Everytime their name pops up it's inevitably "oh some thankless extremely technical low level work leading to impressive/long-awaited features"
Everytime their name pops up it's inevitably "oh some thankless extremely technical low level work leading to impressive/long-awaited features"
Their customers, Valve, in this case, deserve credit for being good FLOSS citizens (even if they are building a DRM walled garden on top of it :/), but the actual workers are the real unsung heroes. Them, Codethink, Collabora, and other open-source consultancies I might have missed are doing the community a huge service."
Additionally you can get a lot of the benefits of Steam (Proton etc.) even for titles you didn't acquire through Steam - you can add and launch third party executables through the Steam client.
Steam is not exactly a walled garden save for some rather light curation of their own store.