Steamdeck is a device with one hardware configuration, one set of drivers, one operating system, and one local environment. "Linux" is an infinite number of combinations derived from an a large and unbounded set of hardware, driver, OS, and environment choices.
The reason that "supporting Linux is hard" is the combinatorial matrix of broken ass shit. Supporting a single configuration is easy.
Proton/WINE works well on Steamdeck. It gets updated regularly by Valve for specific games when it doesn't. It is not as reliable for random gamer's random ass frankenstein setup.
It's a funny thing. I think what you're saying is exactly right from the standpoint of a dev. As a mere consumer, if you support Steamdeck via Proton, then it sure feels to me like you're supporting Linux, but I get why you wouldn't officially say that.
If I were shipping a game today I would say “I support Steamdeck”. If any users complained about it not working on their particular Linux machine I would say “you’re on your own, good luck!”.
I would proudly advertise “Steamdeck support” and I would definitely never claim to “support Linux”.
IIRC for my Linux project something like 40% of support tickets were from the 1% of Linux users. Give or take. Never again!
Not really, no. In practice Linux is radically more fragile and roughly an order of magnitude more expensive to support for two orders of magnitude fewer users.
Games may hit a different set of pain points than a DAW. A lot of the Linux pain is graphics driver related. Which you could say is not a Linux problem but an AMD/Nvidia problem. But from a game developer perspective that distinction doesn’t matter.
The reason that "supporting Linux is hard" is the combinatorial matrix of broken ass shit. Supporting a single configuration is easy.
Proton/WINE works well on Steamdeck. It gets updated regularly by Valve for specific games when it doesn't. It is not as reliable for random gamer's random ass frankenstein setup.