Two unusual companies, Valve Software and Igalia, are working together to improve the Linux-based OS of the Steam Deck handheld games console. The device runs a Linux distro called Steam OS 3.0, but this is a totally different distro from the original Steam OS it announced a decade ago. Steam OS 1 and 2 were based on Debian, but Steam OS 3 is based on Arch Linux, as Igalia developer Alberto García described in a talk entitled How SteamOS is contributing to the Linux ecosystem.
Valve’s contributions to desktop Linux cannot be understated. Aside from Proton, the company also does a lot of work on graphics, as well as stuff like mentioned in the article. Without Valve, there would be no gaming on Linux – and it’s gaming that’s driving the recent surge in popularity of desktop Linux. Of course, it’s still small compared to Windows and macOS, but the growth is undeniable.
Oh cool, that’s one of mine. Thanks for featuring it!
Interop? I’ve never seen it used this way before. In IT it’s general been one of two things:
Getting systems from different vendors, such as Microsoft and IBM to communicate
Interfacing dotnet managed code with unsafe native code – the MS version of jni.
It seems to me what you are referring to is more akin to porting.