Meet Holo Core, a pure AArch64 port of Arch Linux that will serve as the baseline operating system for Valve's highly anticipated Steam Frame gaming VR headset.
Collabora officially announced the first preview of Holo Core, joining Valve's growing hardware family alongside the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and the new Steam Controller.
The Challenge of Bringing Arch to ARM64
Because the Steam Frame is powered by an ARM64 processor, Collabora and Valve have been working hand-in-hand to build a full AArch64 port. Since the upstream Arch Linux community lacks official ARM64 support, the engineering teams had to build entirely new tooling and CI (Continuous Integration) infrastructure from scratch.
The real engineering hurdle was ensuring this entire build pipeline remained reproducible for a rolling-release distribution. For now, the teams have delivered a functional proof of concept rather than a finalized ecosystem.
"We have not rebuilt the entire world (all the packages available in the Arch Linux repositories). Our initial goal is to provide the set of packages required for development and image creation for the Steam Frame," said Denis Pynkin, Senior Software Engineer at Collabora.
What's Next for Developers?
An early, experimental preview of Holo Core is now live for early adopters and developers. Binary packages, sources, and a dedicated Docker container can be downloaded directly from Collabora's official announcement page.
These packages are built from a snapshot of Arch Linux's Git package repository, adapted specifically to compile on ARM64 hardware. The next milestone is evolving this into a continuously updating system that tracks upstream Arch Linux as it changes.
For now, curious developers can pull the container image, spin it up using Distrobox (utilizing QEMU emulation on x86_64 hosts if necessary), and start building packages themselves.
Are you planning to test out Holo Core on your ARM64 hardware, or are you waiting for the official Steam Frame launch? Let's discuss in the comments below!

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