Linux Gaming Didn't Happen By Accident

Valve is about to ship the Steam Machine. We don’t have a date yet, we don’t have a price yet, but it’s coming. First half of 2026. Maybe next week, maybe next month, but it’s coming.

And everyone is going to tell you the same story. Valve saved Linux gaming. Valve made this possible. Isn’t Gabe Newell wonderful.

I want to push back on that a little.

Not because Valve doesn’t deserve credit — they absolutely do, and we’ll get to that. But because that story flattens the picture and erases the people who actually did the work. The Steam Machine isn’t a gift to Linux gaming. It’s Valve betting that the Linux gaming stack is finally good enough to put their name on a box and sell it in your living room. They failed once with the original Steam Machines back in 2015. They cannot afford to fail twice. So when they commit to this, you can bet they’re sure the stack is ready.

And that stack? Valve didn’t build all of it. They funded a lot of it, they directed a lot of it, but the people doing the actual code work — most of them have names you probably don’t know.

So today I want to talk about who they are. Because if you’re gaming on Linux right now — on Debian, on Arch, on Bazzite, on CachyOS, doesn’t matter — you are riding on the shoulders of those people. And you should know their names.

The forcing function

Here’s the thing about the Steam Machine that most commentary is missing.

When Valve commits to shipping hardware, they commit to fixing every bug that hardware exposes. In Mesa. In the kernel. In Wayland. In Proton. In gamescope.

None of those fixes are SteamOS-exclusive. They flow upstream. They land in Debian Trixie. They land in Arch the next day. They land in your distro of choice, whatever you run.

So when I say the Steam Machine matters for Linux gaming as a whole, this is what I mean. It’s a forcing function. It’s Valve committing to keep funding the people doing the upstream work, because now they have hardware on store shelves that depends on it.

And Valve is being honest about this. They’ve said the Steam Machine will be priced like a PC, not like a console. They’re not subsidizing the hardware. Which means the entire value proposition has to come from the software stack being good enough that a SteamOS box beats a Windows box at the same price.

And that’s only true because of a constellation of people who have been quietly making Linux gaming work for decades.

So let’s name names

Wine — the foundation

Alexandre Julliard has been maintaining Wine since 1994. Over thirty years. He’s been CTO at CodeWeavers since 2003, and CodeWeavers themselves are responsible for roughly two-thirds of all Wine commits.

Thirty years of patient reverse engineering. Decades before Proton even existed. Every time you launch a Windows game on Linux and it just works, that work started in 1993 in a project most of the industry wrote off as a curiosity.

DXVK and VKD3D-Proton — the part most people underestimate

Philip Rebohle created DXVK in late 2017 to play Nier: Automata on Linux. Translating Direct3D 9, 10, and 11 to Vulkan.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen leads VKD3D-Proton, doing the same for Direct3D 12.

This is why Windows games often run faster on Linux than on Windows. Without these two, Proton is a curiosity. With them, it’s a platform.

Both contracted by Valve after the work was already underway. That sequence matters — Valve didn’t initiate this, they recognized greatness and funded it to continue.

Mesa — the open driver community

Mike Blumenkrantz is the lead developer of Zink, the OpenGL-on-Vulkan layer. Zink was originally started by Erik Faye-Lund at Collabora — Mike took it from a curiosity to production-ready after Valve hired him in 2020.

Samuel Pitoiset has been the single most prolific Mesa contributor for two years running. Over a thousand commits in 2025 alone — nearly seven percent of the entire project. He works for Valve.

But RADV itself — the AMD Vulkan driver that benchmarks better than AMD’s own — that was started in summer 2016. By David Airlie at Red Hat. And Bas Nieuwenhuizen, who was independent at the time.

They built RADV because AMD was dragging their feet on an open Vulkan driver.

That’s not a Valve story. That’s a Red Hat story and a one-guy-in-his-spare-time story.

gamescope — making it all coherent

Joshua Ashton at Valve has been driving gamescope forward, especially the HDR work. Gamescope itself forked from an older steamos-compositor, but Ashton has made it what it is today. If you’ve ever used Steam Deck’s Game Mode or any SteamOS handheld experience, you’ve used his work.

The independents

Mathieu Comandon created Lutris in 2009. No Valve money there. Lutris is how you launch games that aren’t on Steam — Epic, GOG, Amazon, Battle.net, emulators, native Linux games — through a single interface. It exists because Mathieu thought it should exist.

Flávio Fearn created Heroic Games Launcher on a snowy holiday week in Sweden because he was bored. No Valve money there either. Heroic is now the de facto way to play Epic and GOG games on Linux and the Steam Deck.

Kyle Gospodnetich founded Bazzite in late 2022. Community project. Not Valve-funded. And it now might be the closest thing to SteamOS for hardware Valve doesn’t make. When Bazzite shipped a working SteamOS-like experience on arbitrary PC hardware before SteamOS itself got there, that wasn’t Valve. That was the community refusing to wait.

These are the people. This is who you thank when your game launches on Debian and just works.

Being fair to Valve

But here’s the part I want to be honest about. Because I owe Valve that.

A lot of the people I just named are funded by Valve in one way or another:

Philip Rebohle — Valve contractor
Hans-Kristian Arntzen — Valve
Mike Blumenkrantz — Valve
Samuel Pitoiset — Valve
Joshua Ashton — Valve
Pierre-Loup Griffais — the bridge between Valve and the upstream community for over a decade. Valve.

Valve also funds FEX, the Windows-on-ARM emulator. Griffais confirmed late last year that every core FEX developer has been on Valve’s payroll since the beginning.

So when I say Valve didn’t build Linux gaming, I want to be precise about that. Valve didn’t start most of this work. But once these projects existed and these developers were proving themselves, Valve picked them up, paid them, and let them keep working in the open.

That’s worth something. That matters.

They could have hired these people and made everything proprietary. Walled garden. SteamOS-exclusive. Instead, every line of code stays upstream, where Debian and Arch and Bazzite can all use it.

Valve had the commercial discipline — to put it mildly — to fund the right people and ship the result. The work was already happening. But Valve made sure it kept happening. Full-time. At scale.

The Steam Machine is just the moment the rest of the world finally notices.