Valve isn’t just the biggest force in PC gaming, and they’re not just the newest console manufacturer swaggering into the arena.

They’re morphing into something far bolder: the Apple of Linux.

If you’re not a gamer, that might sound unhinged. Maybe even a little deranged. But if you’re already deep in the Steam ecosystem—if your library scrolls so far it needs its own municipal transit system—you know this isn’t wild at all. It’s practically destiny.

Let’s rewind. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he didn’t reinvent the wheel. He just drew a big cross on a whiteboard and said: four products. iMac, Power Mac, iBook, PowerBook. Four neat squares. Four clean market segments. And everything Apple built slotted neatly into that grid.

Apple didn’t suddenly leap to 30% marketshare. They barely scraped 3%. Didn’t matter. Because the money wasn’t really in the hardware. It was in the ecosystem.

Buy a Mac and suddenly you’re buying OS upgrades, iLife apps, office software, music tools, the whole glittering Cupertino starter kit. That stack of software made the hardware profitable, and that hardware made the software inevitable. The loop fed itself.

Now fast-forward to Valve. Look at what they’ve assembled.

Four core hardware pillars:

• Steam Controller
• Steam Deck
• Steam Machine
• Steam Frame

Four segments. Four use cases. Four doors into the same house.

Already have a PC? You grab the Steam Controller.

Want your library in your backpack? Steam Deck.

Want it in the living room? Steam Machine.

Want it strapped to your face? Steam Frame.

And the moment you buy any one of these, something interesting happens: the rest of the ecosystem starts making sense. Buy a game on Steam and it works everywhere. Your save files carry across devices. You can stream titles between them. The more hardware you add, the smoother it all feels, and the more the ecosystem pulls you deeper in.

But here’s the part I really want you to notice: I didn’t say Valve wants to be the Apple of gaming. No. They want to be the Apple of Linux.

And that’s where this gets concrete. Their hardware ships with Linux that isn’t locked down or lobotomized. It has a real desktop environment hiding under a slick UI.

Which means Valve can evolve SteamOS in ways Apple never aimed to with macOS. Apple built a general-purpose OS that occasionally supported games. However, Valve built a gaming OS that can naturally branch outward into media, creative tools, and productivity. “Gaming-adjacent” doesn’t require a conceptual pivot. It’s the next logical step.

What might that look like?

• A native media center built directly into SteamOS—think Plex or Jellyfin, but officially blessed and seamlessly integrated.
• First-party creative tools that take advantage of Proton and GPU acceleration—video editors, music tools, asset creators.
• A productivity layer—file syncing, cloud storage, collaborative apps—that piggybacks on your Steam identity.
• A SteamOS app store that isn’t just for games. Apps, utilities, editors, streaming clients, the works.

They’ve already dipped into this with Big Picture Mode’s media features, Steam Link, Steam Input configurators, desktop mode on Steam Deck, and Proton opening the gates for thousands of non-gaming applications. Nothing stops them from extending that further.

That’s why Valve—private, secretive, and small enough to fit inside an Amazon lunchroom—is still one of the most valuable forces in the entire industry. Not because they sell hardware like Apple, but because they’re building an ecosystem like Apple. Except this one runs on Linux.

If you’re a PC gamer, none of this is news. But if you’re outside the gaming bubble and this future arrives exactly how I’ve described, just know: it didn’t come out of nowhere. You just weren’t looking in Valve’s direction.

Why I 🧡 the web.

https://drawafish.com

Just draw the fish. Trust me. 🐟

Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.

When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine.

#AI #VibeCoding #design #development #making #creation #artiface #craft #coding #programming #technology #humanity

I've been programming for 36 years, more than 3/4 of my life. It's always a little surprising how much I still absolutely love it. Obviously, the context in which I program can sometimes suck the joy out of it—it's not all roses.

But when I get to sit down and type a bunch of letters to make a computer do a thing, it still fills me with delight. If I won the lottery and retired today, I'd probably still spend much of my time puttering around in codebases.

Tatami is out now!

My little yet infinite puzzle game is now available! If you like it half as much as I do, it might get cozy on your home screen ♡

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