VennStone, who hates free time, cobbled together a guide for getting Valve’s bloated game launcher working on one of these pint-sized motherboards using the Linux trifecta of hope: Armbian, Box86/64, and blind faith in open sauce.

“There's no shortage of videos showing Steam running on expensive ARM SBCs with discrete GPUs, so I thought it would be worthwhile to create a guide for doing the same on (relatively) inexpensive RK3588-powered SBCs, using Box86/64 and Armbian,” he wrote on Slashdot.

He was inspired by the avalanche of YouTube demos showing people shoving Steam onto ARM boards with the kind of graphics cards that cost more than a used Ford Fiesta.

Instead of fiddling with overpriced kits, VennStone’s guide promises a “relatively” inexpensive route.

You’ll be treated to a soul-numbing sequence of adding architectures, forcing Mesa drivers to behave, and pasting a multi-line script that’s described as: “Just close your eyes and run this.”

After a mandatory sudo reboot now—the Linux equivalent of turning it off and on again—you’ll find yourself waiting five minutes while your underpaid SOC attempts to summon Steam from the x86 grave. According to the guide writer, performance at 720p is “all over the place.”

It is impossible to enable Steam Play for your Windows games. To be fair, this whole escapade isn’t completely pointless. There’s a hint of hope that Collabora might upstream support for the RK3588, and Valve is allegedly poking around the ARM henhouse. But then again, we’re talking “Valve Time” here—the clock that moves slower than Elon [Roman Salute] Musk trying to understand content moderation.

It is not a practical way to play your Steam library but it is gloriously absurd.