Wine and DXVK are already running on Android and they play Windows games with the rendering and computational complexity of Fallout 4 at playable framerates on many of the latest smartphone SoCs. It's still WIP, but it's already gone beyond proof of concept, people are using them. Valve don't need the developers to be on-board in order to run their games on anything else, that's why Proton exists.

What Valve want is the dissolution between platform/architecture and store. By my eye, it's the driving force of their efforts, more so than them selling hardware or being the open source good guys. Not to undervalue their work in helping make Linux a first class citizen for gaming, but the core of their business model is getting people to engage with their store, full stop, and being able to sell their games on Android (and elsewhere) would massively extend their reach.

This may go both ways too, there's also been indications that Valve have been tinkering with Waydroid, meaning Steam could also become a store for Android-native games.

You are right that many developers don't care and haven't bothered with Linux, but one reason for optimism is that this seems to be changing. Just looking through the list of native Linux games today compared to what it was like a year or 2 years ago, there are a lot more options. I was looking through the list of Linux games on Gog, and it is likewise in a much better position than it was prior. I think there is much reason for optimism!!

Steamdeck 3 being statistically impossible is a joke about Valve having an aversion to releasing a #3 of anything.

Half life 1, 2… hm.

Ok we’ll make three HL2 episodes to follow that up.

Ep I. Ep II. Uhhhh… and let’s stop there, just like forever I guess.

Portal 1. Portal 2.

Left4dead. L4D2.

Team Fortress. TF2.

Counterstrike. CS2. Oh shit we’re releasing a third one, we might have to use the number three finally, oh no… I’ve got it: CS:Go!

It is a joke about Valve only rarely making the third installment in any of their series (e.g. Half Life 3 not existing) Edit: specifically including "3" in the title - the actual number of games tends to be higher but with different names.

I believe Valve dropped official Windows 7 support in Steam because Chromium did and they weren't going to fork it.

I empathize if you don't like any version of Windows newer than 7 or XP, but it's time to let the dream of running them forever go. It's not weird when software doesn't support the 2009 version of an operating system anymore in 2024. If they never dropped support, it would be difficult to take advantage of improvements that occurred in the last 10 years, because we'd forever be stuck in baggage.

Of course when it's feasible everybody loves software that really never does drop support, like 7-zip, which I think happily still works on Win9x without KernelEx... but I'd rather 7-zip stopped having serious security issues than continued to work on old Windows versions.

Windows 7 was great and I'd love to go back. If I really had my druthers, Windows 2000 was peak and XP was just a vulgarized version of 2000.

However, it is Microsoft more than anyone else that has decided to stop supporting those operating systems. Windows XP does not have support for any modern version of TLS (only TLS 1.0). There's no good way to support a browser-based app like Steam on a platform that cannot natively provide a secure connection to a modern web server.

There is not such a hard reason to drop Windows 7 support (again, except that Microsoft no longer supports it) but there are security-relevant APIs that are only available starting in Windows 10 which means special patches would have to be maintained just for Steam on Windows 7 to continue working securely.