same restarting issue so I might just be at a dead end.

I was able to read a bit of the error message from the previous attempt, which gave CPU error of some kind (possibly a driver error?), and got a picture of a call trace message this time around where it hits a 'exec_page_fault+0x71/0x150' and throws 'entry_syscall_64_after_hwframe+0x76/0x7e' Not sure if there's other error messages that I missed since it flashes by too fast. The USB has been used for projects before this, so it may have some faults.

I'll see if I can get my hands on a newer USB, but Intel processors have had a spotty record for SteamOS even with the updates, so this might just be the end of my journey here for now.

1

u/YolkNotIncluded 3d ago

It’s beta mode af. I would just keep the expectation that it’s not going to work rn

1

u/rft183 3d ago

Have you checked this script out? There's also a version that runs in Windows here.

I haven't tried them, so I can't vouch for them.

1

u/shakegaming1 3d ago

Jeśli chcesz Linuxa do grania z kartą Nvidia użyj CachyOS dużo lepiej działa niż SteamOS lub Bazzite, ale wydajność nadal będzie gorsza niż na Windowsie :)

1

u/Matau_228 3d ago

I'll look into it, I haven't heard of CachyOS before