Linux ecosystem contributions from SteamOS
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The SteamOS Linux distribution is focused on gaming, naturally, but the effort to build it has resulted in contributions to multiple areas in the Linux ecosystem. Alberto Garcia has been working on SteamOS and came to Bilbao, Spain to describe some of those contributions at Open Source Summit Europe 2023. There are some obvious areas where a gaming-focused OS might contribute upstream, such as graphics, but the talk showed contributions in several other areas as well.
García introduced himself as an employee of Igalia, which happened to turn 22-years old on the day of his talk. He is also a longtime FOSS and Debian developer; he has previously worked on projects like QEMU and Maemo. Lately, he has been working on SteamOS and getting Linux working on the Steam Deck consumer hardware. One of the things he likes about free-software development is the way that new projects end up contributing to older projects that are not necessarily directly connected; SteamOS fits that model well.
The Steam Deck is a handheld gaming system that was released by Valve, the company behind the Steam game-distribution service, in 2022. The current version of the operating system for the device is SteamOS 3; there were two previous versions, but those do not work on the Steam Deck and have been discontinued. He finds the Steam Deck interesting because it is an example of "a successful consumer device with standard Linux components".
