Steam support for Chrome OS devices has been in development for a few years now. Code-named “Borealis," the system is intended to bring a fast, easy, and integrated gaming experience to Chromebooks. We've already looked into work on enabling the Vulkan graphics library in Crostini, unlocking gaming capabilities that will be required for Borealis. Now we've uncovered another important piece of the puzzle, as the first system flags arrive for the Borealis beta.

Using these flags requires Chrome OS 98.0.4736.0, which should be hitting Canary any day now — quite a bit behind earlier plans to get a soft launch going by Q2 or Q3. The source code commit that reveals this information also shows that there will be both a stable and beta channel for Borealis, separate from Chrome OS. Interested testers will be able to opt into the beta for access to more features at the expense of stability.

We also see Chrome OS preparing to have a game compatibility reporting system with Proton. If you're not familiar with Proton, it's a seemingly magical piece of software spearheaded by Valve that allows Windows games to run on Linux (it's based on Wine). As you might expect for a project that ambitious, there are plenty of potential issues to iron out, so it's good to see Google planning ahead to address them. A report from Boiling Steam attempts to confirm that Google has a dedicated quality assurance team devoted to testing Borealis. As the product launches, it should be easy for users to provide direct feedback to Google and Valve to make Proton an even better overall experience.

We'll be keeping an eye out for any further motion on Borealis, so stay tuned for more information about Steam on Chromebooks in the coming weeks.