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Valve Removes Steam Machines From Its Home Page (extremetech.com)
Steam Machines were supposed to take PC gaming mainstream by simplifying setup and moving the games in your living room, but they never took off. Today, ExtremeTech reports that Valve has removed Steam Machine listings from the Steam front page due to poor sales. From the report: You can still access what remains of the Steam Machine landing site via a direct link -- not that you'll see much when you get there. It lists only five devices, one of which is no longer available on the manufacturer's site. Several of the remaining systems are arguably not even Steam Machines as Valve envisioned -- they run Windows 10 instead of SteamOS. The final nail in the coffin for Steam Machines may have come from Valve itself. In late 2015, it released the Steam Link. It's a small box that you plug into a TV, allowing you to stream a game from your PC in real time. The original price was just $50, and Valve is basically giving them away right now. Valve is still developing SteamOS, but I don't expect that to go on much longer.
I'll be probably down-voted by GNU/Linux advocates but it's mostly due to the fact that GNU/Linux isn't suitable as a gaming OS. As an OS it lacks several mechanisms that are necessary especially for complicated interactive/heavy software such as AAA games. For example, Linux threads were poorly implemented as a hack on fork() and as a result thread priority sucks https://www.gamingonlinux.com/... as IRL some threads are more critical like sound threads. Also the notorious bug 12309 where symptoms are sill present or bug 14505 where file descriptors and network sockets cannot be forcibly closed and without unmounting them first it leads to stale mount points, and in certain cases to oopses and crashes. Not even talking about unstable API/ABIs. Windows Mac OS and strangely many BSDs are mostly free from such Linux diseases. Even Google is planning to replace it with Fuchsia/Zircon in future.
That is why I'm more skeptical of the "Valve is still developing SteamOS, but I don't expect that to go on much longer." part of the claim.
Given that prebuilt console-size PCs are a bit of a niche; and ones running Linux are niche within a niche(especially now that various cheapo ARM-SoC-with-hardware-decode boxes have basically eliminated the need for a PC by the TV if you want either the streaming services of your choice or your giant NAS-o'-piracy); it probably doesn't make sense to keep them in stock; but abandoning the 'encourage game compatibility with Linux and Linux driver, especially GPU, support for what games need' effort is a somewhat different story: if PCs running SteamOS aren't selling the PC OEMs aren't going to be happy about making them(much less providing timely updates as new parts become available) without Valve outright paying them to do it; but reactivating production if circumstances change is trivially quick and cheap if a sutiable OS is still available.
What isn't quick or trivial is reviving the effort to improve GPU and other gaming-related Linux development and encourage game devs and engine/middleware vendors to support Linux. If you let that lapse you are likely to have a period where even more games than normal don't have Linux support and never get it; potentially engine releases that don't offer Linux support; and the need to rebuild cooperation with hardware vendors and the developers of kernel, Xorg, etc.
br. Maintaining that development effort certainly isn't free; but it is also something where it is difficult, if not impossible, to 'make up for' a period of no support by trying to rush later.
Which is why you have https://moltengl.com/ that let's you create your game in Vulkan (which works on Windows, Linux and Android) while still having it work with Metal automatically.