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.
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.
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.
Yeah this is a feature. Games on Linux are running fine by the way.