Slightly related, but just today I discovered this SteamOS redistribution for generic machines (as long as they don’t have Nvidia graphics): https://github.com/HoloISO/holoiso
Title: Linus Torvalds: Nvidia, F** You! Duration: 0:39 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ
Proton has received patches for Nvidia support in particular, some from Nvidia themselves.
Sure they can. Perhaps not the proprietary drivers but they could contribute to the open source ones and bring them up to speed.
I bet they won’t do that though. It’s probably a massive amount of work and they have no … incentives to do it.
Valve want to extricate themselves from Windows, their incentive is to break free from "Wintel". Steam Deck is a priority, but SteamOS is clearly built to extend beyond that and in order to have any success on standard PCs, Nvidia GPUs need to be supported well.