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Comment by wordofx | Hacker News Reader

How was it a game changer? We had handheld gaming units before steam deck and the rig ally outsells the steam deck.

A Linux PC handheld is the game changing part. It's a big boon to the Linux gaming community because of the amount of effort Valve has put into Linux in the Proton layer. It gives devs a target Linux platform to build to and test to. And it gives Linux distro devs a target to get very good game compatability.

Isn’t the game changer proton. Not the handheld.

The handheld was a necessary and sufficient business case to develop and spread proton. Now we have it.

I see the handheld as a stepping stone. The big benefit to a console style device is a very small amount of hardware to target, whereas the PC market at large is a very large amount of hardware to target.

The handheld was just a market that didn't have much competition at the time. Which likely made it easy to justify it as a business decision for Valve.

Its all part of the stack. Every part of it was critical. Id say proton without the deck wouldnt have the same impact because there would be nothing to create the groundswell of linux adoption for gaming

SteamOS & proton.

Yeah, Linux gaming is amazing in 2025, and it's all down to Steam choosing to run the Deck on Linux. You don't need the deck for it either, I'm not sure you even need Steam.

Such an incredibly pro-consumer move by a company with such a big market share. Anti-enshitification. Hard to imagine any other big name company doing something so radically positive.

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