Yeah they release stuff sporadically, and by all accounts the internal organization is chaos. But that somehow manages to produce some of the best games of all time.
Let's not forget also that Valve has pushed Linux gaming more than anyone else.
The menu and method for selecting weapons in Alyx is ripe for some really intuitive gestures for multi-level radial menus, I would love to explore that myself if I can get back into gamedev one of these days. Weapon selection in classic Half-Life is organized by category, so two-motion gestures for selections seem like a logical step. You're right about the things that Valve excels at, I'm excited to see what they do with VR. It can always use big players in its corner.
It's not though. Windows is a pain in the ass to develop for, and the only thing keeping most developers from writing cross-platform titles is DirectX. Luckily, there's a DirectX-to-Vulkan translation layer that will run 80% of Steam's "legacy" Windows games, as well as any new exclusives. As the industry starts to shift to Vulkan, developers will have much less incentive to ship Windows exclusives.
The final nail in the coffin is probably sandboxing. Linux support for sandboxed applications is next-level, and projects like Flatpak and AppImage have made it possible to ship software that's more stable on Linux than it is on Windows. Valve's probably wants to combine this with their Proton project to create truly "immortal" Linux applications: imagine being able to download a file containing a compressed VM image with Diablo 2 perfectly configured like a Docker container.
> Maybe if there wasn't 100+ distros or whatever and people just focused on getting a couple at the level of XP, we could see a lot wider of adoption.
The only difference between distros is package management, and 99% of them will install Steam, Discord, Spotify, and any of your other "normal" apps the exact same way.
That said, I disagree with some of what you're saying, and I also think there might be some stuff that you aren't aware of.
For starters, and perhaps my comment didn't illustrate this, but from my perspective, Valve's strategy is not to popularize Linux desktop. They did have SteamOS which they obviously abandoned/consolidated into Big Picture Mode. There are rumors of a handheld console that will likely be running Linux underneath, but I'd be shocked if the user ever sees anything but a Steam interface. So I don't think from that perspective that Steam particularly cares about a Linux desktop experience. They don't (to my knowledge) fund KDE or Gnome. They seem to want everyone to interact with Linux through the Steam software itself.
Additionally, to address the fragmentation points you are bringing up (which are clearly valid), Steam has developed a unified Linux runtime that ships with Steam on Linux, and developers can target that runtime for their games. So again, this is a distribution agnostic, desktop agnostic solution for developers. They only have to support one thing: Steam runtime for Linux. And I think that nicely solves the Frankenstein issues.
Now obviously if Steam never turns into a full OS, people aren't going to switch to it just to play games, when Windows can also play all those games, and supports office and Adobe software. So what the plan is exactly, I'm not sure. Valve doesn't seem interested in solving those problems, at least not yet. Perhaps they are just keeping the scope narrow to what they're good at (games) and hoping that others will solve those problems.
That's basically a non-issue. Steam has had a ton of random shit in there for years and people still prefer it to all of the other stores.
It's in fact preferable to have too much than too little. GOG might have DRM-free games and a fancy launcher that combines ALL of your game libaries from different launchers (GOG Galaxy is pretty neat), but it doesn't really benefit me when Mass Effect Legendary Edition isn't on sale there.
That's a good thing though. Steam greenlight was a really good idea, and now you have all kinds of games on Steam, which is really good. I haven't tried Epic but I remember Origin being dogshit compared to Steam. Maybe if all those stores are so terrible it's because it's actually a hard problem and not something trivial that anyone can do better?
Steam have most of the games, better practices than most people (no exclusives like Epic, which is a bad practice in my opinion), they've done many things for Linux gaming (automatically using Proton is really great and works well for most games), they also often have really good sales. Steam is here to stay.
The gaming market has grown incredibly competitive, and statistically speaking the steam store has the most garbage out of all the stores combined x100.
The most depressing thing about Valve Software is that they are a privately-held corporation and have far more agility than the likes of EA, ATVI, et. al. There aren't quarterly earnings calls or other confining economics that would spook away investors if an ambitious AAA project were to be announced this Monday.