> The elephant in the room meanwhile is the countless improvements Valve engineers have made to the the Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan drivers as well as to the kernel graphics driver components. Not just to the AMD graphics drivers for benefiting the Steam Deck's hardware but also to Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan and then other common infrastructure. But in this area of the Linux graphics driver support, Valve's contributions and those of their partners have been incredibly beneficial to the Linux desktop ecosystem even outside gaming.

Yep. Vulkan (the open version of Mantel) for graphics, Proton for low level Windows emulation, driver support and controller customization and options (the Steam Controller was NOT a failed project, just a precursor), and giving it all away upstream... There's something to be said about the ability of a privately held company to execute a vision long term. Everyone from Canonical, to Nintendo, to Activision/Blizzard should be worried about Valve coming to eat their lunch, and they'll do it by giving customers a better experience and thinking long term.