The idea of Valve releasing SteamOS as a Linux distribution is interesting. I don't know for sure but I believe the UI has a hand written compositor specifical

The idea of Valve releasing SteamOS as a Linux distribution is interesting. I don't know for sure but I believe the UI has a hand written compositor specifically designed for Steam and various other game-centric features. Supporting non-Valve hardware would be challenging charity work (though brining customers to the Steam platform is valuable - it's still a small number of people and a large amount of work). Perhaps releasing the SteamOS frontend under a OS copyleft license would be a great way for them to let companies ship their own handhelds without taking on the burden of supporting their hardware. There's certainly demand for the use of the SteamOS frontend and Steam could really become a monopoly in the space. In a lot of ways that would make it the first major open source game console platform. Anyway, when I get my ROG I will definitely be playing around with Linux.