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Comment by phito | Hacker News Reader

It's the same as the steam deck: I don't enjoy video games anymore, I've actually never really enjoyed gaming except for a handful of titles. But I'll be damned, I love that Valve is bringing gaming to Linux and I'll buy the hardware just to support the cause. The people in my life that have been using the "I need Windows for my games" reason (or excuse ;)) to not switch to Linux are now slowly but surely leaving Windows!

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wait, your going to buy Steam hardware to support Linux gaming? WFT. isn't the multi-million yatch Gabe bought enough?

go donate to khronos or the wine team. maybe even Godot, which treats Linux as a 1° class citizen

Good point, I just made a donation to the wine team. I still think buying Steam hardware is a good way to signal to the market that I want to see more of this.

Gabe buying a yacht makes the company evil or something? What's your point?

Valve has single-handedly massively contributed to Linux gaming. Buying their products is obviously beneficial to Linux gaming as a whole. It's in their best interest to continue their trend of supporting and improving Linux gaming.

I think it's important to note that it's not just gaming, but the improvements have cascaded over to regular desktop users as well: I'm taking about improvements in the kernel (for AMD CPUs mainly), improvements in the graphics stack (Mesa, amdgpu drivers), improvements in KDE and of course, improvements to the Wine project in general (which goes beyond gaming). Anyone who's been closely following the FOSS scene can see how the progress in these projects have exploded exponentially over the past 3-4 years, thanks to Valve.

And with the most recent announcements, we can expect to see a similar sort of growth in the FEX emulator and general ARM support for various projects, which is all every exciting even as a non-gamer.

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