[wjoe]

That's one of the benefits of Steam as a gaming platform on Linux. It provides a standard set of libraries that games run against, which match those used on Steam OS and Ubuntu.

Occasionally a developer might use a library outside of the runtime and you could run into an issue, but as you say, 99% of the time games will work under any distro. My situation is the same as yours - I run Arch, and almost every game I've run has worked, besides a couple of small issues.

The downside of this is that you might lose out on some performance gains that you could get from newer libraries, but it's an acceptable compromise for compatibility. A lot of the times devs say they don't want to develop for Linux because it's difficult to test against every distro, but I don't think that's an issue. It's fine to test for Steam OS and the last few versions of Ubuntu, and release it for that. With Steam, it'll almost always work anyway, and if there's a few incompatibilities on more complex distros like Arch or Gentoo, users will usually be able to fix them themselves anyway.