Yep. All of this considered, Valve should really care about a better native developer experience before the time window disappears. I'm not so sure their current approaches are good enough; they do have a "Steam runtime" but it doesn't provide much isolation from the host system which may stymie some of the benefits.
Still, they seem to be successfully shipping desktop Linux to users more or less successfully, which is extremely impressive and strange. A lot of Steam Deck users are learning to deal with Flatpaks and AppImages. My feelings on those modes of app distribution notwithstanding, no doubt continual improvement in those ecosystems will help ensure that not everything they do will only serve to benefit Steam and emulated Windows apps.
But I definitely understand what's going on here. They know well they can't stop investing in Windows emulation yet. A marketing point against SteamOS has been the fact that it can't play your whole Steam library, and while it can play a lot more than I ever expected, it's true. They need to keep working on answering the challenges for existing games and their anti-cheat solutions.
Still, they seem to be successfully shipping desktop Linux to users more or less successfully, which is extremely impressive and strange. A lot of Steam Deck users are learning to deal with Flatpaks and AppImages. My feelings on those modes of app distribution notwithstanding, no doubt continual improvement in those ecosystems will help ensure that not everything they do will only serve to benefit Steam and emulated Windows apps.
But I definitely understand what's going on here. They know well they can't stop investing in Windows emulation yet. A marketing point against SteamOS has been the fact that it can't play your whole Steam library, and while it can play a lot more than I ever expected, it's true. They need to keep working on answering the challenges for existing games and their anti-cheat solutions.