> When contacted for comment by The Verge, Sweeney described Linux as “a terrifically hard audience to serve given the variety of incompatible configurations.” Asked whether it would be possible to enable compatibility just for SteamOS, he said “Linux is a small market already and if you subdivide it by blessed kernel versions then it’s even smaller.”
Claiming that Linux is a hard audience to serve is BS - just support a single distro (or platform, e.g. Valve's Steam Linux Runtime), and most Linux users will happily use it (or figure out how to get your thing to work on their platform on their own). In the specific case of the Steam Deck, it uses Steam OS and has a very limited set of hardware configurations, so there's exactly one target - Sweeny is just misdirecting/lying in order to obscure the real reason, which is money.
Claiming that Linux is a hard audience to serve is BS - just support a single distro (or platform, e.g. Valve's Steam Linux Runtime), and most Linux users will happily use it (or figure out how to get your thing to work on their platform on their own). In the specific case of the Steam Deck, it uses Steam OS and has a very limited set of hardware configurations, so there's exactly one target - Sweeny is just misdirecting/lying in order to obscure the real reason, which is money.