Valve finally got around to it and released an official SteamOS version that doesn't require UEFI and that supports dual boot.

The community took it upon themselves to fix some problems with the first versions of SteamOS. The distribution required an UEFI-powered system and didn't support dual boot.

A respin of SteamOS that fixed all these problems was released by the community under the name of Ye Olde SteamOSe. Valve learned everything it could from Ye Olde SteamOSe and released a new flavor that doesn't have any of the requirements mentioned above.

“I just posted a SteamOS ISO that can be used to install SteamOS on non-UEFI systems. Thanks to directhex and ecliptik for their work on Ye Olde SteamOSe – this incorporates many of their changes. Dual-boot and custom partitioning are now possible from the ‘Expert Install’ option.”

“PLEASE note there has been very little testing on this, especially any kind of dual-boot setup. So don't install it on any machine you are not prepared to lose,” reads the announcement on the official forum, made by John Vert, a Valve representative.

It's unclear if this branch of SteamOS will run indefinitely in parallel with the other releases, but one thing is certain. Valve is paying a lot of attention to the Linux community, and that can only be a good thing.

You can download the new SteamOS release from Softpedia.