Ahead of Legion Go S shipping, we will be shipping a beta of SteamOS which should improve the experience on other handhelds, and users can download and test this themselves.
So, neither that product is rolling out yet, nor the SteamOS beta is rolling out yet?
(This quote is from Valves announcement, but meaning-equivalent to the linked article sentence regarding it.)
"To the Wild" as to other manufacturers. Steamos is now available as a preinstallable option to hardware vendors. Since steam machines disappeared, steamos was only available to Valve devices. There were gossips that this will happen, this is the official announcement.
Windows fanbois upset at the suggestion that Windows is starting to lose the game
People in general objecting to the idea that single-digit install numbers is "conquering."
Greybeards upset at a trivial misuse of compute power (games) is evidently more influential than truly worthy uses, like interpreting ctrl-alt-shift-n and running some Lisp to indent some text.
You've made powerful enemies...
I'm just guessing. I have no idea; I upvoted your comment.
It's mostly just ArchLinux with preinstalled steam, booting into "big picture" ui. You can do the same thing as with any linux distro. Nearly all non competitive games from steam should work ootb.
The important part is a lot of people don't really care about operating systems, a big part of home usage of windows comes from being preinstalled on a lot of laptops. People just switch on their new computer and use it, if the preinstalled os is good enough they don't search for replacement.
This is consumer device from a well known manufacturer. Before this other similar devices had to use windows, as Valve didn't have installers for steam os, didn't supported third party devices.
As the usage of linux grows with this, more (game) developers would choose to also develop for linux or at least make sure their programs run fine with wine.