I would go further and say that all that they’ve done are “”“merely”“” sound elements in a strategy to avoid that in the era of always-online remote updateable software, Microsoft successfully uses their position as the provider (and, more importantly, controller of some of what runs in pretty much all consumer instances) of Windows to squeeze out Steam as a games store.

Microsoft slowly transforming for Windows applications into the equivalent of Apple for iOS applications (and their move towards signed applications could be part of that) would be a nightmare scenario for Steam and it’s a realistic possibility, especially if you notice that Microsoft is moving towards “everything must be cryptographically signed by Microsoft” to run in Windows.

So it totally makes strategical sense for Steam to invest into getting as many gamers as possible away from the Windows ecosystem, and one path is to get more games to as easily as possible run in the already existing and established alternative to Windows - Linux - the easiest way being to invest in an ever improved Windows-Linux adaptor layer (i.e. Wine/Proton) backed by a Steam store in Linux which just seamlessly uses that layer when needed, whilst another path is to sell their own game machines which do not run Windows and there again using Linux makes sense as the OS, both because it already exists and is mature and because using it on their machines has synergies with their investment in the “make games targeting Windows seamlessly run on Linux without needing changes”.

This isn’t Valve and Steam being nice guys doing nice things because they love their customers who use Linux, it’s just good long term business planning and management of maybe their greatest external risk - Microsoft.

I mean, “Yay for choosing Linux!” and “Respect for their business sense”, but lets not deceive ourselves into thinking they’re good guys because of doing what just makes sense strategically to manage Microsoft as a risk.