As someone who has just switched to Linux gaming, I've got to say it's working great. Maybe it's slightly less stable, but not by much, and performance is excellent.
I think it's great that someone invests. That investments are necessary is no sadder than that salaries are necessary for your work. It's just a normal part of work/life where the alternative would be to do it for free, out of passion. But you also have to make a living.
Well, that's also sad.
I just wanted to say it would have been nice if the community would have been able to get this working more easily. But clearly it's too much work to do it without some dedicated fulltimers.
People getting paid is a good thing.
I'm a bit at a loss why some people here prefer commercialised open source over community-driven open source. I mean, I'll take it, and Valve did an amazing job, but there have been plenty of attempts to make this work before Valve stepped in, and it just didn't work that well back then, and it would have been nice if we didn't have to rely on Valve for this.
Using Steam and the whole Valve-supported infrastructure still doesn't cost me anything. But what if Valve decides the Steam Deck isn't commercially viable for them?
In order to do something big, many people must invest many resources, and they would only do so if they all see great value in the thing.
In order to have resources to invest, all of the people must have excess resources that they have generated from previous endeavors.
Remember, capitalism is merely the most efficient system we have for assigning limited resources across society.
by now the linux ecosystem has received to much commercial investment to separate out what is community effort and what is not, but i believe that most of the polish that went into linux desktop applications and interfaces have some commercial investment in them.
the problem is that for most volunteers 90% of usability is good enough. if it works for me, my work is done. the imperfect is almost necessary to attract contributors. a perfectly working application is more likely to attract users but less contributors. and as soon as contributors work on something it becomes imperfect again.
this is not to say that contributors mess things up, on the contrary, but most do just enough work to make it work for them, leaving the work to polish it up for others to someone else. and i think that is perfectly fine. contributors should not be expected to do work that is of no benefit for themselves. the benefit of a polished application is almost always for non-contributing end users, which in turn is almost always a commercial interest.
One particularly great thing about Valve's support is that it benefits all games, and not just those on Steam. It's absolutely a great example of how open source helps everybody.