**Setting Up Your Steam Machine**
To start, plug your USB drive into your soon-to-be Steam machine and enter the BIOS by pressing the F10 or Delete key as it boots. Find the boot menu and enable legacy plus UEFI or a generic UEFI option. Make sure your USB Drive is set as the first option at boot and exit the BIOS.
**Installing Steam OS**
If everything worked, you should see the Steam OS install screen show up from here. Just select the automated install and give it a little while to load everything onto your hard drive. It might appear to freeze a few times, but just be patient and it should complete once it's done. You'll see this screen that means it's safe to unplug your USB Drive and allow the PC to reboot.
**First Boot and Initial Setup**
It will then bring you to a generic looking boot menu. This part is important - go to the drop down menu and select Gnome. Type Steam as the username and steam as the password, both in lowercase. It should bring you to a mostly empty desktop. You should see a Steam icon if not log out and log back in, making sure you selected the right options.
**Steam Installation Process**
Open up Steam and now is the same installation process as on PC - just follow the prompts after it downloads. Log in with your account information and then it should bring you to the normal Steam interface.
**Initial Configuration**
Go to the top right button and log out of the Steam user account. It should bring you back to the login screen. Flick the Gnome option once again, but this time log in with the username and password desktop again, all lowercase. Go up to the Activities menu, select Applications, and then pop open the Terminal. Type this command in exactly as you see it here: (I also have it in the description if you can't quite read it on the video).
**Creating a Recovery Partition**
Ignore the warning and type the password desktop in one more time. It will take a few minutes to create a recovery partition. It will eventually bring you to this screen after a reboot. Just type Y, hit Enter, and let it do its thing for a couple minutes until it boots natively into Steam OS.
**Congratulations!**
You have a Steam machine up and running. For those of you who stuck with me this long, good job!
**Exploring Steam OS Interface**
The interface is basically the same as Big Picture mode - you've got support for the mouse and keyboard along with the wired Xbox 360 controller right out of the box. You can browse through games and take a look at all the info, screenshots, etc.
**Sorting Games in Steam OS**
By default, it shows everything; however, you can sort by Linux games in the store to see what actually works on Steam OS as well. Sorting in your own library, the games that you can install.
**Basic Options and Information**
Things are fairly basic; however, you do have your standard options along with information to check what version of Steam OS you're running, hardware info, and a check for updates button.
**Steam OS Games Performance**
The first game I tried was Metro: Last Light. By default, the screen was way too dark, but after bumping up the gamma, everything looked fine. Unlike the Windows version, the quality settings boiled down to a single slider, which really annoys me as it's hard to fine-tune the visuals.
**Steam OS Performance with GTX 650 Ti Boost**
Speaking of performance with a GTX 650 Ti Boost, it's not too bad; however, it's hard to say what the equivalent settings are normally. It looked to be somewhere between low and medium by default. Turning things up resulted in better quality but a pretty poor framerate that ended up crashing.
**Steam OS Performance with Left 4 Dead 2**
Left 4 Dead 2 on the other hand is an almost exact port - you've got full control of your quality settings, and you can enable the controller. The options are for the most part it runs just fine; however, I ran into quite a few weird hangs where the camera would just pause for a moment.
**Conclusion**
So what do you guys think of Steam OS? Are you going to give it a shot? Let me know in the comments below. Anyway, if you enjoyed this video and you want to see more like this definitely be sure to subscribe to the channel so you're always kept up-to-date with the latest and greatest.