Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is it? When there’s a dominant player that’s practically the only way?
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.