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by revolvingocelot 1401 days ago
Valve has a business case to ready Linux for mass deployment -- recall Microsoft's public musing about locking down DirectX in Windows 10, forcing everyone into the Store? IIRC Steam Machines were a hedge/threat against that, but I'm pretty confident that the individual whimsy of GabeN et al is chiefly responsible for the gobs of money and polish being poured into a Linux uh Decktop experience. That's going to be hard to replicate for a Linux experience for anything else.

At the risk of sounding like a Valve exceptionalist or Great-Man historiographer, keep in mind that GabeN has untold "personal" millions to throw at weird Protean moonshots like Steam Machines-to-Proton-to-Steam Deck. I can't see a way for any extant company with the ability to build out Linux-for-a-phone to want to build out Linux-for-a-phone without baking some poisonous antifeature into it to make people look at ads.