Even entertaining the idea it being anything else is ridiculous.

It’s their own OS running on their own custom handheld. Treating it separately from other linux machines might be odd, but calling it “ridiculous” is being childish.

Yes, I know how Linux works.

The poster above asked for a reason why steamOS might be considered separately to other sisters, and I gave them a possible one.

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ARM isn’t the problem. Some games have native ARM ports, and x86 games can be run by Rosetta. It’s not as fast as native, but broadly comparable with the performance of the previous gen Intel chips they replaced.

A bigger problem on macOS is that they dropped support for 32-bit software a few years ago in Catalina. Not a problem with newer games, but it decimated Mac users’ Steam libraries.

And the biggest problem is that Apple just doesn’t give a shit about gaming. Every few years, they claim they’re going to do games, but quickly forget about it. They’ve never put decent video cards in Macs, and never hesitate to throttle hardware if proper cooling would mean a larger enclosure, so AAA games typically arrive on macOS years late, when second-rate or integrated video cards can run them.

If they actually cared, they’d have their own Vulcan implementation. Instead, they’re focused on their own proprietary Metal API.

Basically, Apple and AAA game studios have been ignoring each other for decades.

Why wouldn’t an Arch branch not be Linux?

Because it’s Valve’s own OS. They might consider being first-party sufficient reason to not to lump it in with its third-party cousins.