Helping Valve to Power Up Steam Devices
13 comments
·November 21, 2025fidotron
wronglebowski
It’s incredible how bad driver support is the ARM space. I was looking into some of the various Ambernic handhelds and their Linux firmware. Despite their SoCs being advertised as having Vulkan 1.1 support every firmware for the device ships with it disabled.
stavros
I don't play games almost ever, but I'm going to buy all the products Valve releases soon, just to support their OSS efforts. They seem to be the only vendor that's opening stuff up, rather than locking it down.
zem
I had barely played games for years, and got a steam deck just because it seemed like a cool linux device I could use both for gaming and tinkering. it has definitely gotten me back into gaming in a big way, the experience really is very nice.
palata
Same here! I actually stopped playing when I moved entirely to Linux, and have been running on laptops without a good GPU solution since then.
I bought the SteamDeck because it looked like a cool product and I liked the openness ("it's just running Linux"), and I love it. And it got me back into gaming :-).
stavros
Yes! The Deck is the closest I've gotten to getting into gaming. I especially loved the "press the power button and your game is immediately right there" aspect of it.
I ended up selling it to a friend because I enjoy making things much more, but the Deck is such a fantastic device.
pipes
It's a great device, I mainly use it for emulation. The fact that it's properly an open platform is amazing.
layer8
There’s probably a better way to sponsor Valve than to buy physical products you won’t use. That has pretty low monetary efficiency for the purpose.
stavros
But maybe I'll use them!
huseyinkeles
That’s what happens when you don’t need to please the shareholders.
stavros
That's very true, and I didn't realize it until you just said it.
righthand
I’d wait to see if they open source the Machine, Controller, and Frame before assuming buying their products supports open source that matters for everyone. Right now the Steam Deck is the only product that open source and supports that vision.
null
> This is a very difficult combination to achieve, and yet that’s exactly what we’ve done for Valve with Mesa3D Turnip, a FOSS Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs.
Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing.
Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.