Valve, the company best-known for developing beloved games like "Half-Life" and "Counter-Strike," absolutely dominates the world of PC gaming with its Steam marketplace, but over 96 percent of its users are running Windows, which, at the end of the day, is owned by another company fighting for the same customer's wallet.

Heck, most PC games only ship with Windows support; don't even hope for Mac or Linux versions. But thanks to Valve's success in portable gaming, Microsoft's dominance of the PC market could very well get shaken up.

About a decade ago, Valve flirted with pushing for Linux-based gaming with its own SteamOS and co-branded PCs called "Steam Machines" (that ran its free operating system instead of Microsoft's proprietary Windows OS.) That certainly didn't take off, but Valve didn't give up on the idea of decoupling its store from Microsoft's platform.

Cut to 2022, hot off some very strong COVID years in the gaming industry, Valve announced the Steam Deck, its handheld gaming PC that was powered by a new version of SteamOS.

While the idea was solid, simply copying the Nintendo Switch form factor wasn't able to resuscitate Valve's hardware brand, but it did reveal the company's real secret sauce — an upgraded version of Proton: a custom compatibility layer designed to run Windows games seamlessly on Linux.

Of course, compatibility layers aren't a new concept. Linux users have had WINE for decades, and Whisky has made huge strides for Mac users, but nothing has been this user-friendly and deeply integrated before.

In effect, Valve has delivered a piece of hardware that can run huge swaths of games right out of the box, with little-to-no fiddling from consumers. Underneath, there's just a regular ol' Linux desktop, but nobody needs to worry about any of that except us nerds.

Slowly but surely, the Steam Deck has gained enough traction that developers have started proudly marketing their games as well-suited for the Steam Deck. This makes SteamOS matter in a way that the Steam Machines never did.

Better yet, Valve is actively supporting its operating system on other portable gaming devices, so even more people can take advantage of the optimizations and strong Steam integration without paying Microsoft a dime.

There's no reason for Valve to actively antagonize Microsoft at the moment, and one employee has publicly waved away the idea that Valve is coming after Microsoft's monopoly, but it's easy to see where this is going.

With more and more gamers running Linux-based operating systems, we can finally sidestep the chicken-and-egg problem of establishing demand to spark supply of Linux games. If devices running SteamOS can eventually hit critical mass, there won't be the need for a Windows compatibility layer anymore — developers will just ship games on Linux.

So, what's wrong with Windows? Well, beyond the added cost of licensing its for-profit OS, Windows is suffering from the same enshittification as almost everything else in tech.

Its pushing abysmal AI tools, breaking PCs and cluttering up computers with junk, enough of it that people ended up making entire open source projects to de-junk its rickety OS.

Valve isn't a public company, so there isn't a constant external push from shareholders to deliver value. Valve has been exceedingly cautious about allowing games with AI-generated content onto its marketplace, and Steam still doesn't have some busted chatbot begging for your attention.

We fully admit that SteamOS is unlikely to dethrone Windows as the dominant operating system anytime soon, or perhaps for a few generations, but its success is showing us a world where creatives, developers and technologists don't need to suffer and play by the rules of a decaying ecosystem.

We have better options, and we should take advantage of them.

[Image: Valve]