It bothers me a bit when I see the narrative on here that the introduction of the Steam Deck changed everything for linux gaming, but really it is a culmination of steady ongoing work that didn't even start with Valve. I've been primary linux gaming since probably about 2014. When Steam machines fizzled out Valve just quietly brushed it off and continued investing in the general concept.
There was a huge amount of work by WINE (and others), but it really was a huge leap in how accessible Linux gaming was to people.
Going back a few years, my experience was that you had to do some research to see if a game was likely to work, install it through wine, and then usually faff around with a load of winetricks/configurations/packages/etc to get a game that mostly worked (often with some weird bugs, performance issues, etc).
Now there's a whole library of games that you can just right click -> install and they work perfectly well on Linux. And of course that wouldn't have been possible without the years of work building up to it - but it was a massive improvement when Valve threw their weight behind it and built it directly into the Steam client.
> When Steam machines fizzled out Valve just quietly brushed it off and continued investing in the general concept.
I remember being really disappointed when they did - I assumed gaming on Linux would be following the same path, because what the fuck kind of company breaks down a wall by repeatedly bashing their forehead into it?
Steam machines did not do well, and instead of Valve saying "Maybe this is a money pit we should abandon", they just shoveled money into it until it was mostly full.
