The Steam Deck is a great gaming system. This isn’t because of it’s great battery life. A Nintendo Switch would probably have better battery life. It’s not because of its great performance. I don’t usually play AAA games, so I wouldn’t know. The Steam Deck is great because of the philosophy on which it is built.

The popularity of Steam Decks is directly tied to the betterment of support for games on Linux. This is because the Steam Deck really is a linux computer in a handheld form-factor with a gamepad, among other things, attached to it. According to ProtonDB, over 5000 PC games are certified Verified on the Steam Deck, and over 15,000 games are considered playable. This means that there are tens of thousands of games that can be run on Linux in some way.

Thanks to Steam’s efforts, the state of compatibility of games on Linux systems have heavily improved. Not all these thousands of games running on the Deck have binaries that run natively on Linux. Pivotal to the success of the Deck is Proton, a middle-layer compatibility software, that makes this (mostly) seamless emulation possible. Nonetheless, the greater the adoption of Decks, the likelier we are to normalize prioritizing game-builds for Linux.

We run software because it serves us some purpose. In this, running software is no different from utilizing everyday objects, and playing games are no different from running software. Yet, this teleological view of computing would miss a lot of context. When picking an operating system, we may want to make a choice that aligns with the goals of transparency or software freedom. But this would not be realistic if the programs we would like to run on top are not supported in such an ecosystem. Since large parts of Proton is open-source, and are released under permissive licenses, gaming on a Deck takes us closer to using a principled software stack for daily use.

Purchasing everyday objects give us ownership over them. With media, software and computing equipment, this is less so. When you buy a book, you may lend it to others, sell it, earmark the pages and even rip it in two if you like. This is very different from the experience of buying a smartphone. You can’t run arbitrary programs of your choice on an Android phone without rooting, or on an iPad or an iPhone without jailbreaking. In most scenarios, you’d be forced to sign away your legal ability to root or jailbreak before you can engage with the device in any meaningful way.

The Steam Deck does not engage in this practice. It runs a heavily customized version of Arch Linux. This means that you can plug in a keyboard and mouse into it, and pretend that it is your desktop computer. If you like, you can install the LibreOffice suite on it, and prepare presentations.

The matter of using your computers the way you like is more than just a symbolic debate about the nature of ownership. It is a political matter of freedom of expression. When they control the apps that you run on your device, they are in charge of deciding which content is Kosher, and which content is obscene. It is also an economic matter of having efficient markets. The mythological power of the free market works only when the consumers can switch between different producers at will. When the operators of the market themselves try to capitalize on chokepoints and direct the consumers to buy products from their allies, this is no longer the case.

Switch owners buy games from the Switch Store not because that is the best market, but because that is the only marketplace from which they can install games. This is thankfully, less of a case with the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck encourages you to buy and play Steam games, of course. Nonetheless, I had no issues installing Epic Games, GoG or even itch.io launchers on my Deck and playing games from them. The Deck also includes a “non-steam game” tab in its UI to let users conveniently access them.

When your shoe tears up, you are welcome to visit the cobbler of your choice. They all understand the internals of a shoe. And when they need to fix them, they all can gather the nails, glue and the pieces of fabric that they might need. This is less so for many computing products. Many manufacturers try to discourage third party vendors from repairing them. Worse, they sometimes purposely use proprietary parts in their products, replacements of which would be hard to find. Thankfully, Valve has been different. Valve has released a video explaining the internal organization of the Steam Deck and how one should approach replacing parts, should they wish to do so.

This post is not really necessarily about the Steam Deck (or Valve Corporation) itself. That said, the Steam Deck is an excellent demonstration that the commercial interest of making profit does not necessarily have to overpower the civic interests of the people.

Valve’s libertarian ideology has not always been an unquestionable force for good. Some people have criticized that their company culture of libertarianism sometimes takes precedence over other important values including equity and inclusion. During the peak of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, Valve was pressured to make a statement. Valve responded by giving each of their employees an amount of money which they were free to donate to a charity of their choice. This was regarded as a non-statement by many since there may have been employees who have donated their shares to an organizations with interests opposing the cause.

Valve has also generally refused to take a stance against gambling websites which plug into their ecosystem, despite the allegation that this harms many users (including minors). This maybe a consequence of their libertarian philosophy, but the worse possibility is that they are disinterested in tuning down a part of their system that profits themselves.

A very large share of the PC gaming market is Steam, which is a fact I do not admire. They do take a 30% cut on the sales of Steam games, which can arguably be considered rent seeking, even if it is the industry standard. I do hope the marketplace of game distribution sees more healthy competition. Nonetheless, I appreciate Valve for not pursuing aggressively anti-competitive tactics.