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Because the turn-around time from upstream-to-packager is smaller, which in turn helps get problems fixed faster. That in turn means devs have more space to fix issues. It is an effective velocity improvement for them and they think it will work for their targeted market. First, it's worth keeping in mind that this Steam Deck is for all purposes and intents a fixed-spec system. Valve will control all of the most major components that make various end-user support problems appear (fixed CPU, GPU, RAM, motherboard, controllers, storage, etc.) Now, with that in mind, if you use a system that has a release cadence like Ubuntu, if you want to fix issues, you must report them upstream and backport them into your current system. This is workable, but it is implicitly predicated on the assumption that the backport is the only way to deliver the fix to users in a reasonable timeframe. Otherwise you would have to wait 6 months for Ubuntu to release anything. If you use a rolling system like Arch that is much closer to the very latest versions, the same process above occurs. But the window for those changes to appear downstream (from reporting the issue to the person receiving the fix) is much smaller. If this window becomes small enough, say "I report an issue and a patch is issued and released in 48 hours", it often means you don't have to backport or maintain the backport for long. If you're maintaining less backports concurrently, or even none at all, that means you have less workload and can focus on diagnosing real issues with up to date code. Finally, and this is the important part: it doesn't matter for who they want to buy this. I don't think Valve intends this to be seen as a console, but as a portable PC, and I don't think PC gamers who use Steam (and thus are the target market) are unexperienced with the fact games might not work and bugs need to be reported. It's part of PC gaming culture at this point to complain about bugs in PC games. They actually will probably want one anyway because it will make their massive investment in their Steam library all the more available. And if you're some die-hard guy who likes this thing because it's Linux, well, Proton is basically as good as it's ever going to get at this rate, and it's objectively made Linux gaming massively more available, so, you just gotta deal. (Proton's very existence gives developers less of a reason to deal with native Linux ports when they can just target Windows and let the magical translation layer fix it instead. So actually the focus will be going into making Proton better instead to fix these issues, and that is actually probably the best way forward to ensure older games can be available, too.) There are a thousand confounding variables in this equation and I'm sure you can line up to list them or whatnot. But the important thing here is that in all cases there are social expectations about how the maintainers of each upstream project and distro fix issues, and on what timescale, and how users respond to them. That's why they think this will work. |