Comment by righthand a day ago
I’d wait to see if they open source the Machine, Controller, and Frame before assuming buying their products supports open source that matters for everyone. Right now the Steam Deck is the only product that open source and supports that vision.
Even this article it is not clear how beneficial some of their open source work is for everyone except Valve.
Steam Deck is not free software, is it?
The repo[0] is basically an issue tracker and the hardware is not open either (but they're repair-friendly which is already an improvement over... everything else.)
They run their own Gitlab instance with many more steamos projects:
Sorry my point is that the Steam Deck is the only product of theirs that really supports beneficial open source in software and hardware. If you don’t think fossing the case is enough then you’re making my point for me that buying the machine, frame, or controller doesn’t do anything for foss.
It’d be like donating to Mozilla and expecting the money to go to Firefox development.
For a few years before I eventually got a Steam Deck, I played a lot of games that I bought outside of Steam, and over the past decade, the experience of doing this on Linux has massively improved. Plenty of their improvements get upstreamed to Wine, and there's nothing stopping you from obtain proton (or even one of the various unofficial tweaks of it) to run games that you don't buy through Steam to get the benefits that aren't upstreamed (or haven't been yet). The article itself mentions that they've implemented a driver for Mesa that has equal or better performance on ARM than the proprietary one from Qualcomm.
It's not clear to me what you're attempting to convey by saying the Steam Deck being the only product they have that supports the open source vision. The Steam Deck is the only new hardware product they've had since 2019, when they released their original first party VR headset that presumably is being replaced by the new one. Other than that, the only other hardware products they've ever worked on were earlier headsets made by other manufacturers or the previous iterations of the other two products announced alongside the new headset. From that standpoint, you could make a credible argument that the only product they even have right now that benefits from the open source work they've done in the past six years they did is the exact one you say supports this vision.