Steam Deck amazes me, I've had it for years and it doesn't feel dated in the slightest.

I'm sure Valve probably still deserves the credit, since the Steam Deck uses a RDNA 2 gpu, but the article mentions that Timur specifically worked on gcn1.0 GPUs - e.g. radeon HD 7800/7900 from 2012 (!)

My experience has been that for Linux you are always better buying older mid tier hardware because all of the issues and optimisations have already been worked out and those changes have flowed through to your distro so you aren’t waiting on kernel updates.

AMD supports Mesa precisely so that enthusiasts can do this.

Nvidia doesn't, and their Vulkan stack underperforms on Linux quite significantly.

Is there financial incentive for them to bother?

I have a Radeon RX 6900 XT (16 GB VRAM, originally released in 2021), and it's possible to run some lightweight models to have okayish performance and quality of output, but nothing I've tried has come anywhere close to the quality even of the models I can use for free from OpenCode Zen or the free tier of Openrouter. If you want to keep everything local on the same card I have, it requires putting up with a model that's noticeably worse in virtually every metric than what you can get for free elsewhere, and the GPUs this article are talking about are three times as old as mine.

It would be awesome if someone manages to figure out how to get small enough models to fit on older cards to be viable, but I'm not optimistic that it will come without some sort of fundamental architectural innovation rather than incremental improvements, and it's not clear if and when that will happen.

Most of these older cards are lacking the physical hardware for fp8 or other lower precisions that most quantized models use. Or the memory to run models at higher precision.