Valve and consultancy Collabora are building an Arm64 port of Arch Linux, called Holo Core, to power the upcoming Steam Frame VR headset, with hopes the work eventually gets folded into the official upstream Arch Linux distribution. This matters because Arch Linux currently only ships official x86-64 packages, so getting native Arm64 support upstream would be a significant shift, and it comes as Arch-based distros already dominate Linux gaming on Steam.

Unlike the unofficial Arch Linux ARM (ALARM) project, which uses separately modified build scripts for 61 Arm devices, Valve and Collabora aim to build Arm64 support directly into Arch's original PKGBUILD scripts. The push is driven by the Steam Frame, which will use a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip rather than AMD hardware like the Steam Deck and Steam Machine, with Valve's FEX emulator letting it run x86 games. SteamOS 3 ("Holo"), based on Arch, already leads Linux gaming, with the June 2026 Steam Survey showing Steam OS Holo at 22.83% and Arch-based CachyOS at 14.03%, together with other Arch variants making up 47.49% of Steam Linux usage. No installable image exists yet, but Collabora has released preview binaries, source packages and a development container.