"To the Wild" as to other manufacturers. Steamos is now available as a preinstallable option to hardware vendors. Since steam machines disappeared, steamos was only available to Valve devices. There were gossips that this will happen, this is the official announcement.

Linus Torvalds said 10 years ago that Valve will save the Linux desktop, and here we are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc

He says it after 5:10

"linux desktop handheld" is not wrong.

I really thought it had dwindled for good after the failure of the original run of Steam Machines, feels great to be where we're at now

Good question. Maybe:

1. Windows fanbois upset at the suggestion that Windows is starting to lose the game
2. People in general objecting to the idea that single-digit install numbers is "conquering."
3. Greybeards upset at a trivial misuse of compute power (games) is evidently more influential than truly worthy uses, like interpreting ctrl-alt-shift-n and running some Lisp to indent some text.
4. You've made powerful enemies...

I'm just guessing. I have no idea; I upvoted your comment.

@lig @Sunshine BTW this is true since many years, in fact this was among the reasons that made me switch from winlol

It's mostly just ArchLinux with preinstalled steam, booting into "big picture" ui. You can do the same thing as with any linux distro. Nearly all non competitive games from steam should work ootb.

The important part is a lot of people don't really care about operating systems, a big part of home usage of windows comes from being preinstalled on a lot of laptops. People just switch on their new computer and use it, if the preinstalled os is good enough they don't search for replacement. This is consumer device from a well known manufacturer. Before this other similar devices had to use windows, as Valve didn't have installers for steam os, didn't supported third party devices.

As the usage of linux grows with this, more (game) developers would choose to also develop for linux or at least make sure their programs run fine with wine.