Android started off being its own thing, except for the kernel. The Steam Deck is built on desktop Linux tech, so they would have to start over if they wanted to move away from that. That doesn't make their path guaranteed to be the same in the future, but it does make what you describe less likely.

They may be bought by someone bigger and then shutdown to protect the existing wild gardens. There are many analogies. Astrid[0][1] and Wunderlist[2] come to my mind.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrid_(application)

[1] https://github.com/tasks/tasks

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist

Valve is a privately held company (owned by its employees) that makes ridiculous amounts of money, has no real incentive to sell, and Gabe Newell has publicly stated many times in the past that Valve selling out is extremely unlikely, and some kind of hostile takeover is virtually impossible.

Newell said that there was a better chance that Valve would “disintegrate,” its independent-minded workers scattering, than that it would ever be sold.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/technology/valve-a-video-...

The difference here between Valve and most all of the infamous tech buyouts of history is Valve has no VCs looking to cash out who get final say, or public investors looking to maximize returns.

I agree but Gabe is not gonna live forever....

Android never used the Linux userspace. Steam Deck is using KDE. I'm optimistic.

huh? what do you mean by this?

We have to get a bit in the weeds here. Does the name Linux refers to just the kernel, or does it also include the GNU userland and the rest of everything on top that desktop distros are made up of (Gnome/KDE/etc). Because Android uses the Linux kernel, as does ChromeOS, but calling them Linux doesn't exactly mean what people are trying to say when they say "it's the year of the Linux desktop".

So the worry is that the Steam Deck is also going to be its own weird fork of Linux desktop, and fixes can't be used to improve Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch/etc.