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Comment by chithanh | Hacker News Reader

It seems pretty clear to me that the main target of this is ARM Chromebooks, at least for now. As these are the only products currently shipping in any relevant numbers where this makes sense.

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An ARM based steam deck seems more likely.

But unlike ARM Chromebooks, an ARM Steam Deck does not exist today, and will not exist until at least November 2025 per Valve statements.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-09/new-steam... (archived link w/o paywall: https://archive.md/VWvsW )

I think it is pretty clear that Valve plays the long game. Proton existed for years before SD was released.

Proton didn’t exist in a vacuum though. It existed for Valves previously failed vision of the Steam Machine. Those were actual product lines that existed (briefly) to go along with Proton.

The Steam Deck was Valve finally getting sick of nobody doing what they wanted, and technology getting to where they could do something more interesting than just another desktop.

Proton came well after the steam machine failed. It was plan B.

I could have worded it better but that’s my point. It was sort of their third attempt to make Linux gaming a thing (steamOS 2 + proton) before they finally came up with a compelling product of their own.

Since you're talking volume: what about MacBooks?

MacBooks certainly have volume, but Wine/Proton on macOS is facing serious technical challenges which they only started to address (Wine 9.0 with WoW64 was only released in January). Chromebooks are much lower hanging fruit.

Valve contracts ~a dozen developers from Codeweavers (same folks that develop Codeweavers and the downstream open source project WINE) for Proton and they've had 32 bit Windows executables working on macOS (despite the native limitations) for years.

Arm windows laptops?

You don't need Proton for that, and the article talks about Valve testing proton-arm64.

Mobile?

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