I "defend" valve because they're seemingly the only company that cares about the end-user linux experience.

Rocket league used to have a Linux build, then epic decided to kill that off entirely.

I recently bought the steam frame. It's years past when I would have wanted this VR headset the most, but half the reason I bought it was to support Valve's R&D with Linux desktop support, arm JIT translation, etc.

People bitch and moan about "voting with your wallet", then you have a company that tons of people continually vote with their wallet for, then people complain about others defending the one company that doesn't seem to want to screw their userbase over.

Sure Steam has some blind spots for the very sweaty semi-pro gamer. I don't care about virtual stickers and little treats. I care that all my games run on my Linux desktop after years of devs not giving a shit and other companies being openly hostile.

Valves competitors suck. Their VR competitor is Meta which in a just world would not exist as an organization. Their gaming marketplace competitor is Epic, which produces the character-slop extraction shooter and a launcher that gets more annoying to use every time I open it.

The other "competitors" if you can even call them that, are microsoft who has basically deleted a dozen game studios in the last year via moneyball, and other game companies like EA and Ubisoft who routinely delete purchased games and tell the users to go suck it.

Valve is basically the only company out there who is resisting the constant urge to make everything shitty to increase investor profits. They stay private and everyone loves what they do with that power. I'm sure a ton of fail-son PE bros are dying for the chance to buy out valve and turn everything it's ever done to absolute dogshit. We'd be getting half-life 3, 4, 5, 6, mobile, etc and they'd all be shit.

I "defend" valve because they're seemingly the only company that cares about the end-user linux experience.

Why bother defending them about this specific issue though?

Either Epic is right, and this pushes Valve to improve Steam performance.

Or Epic is wrong, and then who cares? People will continue to not use the Epic store and continue to use Steam.

It just feels more "defensive" then "defending" if that framing makes sense.

hear, hear!