I really wish more PC handheld devices would come out with SteamOS instead of Windows. It'd make them a lot more appealing to me over the Steam Deck. The Windows experience on handhelds is a bloated and kludgy mess.
They haven't released the installable ISO, but there's no reason why hardware vendors and Valve couldn't work together to build a Steam OS image for specific devices.
Depends how they view their business evolving. Ask Apple if you can build a device that runs iOS. They have an App Store and make lots of money from it.
If they want to be in the hardware business, not just building proof of concept/proof of market devices, they very much may not want to share it with other manufacturing of competing devices.
Yeah that's true, there's also the maintenance burden to consider as well. It would be a pretty big departure for Valve though, Apple was always selling hardware but Valve wants to get their storefront in front of as many people as possible because that's how they print money. They also want to get more folks gaming on Linux so I think the incentives right now line up pretty nicely for Valve to want other devices running their os.
We'll have to wait and see. I personally would love to see more devices running SteamOS as well so I'm definitely biased!
Depends how they view their business evolving. Ask Apple if you can build a device that runs iOS.
If they want to be in the hardware business and SteamOS is the best thing out there, they very much may not want to make it easy for other people to run.
Allegedly MSFT took notice and is working on it…. But there are some good 3P apps that make it usable to launch games. Installing them is still a chore without a Bluetooth keyboard.