It’s a matter of priorities. A large portion of Linux users don’t actually care about adoption. They’re not selling the os, so the docs aren’t designed for anyone who isn’t already a user.

Valve on the other hand is paying people for documentation and good ux. That’s enough to significantly boost the quality.

It’s even still a valid course of action if there’s literally no interest in making the world better.
They’ve potentially found a way to make their nearly omnipresent e-commerce platform share a name with the operating system, which is coincidentally mostly developed by others. They get to associate their name with a few tens of billions of dollars of development effort for a fraction of the cost.

To be clear, this isn’t bad or anything. It’s quite literally what a lot of the people doing all that legwork want. It just doesn’t require any altruism from valve. They make money selling games, and they sell more games when people think it’s easier to play them. A desktop with the ease of a console is a big selling point for a lot of people.

Their streaming system works fine with desktop apps, and it already works with their VR setup on different headsets.

I’ve streamed desktop to a different headset. I was able to also do stuff like mounting an app in a picture frame on the wall of a little VR house.

Using the video player on desktop while streaming was a little jank, but since this is a proper desktop I imagine it’ll be easy enough to switch over and use a normal video player without streaming another computers video player.

They’ve been pretty great on Linux. They built on the great work of the wine people and have done a lot to push the state forward.

I believe they’ve had a lot of good things to say about the stability of the Linux platform from a development perspective. For all the jank and instability that Linux software exposes, it has a lot more stability in terms of things like kernel and driver interfaces as a point of deliberate design choice. So there’s a lot less work needing to code around the specific versions of drivers being used.