Cheaper options like the Steam Deck are definitely a boon to the industry. Especially the idea of "good enough" gaming at lower resolutions on smaller screens.

Personally, I just don't like that its attached to steam. Which is why I can be hesitant to suggest consoles as well now that they have soft killed their physical game options. Unless you go out of your way to get the add-on drive for PS5, etc

Its been nice to see backwards compatibility coming back in modern consoles to some extent with Xbox especially if you have a Series-X with the disc drive.

I killed my steam account with 300+ games just because I didn't see a future where steam would actually let me own the games. Repurchased everything I could on GoG and gave up on games locked to Windows/Mac AppStores, Epic, and Steam. So I'm not exactly fond of hardware attached to that platform, but that doesn't stop someone from just loading it up with games from a service like GoG and running them thru steam or Heroic Launcher.

2024 took some massive leaps forward with getting a proton-like experience without steam and that gives me a lot of hope for future progress on Linux gaming.