In an IGN interview, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said that “[they] want [SteamOS] to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC”. Below is a transcript of the interview. I tried to clean it up to my best ability.
Just like Steam Deck paved the way for Steam OS on a variety of third-party handhelds, we expect that Steam Machine will pave the way for Steam OS on a bunch of different machines in either similar form factors, different perf envelopes, different segments of the market, and get to a good outcome there. We definitely want to encourage people to try it out on their own hardware. We’ll be working on expanding hardware support for the drivers and the base operating system. Just last week, we fixed something that was preventing us from booting on the very latest AMD CPU platforms. Last month, we added support for the Intel Lunar Lake platforms. We’re constantly adding support and improving performance. We want it to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC, but there’s still a ton of work to do there.
If the embedded video doesn’t take you to the correct part of the video, the correct timestamp is 5:37.
EDIT: Here’s the written article of the video:
https://www.ign.com/articles/valves-next-gen-steam-machine-and-steam-controller-the-big-interview
It’s built on FOSS software, Valve is a main contributer to a bunch of Linux-specific frameworks like Proton, AMD FOSS drivers, and others. This means that the FOSS world benifits from their contributions, regardless of Valve’s future contributions.
That’s the beauty and power of FOSS, it can’t be restricted or locked away, everybody gets to enjoy everybody else’s contributions, big and small.
Even if Valve totally enshitifies and tries to restrict their tech, the community will fork their projects, take the code and continue building cool stuff.
Look what happened with Terraform, the largest infrastructure as code platform in the world. They tried to close down their codebase by changing the license to a more restrictive one, and the community rebelled and forked Open Tofu, which not only has 100% backward compatibility with Terraform, but has newly developed features that terraform doesn’t have.
Same thing with Red Hat, a multi-billion dollar corpo owned and controlled by IBM, which tried to lock out devs from their codebase recently unless they were building code specifically for Red Hat Linux. Rocky and Alma Linux not only survived, but still thrive.
I could go on, but the point is that right now Valve is a fantastic force for Linux and FOSS development in the gaming space, and because they started with a largely open platform and ecosystem, that protects the community at large from future enshitification.