i would like to highlight, and not discredit, the great work valve has done for the linux ecosystem, namely in getting arch based distros to a quality that hacker news comments can write it off as “emulating windows”
for example, all my non-windows, non-steam gamepad support stems from valve investing in improving upstream compatibility to where devices just work, without needing to go to a vendor website to download an .exe for a driver— now that’s emulating windows.
Valve is great! I love my SteamDeck. I just think it’s hilarious that the trick to making gaming on Linux possible was to use exes compiled for Windows.
that’s only a tiny aspect of it, which is why i used the word “reductive” specifically
there’s so much more internal plumbing that happened, mostly in the hardware compatibility and device driver layer of the stack.
i’ve been double clicking .exes using wine since 2008. i haven’t been able to use every gamepad under the sun on linux until valve funded device compatibility— not just “steam” or “steamos” or “steamdeck”— the upstream.
No. Linux just sucks and is bad at deploying proprietary software in a reliable manner.
It's not particularly difficult to target a broad combination of Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox. They're all basically the same. Even x64 vs ARM is largely irrelevant.
In a sense SteamOS isn't even Linux. It's one distribution with no user modifications running on one set of hardware. It's closer to a console than to "Linux".
Meanwhile Linux isn't even a thing. It's many many many different things. Once upon a time I shipped a game that supported Linux. It's been awhile but Linux players were roughly 1% of the audience but they represented 50% of bug reports. And no, Linux users were not "good" users who were simply better at reporting bugs.
for example, all my non-windows, non-steam gamepad support stems from valve investing in improving upstream compatibility to where devices just work, without needing to go to a vendor website to download an .exe for a driver— now that’s emulating windows.