What I find most amazing about it is that this has been about a decade in the making - Valve started their Linux compatibility initiative back when Microsoft threatened to hurt Steam with Windows 8 and Microsoft Store requirements.

How dedicated they are to this effort is impressive - they first failed big with the Steam Machines when support was very half baked, but now they'll try again with the Deck just as compatibility is coming along much better.

I guess Linux gamers can largely thank Microsoft for this one!

As a Mac user I'm a bit disappointed they stopped their efforts on that front, since the new processors are quite capable.

mac left the ship once they refused to embrace standards like Vulkan and let OpenGL rot at the same time.

Not only that, but it has a lot of pain points, including ARM CPUs in a world where a lot of games used to target 32 bit windows.

Proton supported macos at first[1]. I think support is still more or less there, though not integrated with "steam play". Proton "glue" scripts are also mostly python, and macos does not (did not?) support python3.

I think the community could step in and help support it, but valve pretty much stopped efforts on that front (some rationale in [2]), although I think community efforts on wine would be welcomed.

[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/a84120449d817...

[2] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1493#issuecom...